Thu 16 Apr 2009
On mystery writer’s Rafe McGregor’s blog today is a post called “The Speckled Band: The Worst Sherlock Holmes Story?”
I imagine that everyone over a certain age has read the story, and (I hope) many under that certain age. In order to discuss the story, though, certain elements of the plot have to be mentioned, so [WARNING: PLOT ALERT AHEAD].
I’d read this or a similar list of errors before, but here are at least some of them:
1. Snakes don’t have ears, so they cannot hear a low whistle.
2. Snakes can’t climb ropes.
3. Snakes can’t survive in an airtight safe.
4. There’s no such thing as an Indian swamp adder.
5. No snake poison could have killed a huge man like Grimesby Roylott instantly.
Rafe asks how detrimental these erroneous pieces of the plot are to the enjoyment of the story, to which some people have already replied. To me, the answer is “not very.” Holmes as a character is well beyond belief anyway, a wish fulfillment superhero in many ways — isn’t he? think about it — that quibbling over “small points” like the above is like asking how come Superman is so vulnerable to Kryptonite.
You might ask me tomorrow, though. I might have my science pants on by then, and I could easily have changed my mind.
I can tell you this, though. The story scared the heck out of me when I read it as a kid, which was probably when I was around eight years old. And was I relieved to know, whenever it was, that snakes can’t climb ropes? You bet.
April 16th, 2009 at 3:01 pm
No one goes to A. C. Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories looking for scientific, forensic, or investigative purity. One spends a rollicking good time with Holmes and Watson because . . . well, because it is a rollicking good time. Though I could not find (access) the McGregor blog, I would suggest to him (through you) that he reassess and remember the contexts in which Doyle was writing, and–having done so–then McGregor can imagine himself as a turn-of-the-century reader who picked up the latest Holmes adventure for simply one reason: (Yes, we’re back to that same idea.) A rollicking good time. So, please tell Mr. McGregor to “willingly suspend” his “disbelief” (as Coleridge would advise in a different context), and surrender instead to the sublime pleasure of good old fashioned reading entertainment. So there!
April 16th, 2009 at 3:30 pm
R.T.
I’ll forward your comments on to him. Sorry about the busted link. It’s fixed now, and it goes straight to the post itself, not the home page of his blog, which is probably even better.
And by the way, I still have my reader’s pants on today, and I agree with you. In fact, all seriousness aside, I think I’m always in the mood for a rollicking good time when I read a book or watch a movie.
— Steve
April 16th, 2009 at 7:42 pm
At various times Doyle has Watson, a surgeon, identify rabbit bones as human, badly confuses the geography of Dartmoor in The Hound of the Baskervilles, and has the trains out of Victoria Station running in the wrong direction. The detective story is an artificial construct, and if you are going to apply strict applications of reality to it you would do better to read something else.
“The Speckled Band” may have many flaws, but the fact is it is one of the great works in the genre and one of the most enjoyable of the Holmes tales. Are we to throw away Dumas Musketeers because he has a street in 17th century France named for one of Napoleon’s Marshals, or in more recent times trash The Da Vinci Code based on the fact that the central clue is wrong (Alexander Pope didn’t give Newton’s eulogy)and Leonardo wasn’t named Da Vinci, he only came from there?
If it matters to you, then it matters, but your popular entertainment is going to be severely curtailed. In Hound Holmes, who we are told is a crack shot elsewhere, puts five bullets in the “flank” of the beast, which might slow it down a bit, but would hardly be fatal. Almost any good tec tale can be taken apart this way. For that matter in The Maltese Falcon Spade knows from the beginning who shot Archer, but plays along for no real reason since he ends up turning in the culprit and the money.
Good fiction turns more on internal logic than external facts, and most works of literature have mistakes in them of one sort of another. A good deal of popular fiction wouldn’t work at all if at any point the reader lets reality intrude too much.
