Sherlock Holmes

Holmes makes an ambiguous impression on Watson. He conducts complex chemical experiments with blood, plays the violin, has a profound knowledge of cigar ash, London dirt and criminal law, but is unfamiliar with some common truths (for example, he does not know that the Earth revolves around the Sun); he never reads fiction, as well as books on history and philosophy; very strange visitors constantly come to him, and on his desk there are portraits of individuals of the "most disgusting appearance". Watson suspects Holmes of involvement in the criminal world. However, after clarifying the relationship during a boxing match, which takes place at the request of the doctor right in the house, all of Watson's fears and doubts are dispelled: Sherlock Holmes turns out to be a private detective.

Soon Holmes and Watson, who has become his companion, have to investigate the "Case of the Speckled Band". A certain Helen Stoner (Maria Solomina) comes to Holmes and tells him that she fears for her life. Two years before, under strange circumstances, not living a few days before her wedding, her twin sister Julia died, and now Helen is afraid that the same thing will happen to her.

Helen and Julia lived without a mother, with her stepfather, Dr. Grimsby Roylott (Fyodor Odinokov), in the Stoke Moran estate near London. A week before her death, Julia told her sister that she began to hear a quiet whistle and a strange knock at night, and three days before the wedding, she woke up the whole house with a terrible scream and died almost immediately, having managed to mention some kind of colorful band (in the original English context, there is a play on words that is difficult to convey in Russian, and the translators did it descriptively: the word band in English means both "band" and "gang, group of people." The text of the story mentions possible suspects in the involvement in Julia's death - Roylott's friends, gypsies who wore colorful scarves around their necks).

inheritance from their dead mother, and he decided to kill them both. Since Roylott was a doctor, he decided to get rid of the girls with a poisonous swamp adder (whose bite, according to Holmes, is almost imperceptible) in order to hide his involvement in their deaths.

Difference from the book: in the story, Helen only pretends to go to sleep in her room, in which Holmes and Watson actually remain, but she spends the night in her first, unrenovated bedroom;

Holmes and Watson enter the girl's room and remain there until the morning. Hearing a whistle and a knock, Holmes strikes a match, sees a snake crawling through the vent and descending along the cord, and beats it with his cane. The enraged snake returns to Roylott's room and bites the owner, who dies from this. It turns out that the stepfather was unprofitable for his stepdaughters to marry, since they were to receive part of their deceased mother's inheritance as a dowry, and he decided to kill them both. Since Roylott was a doctor, he decided to get rid of the girls with a poisonous swamp adder (the bite of which, according to Holmes, is almost imperceptible), in order to hide his involvement in their deaths.