The Legacy of the Speckled Band

The legacy of “The Speckled Band”, an adventure of Sherlock Holmes by A. Conan Doyle, has sent a ripple through storytelling. “The Speckled Band” appeared in The Strand in February 1892. Sherlock and Watson investigate the mysterious death and possible future death of two sisters. Dr. Grimsby Roylett is the stepfather of two very rich young women. When they marry, all their money will leave his grip, so he devises a way to kill them mysteriously and Gothically. He places a deadly snake in their room–this is the speckled band– to bite and kill them.

…I heard a gentle sound of movement, and then all was silent once more, though the smell grew stronger. For half an hour I sat with straining ears. Then suddenly another sound became audible — a very gentle, soothing sound, like that of a small jet of steam escaping continually from a kettle. The instant that we heard it, Holmes sprang from the bed, struck a match, and lashed furiously with his cane at the bell-pull. (“The Speckled Band” by A. Conan Doyle)

Now normally I wouldn’t want to reveal the solution to a Mystery story but this is a well-known one. You’ve had a hundred and twenty-nine years to read it, so stop complaining. That long date is significant because the story is still anthologized and a favorite of the locked room Mystery sub-genre. Doyle consider it his best story — and he wrote a lot of them.

Let’s jump to 1912. Arthur Sarsfield Ward is about to create another iconic figure. As Sax Rohmer he had been writing since 1903 and “The Mysterious Mummy” in Pearson’s Magazine. But in 1912 he began a series of stories, “The Zayat Kiss” for The Storyteller, October 1912. In this story, Dr. Petrie is woken up to find his friend, the secret agent, Nayland Smith back in London. The two men rush to save a man from “The Zayat Kiss” but are too late. Smith investigates and finds the victim had received a perfumed envelope. Inside, only a blank sheet of paper.

Smith explains to his Watson, that he knows of a sinister conspiracy and its wicked kingpin, Dr. Fu Manchu. Staking out the next victim, Smith and Petrie thwart the evil Asian assassin. Smith figures out that the letter is scented with a chemical that attracts the killer. This proves not to be a snake, but a half-foot long centipede with poisonous bite.

It was an insect, full six inches long, and of a vivid, venomous red color! It had something of the appearance of a great ant, with its long, quivering antennas and its febrile, horrible vitality; but it was proportionately longer of body and smaller of head, and had numberless rapidly moving legs. In short, it was a giant centipede, apparently of the Scolopendra group, but of a form quite new to me. These things I realized in one breathless instant: in the next—Smith had dashed the thing’s poisonous life out with one straight, true blow of the golf club! (“the Zayat Kiss” by Sax Rohmer)

This is the Zayat Kiss. Arthur Conan Doyle’s inspiration of the killer animal assassin is obvious as is the use of a Moriarty-like genius at the head of a criminal organization.

Rohmer will add incident after incident to form an episodic novel known as The Mystery of Fu Manchu and in the US as The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu. The series will run to thirteen volumes. The Yellow Peril aspects of the book make it quite dated today but you can’t deny that Fu is iconic. With the same birthday (October 1912) as Tarzan, these two characters are instantly recognizable.

It shouldn’t be surprising that a young Ian Fleming would have read Rohmer’s books. Born in 1908, he would have been a teenager when Fu rose to fame. What we read in our youth has an influence on what we create in later life. For Fleming that was Dr. No (1958), the sixth James Bond novel. Dr. No’s Gothic island of terrors may have borrowed from the 1941 Fu novel, The Island of Fu Manchu, but the centipede that is placed in Bond’s room to kill him has more of “The Zayat Kiss” about it. (In the film version, a spider is used.)

The thing on his leg moved. Suddenly Bond realized that he was afraid, terrified. His instincts, even before they had communicated with his brain, had told his body that he had a centipede on him.

Bond lay frozen. He had once seen a tropical centipede in a bottle of spirit on the shelf in a museum. It had been pale brown and very flat and five or six inches long-about the length of this one. On either side of the blunt head there had been curved poison claws. The label on the bottle had said that its poison was mortal if it hit an artery. Bond had looked curiously at the corkscrew of dead cuticle and had moved on. (Dr. No by Ian Fleming)

In the novel, No forces Bond into the ventilation system so he can perform experiments on the British agent with electric shock, burning temperatures, poisonous spiders and finally, a killer squid. All this got simplified in the film version. In return for all this Sax Rohmer style abuse, Bond drops a ton of bird shit on him.

Up to now all our examples are within the Mystery-Suspense field. But in 1965, Frank Herbert would borrow the Speckled Band trope for his classic SF novel, Dune. Herbert could have invented any kind of Arrakian baby sand worm for an assassination attempt on young Paul Atreides. This would have been quite in line with Doyle, Rohmer and Fleming but instead it is a mechanical version known as the Hunter-Seeker:

From behind the headboard slipped a tiny hunter-seeker no more than five centimeters long. Paul recognized it at once—a common assassination weapon that every child of royal blood learned about at an early age. It was a ravening sliver of metal guided by some near-by hand and eye. It could burrow into moving flesh and chew its way up nerve channels to the nearest vital organ. (Dune by Frank Herbert)

Herbert’s sprawling universe in the Dune series is so impressive, critics rarely think about where Frank got his inspiration from. That fact alone made a “space opera” the best-selling SF novel of all time. The hunter-seeker is another example of this. How many readers went “Oh, Sherlock Holmes!” or even “Sax Rohmer!” (Another much more obvious example is the Gom Jabber scene at the beginning of the novel. Read George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Curdie (1877), which Frank must have read as a kid. The scene is eerily familiar to Dune fans.)

Speaking of Frank Herbert, the author thought to sue George Lucas when Star Wars used his desert planet setting. Ultimately he didn’t but Lucas comes in here again when we look to The Attack of the Clones (2002). George is clearly joining the Zayat Kiss Club when he has an assassin cut a hole in a window and deposit two centipede-like aliens into Senator Amidala’s room. These Kouhun have but one objective: to kill their victim in a style worthy of Sax Rohmer. Fortunately the Force sends an alarm and Anakin cuts them up with his light saber. 

So this is the legacy of the speckled band. I am sure there are dozens of other Mystery novels and stories that used it. In SF it is less common but certainly there. I tried to think of examples from Fantasy and Horror fiction, but honestly, a poisonous centipede may be the least of your worries in genres filled with dragons and Cthulhu-sized monstrosities. Despite that, I am sure someone has used it. The idea of trapping a victim in a room with a terrible threat, usually for ill-gotten gains, is a classic trope that transcends genre. Doyle made it famous. Others have used it to heighten suspense and danger for their characters after him. The legacy of the speckled band isn’t so much the threat of a poison spider as it is the evil mind behind it that wants only one thing: you dead. Kiss-kiss.

If you can think of any Zayat Kisses I missed please mention them. I think there is a scene in the first Doc Savage book (and movie) that rates. Instead of regular snakes, they are phantom snakes called “The Green Death”. I suppose Robert E. Howard’s “The God in the Bowl” kinda works here too.