I’m reminded of a story illustrator Herbert Morton Stoops once told. He had done an illustration for the Saturday Evening Post for one of James Warner Bellah’s cavalry stories, and in the illo there is a dramatic depiction of a cavalryman’s horse leaping over an Indian camp fire. In a letter to famed western painter Charles Russell, Stoops worried because in real life the animal would have broken its leg when it landed. Russell wrote back explaining that artistic license applied. Or as Russell put it he had: “broke more horses legs than all the gopher holes in Wyoming.” I think we have to give Doyle, and others, their ‘gopher holes’ in the name of entertainment.
April 17th, 2009 at 2:50 am
We can easily trash THE DA VINCI CODE, because it’s poorly written and not very well paced and the characters are cardboard and the dialogue is horrible.
April 17th, 2009 at 9:15 pm
I liked the Da Vinci Code better than Juri, but I’ll agree it isn’t in a class with Conan Doyle or Dumas, and certainly open to sniping as a result. Still, I argue that by nature fiction is always open to some attack on the basis of logic and fact. Plenty of critics have pointed out how bizarre Philip Marlowe behaves in The Big Sleep after Carmen Sternwood visits his apartment, and Peter Wimsey’s ‘charm’ can be tedious in some of Sayers books. A lot of it depends on the reader.
I mentioned in my review of John Vandercook’s Murder in New Guniea there is a huge mistake involving a major plot element, and certainly many classic mystery novels suffer from the flaw that if anyone behaved the least bit normally the whole plot would fall apart. Ellery Queen’s The Glass Village involves an absurd situation that could not happen in the real world, but it’s still a good book.
Raymond Chandler commented, with some justice, that only a moron could come up with the solution to Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express (which I love, but Chandler is right), and while I greatly enjoy the Philo Vance novels it is a little disconcerting when you first realise the murderer shows up on the same page in every book.
Ultimately it is up to the reader to decide for himself what he is reading for and what he finds acceptable or unacceptable. I would argue that the mistakes in “The Speckled Band” would be unforgivable today when a ten minute Internet search could eliminate most of them, but that they were of no importance when the story was written and only a detriment to an awfully fussy reader today. For that matter if Holmes was taking a 7 1/2 % solution of cocaine he was lucky to get a slight buzz on much less addicted.
I know readers who find Chesterton’s Father Brown unreadable because of Chesterton’s Anti-Semitism and others who simply accept it as an unfortunate side of a talented writer. Aside from the ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ that all fiction calls for the reader has to be willing to enter the game the writer is playing just as the writer owes the reader a certain effort in making the game worth playing. For may taste “The Speckled Band” is as good as the game gets, and it’s flaws mostly forgivable. Since I was entertained by The Da Vinci Code I was willing to forgive it too despite it’s many mistakes and even questionable clues. Even Shakespeare gives Bohemia a non existant seacoast, and the last act of Hamlet is a bloodbath literally and dramatically because the Bard wrote himself into a corner with five major characters in a tragedy all alive in the final scene. I haven’t noticed that unduly hurting Hamlet or Shakespeare’s reputation. I doubt “The Speckled Band” or The Da Vinci Code or in much danger either.
April 19th, 2009 at 9:59 am
I looked on the Wikipedia page this morning, and apparently I had every reason to be afraid of things running up and down bell cords during the night:
— The herpetologist Laurence Monroe Klauber proposed a theory that the swamp adder was an artificial hybrid between the Mexican Gila monster (Heloderma suspectum) and Naja naja. His speculation suggests that Doyle might have hidden a double-meaning in Holmes’ words. What Holmes said, reported by Watson, was “It is a swamp adder, the deadliest snake in India”; but Klauber suggested what Holmes really said was “It is a samp-aderm, the deadliest skink in India.” Samp-aderm can be translated “snake-Gila-monster”; Samp, Hindi for snake, and the suffix aderm is derived from heloderm, the common or vernacular name of the Gila monster generally used by European naturalists. Skinks are lizards of the family Scincidae, many of which are snake-like in form. Such hybrid reptile will have a venom incomparably strengthened by hybridization, assuring the almost instant demise of the victim. And it will also have ears like any lizard, so it could hear the whistle, and legs and claws allowing it to run up and down the bell cord with a swift ease. —
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventure_of_the_Speckled_Band
April 20th, 2009 at 1:37 am
Hurrah for the Irregulars! They will always save the day. I have even heard it specualted that Watson was trying to mislead Moriarity when he had he and Holmes traveling north out of Victoria Station (the trains out of Victoria run south)and Watson was testing Holmes when he identified those rabbit bones as human.
