Helen goes on to describe some nasty fights and the stress caused by these. incidences. She describes to Sherlock Holmes the fact that her sister was particularly distressed. ‘She was but 30 at the time of her death, and yet her hair had already began to whiten, even as mine has.’
It is then that we learn that her sister is dead and that her death occurred within two weeks of her getting engaged to a young man. Again it is clear that Dr Roylott had set up and killed her so he wouldn’t have to pay the yearly allowance which would be hers.
At this point in the story we learn about the actual events leading up to the death of Julia.
‘The Fatal night Dr Roylott had gone to his room early, Though we knew that he had not retired to rest, for my sister was troubled by the smell of the strong Indian cigars’.
She goes on to describe the awful death of her sister in the middle of the night after she had heard ‘a low, clear whistle’.
The suspense in the story gradually builds through the reader hearing things about the villain but never meeting him except at the end where his plan to kill Helen Stoner turns around onto him. When Sherlock Holmes comes into the room at the end he notices that ‘round his brow he had a peculiar yellow band, with brownish speckles.’
Conan Doyle presents Dr Roylott as a stereotypical villain throughout the whole story. He makes the reader feel frightened of this man through Helen Stoner’s description.
He is a very rude, violent man whose family all had a history of this.
In ‘Silver Blaze’ the villain is presented in a very different way to Dr Roylott is in ‘Speckled Band’.
In ‘Silver Blaze’ Doyle throws in a red herring to put the reader off track so that you are not quite sure who the real villain is throughout the story. He shows a man called Fitzroy Simpson in a very nervous condition.
Fitzroy Simpson is a man who is a ‘ very heavy gambler’ so it makes the reader thinks he had lost a lot of money and could only get it back by taking away the horse ‘Silver Blaze’ That was put down for winning against him.
He is displayed as being a stereotypical villain.
John Straker is the main villain. His very name is an indication of his character. Straker: coming between striking and raking, both verbs of violence. He has the motive, support and opportunity because he is in a position of trust and authority. Although we are lead to believe that John Straker is a main villain he also is a main victim because in the story Straker is murdered.
In ‘Silver Blaze’ there is no murder as such. The killing is carried out by a terrified horse, and that is a surprise in itself.
John Straker went down to the stables in the dead of the night and took out Silver Blaze. He did this by ‘drugging his own stable boy’.
He was very clever about drugging the stable boy because he had waited until the opportunity came to mix his opium powder with something that would be able to ‘disguise the taste’. He and his wife found the perfect thing which was a lovely supper of ‘curried mutton’.
Straker then went into the stable and ‘struck a match’ in order to see what he was doing. He was attempting to do a ‘delicate’ piece of surgery on the horse that he had previously been attempting to do on sheep. This was just practice for him so he would get it right on Silver Blaze. He made ‘a slight nick upon the tendons of Silver Blaze’s ham.’ This would then develop into slight lameness which would be put down to a strain in exercise. So therefore there would never be any suspicion falling on him.
When John Straker was next found dead on the Moor they noticed that he had a piece of paper in his pocket which was a bill not addressed to is name. We are lead to suspect it is somebody else’s throughout the whole story but at the end we realize that John Straker has in fact been leading a double life.
In this story there are a few minor villains. The shifty Simpson, a man down on luck, who is after some inside knowledge to improve his betting. And of course Silas Brown, the neighboring trainer, who steals the horse opportunistically. He is a Doyle stereotype. Silver Blaze who is the main villain isn’t very like a normal stereotypical villain because he is an animal. Animals in stories aren’t normally the main villain.
Conan Doyle has used animals as killers in both ‘Silver Blaze’ and ‘The Adventure of the Speckled Band’. He has made them both out to be victims. Both animals didn’t have any say in doing what they did. I think he uses very creative images with the animals so we are lead to believe it was someone else every time.
In ‘The Adventure of the Dancing Men’ Conan Doyle changes the way he presents the villain. He still uses the same victim strategy as in both ‘The Adventure of the Speckled Band’ and ‘Silver Blaze’.
In ‘The Adventure of the Dancing Men’ we are trying to solve both a murder and to work out a type of hieroglyphics which look like they have been drawn by a ‘child’.
A man called Mr. Hilton Cubitt, of Riding Thorpe Manor, Norfolk, is very anxious to find out who is writing them and what they mean.
Mr. Hilton Cubitt entered Sherlock Holmes’s office. He was a ‘tall, ruddy, clean-shaven gentleman, whose clear eyes and florid cheeks told of a life led far from the fogs of Baker Street.’
He seemed to bring with him ‘a whiff of his strong, fresh, bracing, east cost air with him as he entered.’
He started to tell Holmes that these dancing men are ‘frightening her to death’ ‘my wife says nothing, but I can see the terror in her eyes’. He starts telling Holmes about how he came to meet his wife.
“Last year I came up to London for the Jubilee, and I stopped in the boardinghouse in Russell Square. There was an American young lady there called Elsie Patrick. Before the month was up we were married quietly at a registry office. You’ll think it very mad, Mr. Holmes, that a man of a good old family should marry a wife in this fashion, knowing nothing of her past or of her people.” This is a very significant part to the story because later on we find out about how the hieroglyphics are linked to Elsie’s past.
Holmes asks Mr. Hilton Cubitt to wait until the hieroglyphics turn up again, then to draw a copy of them onto a piece of paper and bring them in.
He came back a few days later with the dancing men on a piece of paper that he had copied from the ‘black wooden door of the tool house.’ The men were drawn in white chalk.
After a few more of the hieroglyphic sightings, Holmes starts to understand what the dancing men are saying.
They figure out that the person who is doing this is not a child but a man called Abe Slaney. He is presented as having a bristly black beard and a great aggressive hooked nose, which is an almost obligatory feature of a stereotypical villain. He flourished a cane when he walked. Conan Doyle has presented this villain like the villain Silas Brown in ‘Silver Blaze’ because in that story he, too, was swinging a riding crop. He has made it so they have the same sort of similarities. He uses this to stereotype the villains.
Conan Doyle shows us two sides of this villain by showing that he is capable of killing an innocent man all for the love of Elsie. He says ‘he would not harm a hair of her head’. He is then appalled when he sees the injuries he has caused and the resulting grief.
When Abe is arrested by Holmes he glares, with ‘blazing black eyes.’ His attitude is very villainous in all of this.
In all of Conan Doyle’s stories he stereotypes the villains by giving them all the features of the villains we are all used to hearing about in fairy tales. He always makes us focus on a point which will lead us off track of the real villain so it is an excitement to us when we finally find out who the real villain actually is. I think this is a really good way of doing this because then the reader will always want to carry on reading to see who the villain really is.
