In Gothic literature it will usually involve a painting of a picture of gloom which is composed of an ancient ruined building, a family that is decaying with no heirs, and a conflict that involves the repression or murder of a woman, or both.

The opening often begins with a description of the scene where the story will occur. The Gothic plot is similar to other genre’s in that it represents a curve with a beginning opening scene, a series of crisis building to a climax, and then the curve goes down as the resolution occurs and the denouement if necessary is written. In his story, “The Adventure of the Speckled Band”, Doyle will take the traditional moral stance against degeneracy, and use the murderer to end his own life and solve the mystery as he does exactly this in the denouement of his story. However, in line with classic Gothic literature, Doyle does follow the formula written about by Ed Cameron in his paper titled “Ironic Escapism in the Symbolic Spread of Gothic Materialist Meaning” when he says, “Even though Gothic novels, according to Halberstam, introduce all sorts of unnatural acts – ranging from theft, incest and rape to torture and murder – Gothic authors do not condone such perversity they take a moral stance against these degenerate acts which produce such monstrosity” (23). Nevertheless, he liberally used traditional Gothic tropes to create the very atmosphere of irrational fear that he would then dispel with reason.

The traditional Gothic tropes, such as an abbey, castle, or other ruined estate, groans or shrieks, a male protagonist and an evil male antagonist, a female heroine, murderers or assassins, skeletons or skulls and other signs of death, ghosts or the suggestion of ghosts, and a murder in the dark, are all used in Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Speckled Band.” The twist is that Doyle railed against the superstitious tropes of the traditional Gothic tale by presenting Holmes, a character that showed science will overcome wild fears every time. “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” by Doyle is a classic Gothic tale with a twist.

Conan doyle the speckled band