Samp-aderm makes absolute sense to me. As for the actual snake, when a play of The Speckled Band was produced in London Doyle was quite pleased with the snake they used in the climactic scenes, but when the reviews came in the critcs were uniformly positive save for the complaints about the terribly unrealistic rubber snake so the producers had to replace the real one with a more realistic rubber one. Sometimes you just can’t win.
I suppose next someone will try and tell us Sean Connery is under a plate of glass when that spider crawls across him in the film of Dr. No, or that Harrison Ford secretly likes snakes.
As for Holmes, when you keep your favorite shag in the toe of a Persian slipper and do all those chemical experiments in the closed space of a second floor Victorian walk up you are likely to see worse things than swamp adders, with or without that rather weak 7 1/2 % dilution of cocaine. Considering Watson’s first name keeps changing and he can never recall if he is married, widowed, or single much less what his wife’s name is I think we can be lenient on the matter of samp-aderms and swamp adders. The poor man can’t even keep straight on where that bullet from an Afghan jezzail hit him from one story to the next. Perhaps it was a head shot.
Of course Conan Doyle was simply writing entertaining tales and could have cared less about all the continuity problems that we worry over today, and had he been more careful what would the Irregualrs write those learned monographs about? It was positively visionary of him to leave all those minor inconsistencies and plant those mistakes so we could have these literary games to play.
August 3rd, 2009 at 4:15 am
I am not a Holmes fan. Great and thoughtful comments above!! Tell me, isn’t there a flaw in “The Speckled Band” that’s more obvious than any in the list?
The snake kills the first sister. In the coroner’s report there is no apparent damage on her body. But what about fang marks?? I gather that it’s poison – not a constrictor. Surely fang marks would have been noticed and the absence of any known poison points to the exotic. Thus, with his menagerie the fingers of blame would poke at the human murderer concerned . [Sorry, forgotten his daft name.]
September 12th, 2009 at 5:37 pm
thanxx, john rose (8/3/09). that was the first less-than-observant detail on which i had to suspend my disbelief. well, i suppose a fictional, “nervous” victorian lady might have died from sheer fright…
the second of course is, as the subject of a batch of ‘net search results shows, on just what the heck “‘band’ and ‘speckled'” (the words of the suddenly deceased sister as reported by the surviving one) would have to do, at the denouement, with a snake. (at least in early 21st century american awareness. perhaps for late 19th c. brits it was like “tooth” and “blue” is for us at this moment?)
in a very fun onstage production i just saw in tucson, az (8/14-9/27, top hat theatre club)), it’s not alluded to ~ not what i have been trained to expect in holmes’ usual punctiliously thorough explications. so, i took myself online to find out.
as these points have led me to find others’ engaging comments & info, it’s not at all a detraction from my enjoyment; rather, the opposite. a great part of the fun is in the theater: more-passive delight in performers and plot, and another part is in the continuation of it, in the more active exploration of perspectives.
thanxx to all for that.
April 24th, 2011 at 3:56 pm
did no one mind that neither sister notices that the bell cord didn’t/couldn’t call any servants? or that the bed was nailed down??
I love the “samp-aderm” solution. May I use this as the title of my next story?
November 29th, 2011 at 5:19 pm
the snake didn’t climb the rope, he lifted it with the handling stick; it was a short trip over in that non-working ventilator; and there MUST be some poison we haven’t discovered yet-if there’s a gas to kill someone that fast, there’s a poison to kill someone that fast!