In “The Speckled Band” by Arthur Conan Doyle, Dr. Roylott’s sensationalized persona is an interesting deviation from one of the typical elements of the sensation genre. He is not a seemingly average but wealthy neighbor with horrible secrets to be discovered underneath (though maybe in his wealthy eccentricism he still fits the wealthy bachelor stereotype in a different way). His reputation is entirely based on his exoticism and extreme temper—the cheetah and baboon he keeps as pets, the blacksmith he “threw over a parapet into a stream” (Doyle 134), and the gypsies he harbors on his property. Everything about how he is characterized is larger than life and almost mythological. From the get-go, he is the primary suspect, with only the method left really in doubt. The piece of his character that makes this writing decision particularly interesting is his connection with India. “The Speckled Band” was first published in 1892, during the height of imperial bureaucracy in India. Dr. Roylott is a colonizer himself, stealing native animals from their natural habitats and setting them loose in his yard. But the degree to which his exoticism is described others him, making it seem as though his travels and connections with India mark him as different, more frightening, and less predictable than the rest of the local wealth. It is therefore telling that he is inevitably killed by the swamp adder, a product of his colonial overreach—assuming he could tame and control such a dangerous creature just because he was given the power to try. He is violent and uncouth, the prime suspect and eventual proven murderer, and is directly associated with travel and familiarity with the Indian colonies. By 1892 there had been multiple mutinies and small-scale rebellions against the East India Company and later when it was supplanted against the British Empire itself. Through this lens, the adder can be symbolic of the public and the readership’s perception of India: dangerous, exotic, and lethal. There is an evident fear of the unknown or a stereotyped fear of the ethnic other that is inseparable from the text, derived from the British relationship with colonization at the time, and personified through Dr. Roylott’s character.