Victims and Villains in The Speckled Band, The Cardboard Box, and The Red Headed League

Having read a range of detective stories by Conan Doyle, compare the

presentations of victims and villains in The Speckled Band and two

other stories.

In this essay, I am going to look at how Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, has

written the Sherlock Holmes stories, looking at the victims, villains,

Holmes and his dear friend Watson. The Sherlock Holmes, stories are

written in the detective genre, all of the stories that I have looked

at to compile this essay, have a crime, victims, and villains. It also

shows this as there is always a crime that Sherlock Holmes solves, by

his intelligence. The intended audience of the stories, I think is for

adults, even though there maybe some younger readers, but they may not

understand the story line. There are lots of stories within the

collection of Sherlock Holmes. These include The Speckled Band, The

Cardboard Box, and The Red Headed League. Other stories within the

collection are, ‘The Man With The Twisted Lip’, this story, is set in

the East of London. The crime to be solved is a disappearance of

Neville St Claire, the villain if Hugh Boone, this is actually Neville

disguised, as he faked his own death. Another of the stories within

the collection is, ‘Silver Blaze’, the crime in this story, is that of

a race horse that has been stolen and also the murder of the horses’

trainer. The story line is of, a horse race in which one of the people

competing murders another of the competitors so they can have an edge

in the race.

Our expectations of the victims in the stories of Sherlock Holmes, are

that the victims, are quiet rich, posh and vulnerable, and they are

expected to easily get attacked by the villain or villains in the

story. We also expect the victims to be adult,...

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...he crime solving then at least

tell Sherlock Holmes what happened straight away.

In conclusion all three stories follow the same pattern of being a

detective story with Sherlock Holmes solving the crime and his physic

Dr. Watson being there if he is needed. The presentation of victims

and villains within the stories may have been like what the victims

and villains were like at the time when the story was written, but

nowadays the description of them in the story would not be classed as

correct, this is due to the boom in technology. I prefer a quick read

with more action and less description, as if you are going to put a

lot of description in a short story, it can dramatically add to its

length. But at the same time the characters must be detailed and the

storyline must be fully developed, for the reader to be able to see

what is happening in the story.