Compare and contrast the two detective stories ‘Three-Dot Po’ and ‘The Speckled Band’

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Compare and contrast the two detective stories ‘Three-Dot Po’ and ‘The Speckled Band’

  I am going to compare and contrast two short stories, written by two different authors but they are both detective stories. The two stories were written in different times by two very different people.

  Sara Paretsky, the author of ‘Three-Dot Po’, was born in the middle of the twentieth century and is still alive and writing books today. She has a good education; she has a degree in Political science, a PhD in history and has received an MBA from the University of Chicago. She has published 11 novels in several languages, 9 short stories, and 6 essays and has received numerous awards for her writing.

  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of ‘The Speckled Band’, was born in 1859 and died in 1930. He wrote in a very different time and society to the ones that Sara Paretsky writes in. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle qualified as a doctor and practised medicine, he was well educated and respected in his profession, however he preferred to write mystery stories. He was the first writer in the nineteenth century to have the same characters in his stories but different stories each week.

  Both writers were/are respected in their fields of work and although they both had different backgrounds they had at least one thing in common, they both wrote murder mysteries that included the same characters but different stories in each edition.

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  Both stories were aimed at the same audience range, however ‘The speckled band’ may appear slightly more to an adult audience. Both ‘Three-Dot Po’ and ‘The speckled band’ are structured in the same way, they are both short stories. Although they both have a different under – lying structure. ‘Three-Dot Po’ is a methodical story and takes you step by step through what the character is going through, whereas ‘The speckled band’ builds up to a climax and leaves you puzzled and confused up until the end. Each story has a different narrator in Three-Dot Po it ...

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