🐍 Dr Grimesby Roylott
The huge, hot-tempered stepfather of Stoke Moran, who bends a fireplace poker to intimidate Holmes and dies by the swamp adder he trained. The canon's definitive domestic tyrant — violence behind respectable walls.
“I am a dangerous man to fall foul of!”
The tyrant of Stoke Moran
Dr Grimesby Roylott is the canon's definitive domestic villain: a huge, violent man of good family and ruined fortune, who beat his native butler to death in India and came home to terrorise his stepdaughters behind the walls of a crumbling manor. His motive is the canon's most sordid — a marriage settlement he cannot afford to release — and his household of wandering gypsies and exotic animals is engineered camouflage for it.
The poker scene
Roylott's famous entrance — bursting into 221B, abusing Holmes as a meddler and a jack-in-office, and bending the fireplace poker to underline the threat — earns the canon's driest reply: Holmes, once the door closes, straightens it. The scene is pure characterisation by physics: brute force against quiet strength, and a promise of exactly how the contest will end.
A murder method as a signature
The speckled band itself — a trained snake sent through a ventilator to a bell-pull above a bed — is medically absurd and dramatically perfect, the work of a doctor whose knowledge has curdled into cunning. Holmes's counterstroke turns the weapon home, and his verdict on the outcome ('I cannot say that it is likely to weigh very heavily upon my conscience') is as close as the canon comes to endorsing poetic justice.