"The Speckled Band" is a classic locked-room mystery that deals with the themes of parental greed, inheritance and freedom.

The theatrical adaptation was written and produced by Doyle himself, directed by and starring Lyn Harding as Grimesby Roylott.

[2] In April 1883, Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson rise early one morning to meet a young woman named Helen Stoner, who is in great fear of her life.

She explains that her mother married her stepfather, Dr. Grimesby Roylott, in India when Helen and her twin sister Julia were two years old.

Dr. Roylott is the impoverished sole survivor of a formerly wealthy but ill-tempered violent and amoral aristocratic Anglo-Saxon family in Surrey.

The official inquest was unable to determine the cause of death: the room was securely locked both inside and outside, and the doctors could find no poison.

Undaunted, Holmes leaves for the courthouse to examine Helen's mother's will; because of the fall in investment prices the yearly income of £1,100, is not more than £750.

After a tense wait, they hear a slight metallic noise and see a dim light through the ventilator, followed by a hissing sound.

Richard Lancelyn Green, the editor of the 2000 Oxford paperback edition of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, surmises that Doyle's source for the story appears to have been the article named "Called on by a Boa Constrictor.

[1] In the article, a captain tells how he was dispatched to a remote camp in West Africa to stay in a tumbledown cabin that belonged to a Portuguese trader.

On the first night in the cabin, he is awoken by a creaking sound, and sees "a dark queer-looking thing hanging down through the ventilator above it".