How does Arthur Conan Doyle exploit the detective story genre in four of his short stories?
Traditional detective stories fall into three groups, whodunit murders,mysteries with a twist in the tale and “locked room” stories.
A whodunit mystery is a story where the detective has to find out who commited the murder by unravelling a series of clues that will eventually lead him to the murderer.There are usually a group of characters who are potential suspects because they have either a method or a motive for the crime.As the story moves on the detective slowly eliminates all the suspects in his mind until only one remains.The detective then usually calls all the suspects together and reveals the perpetrator.When the villain is taken away the detective them goes on to explain how he assembled all the clues and how they led him to the murderer.
An example of how Conan Doyle exploits this is in the Cardboard Box when a cardboard package is sent to Miss Susan Cushing with a pair of preserved human ears in it and no-one knows why or who the ears belong to.Conan Doyle exploits this by removing the elimination process and turning it into a hunt for who the ears belong to and who must have killed the owners. After using his powers of observation, “I percieved that her ear corresponded exactly with the female ear which I had just inspected.The matter twas entirely beyond coincidence.There was the same shortening if the pinna,the sam broad curve of the upper lobe,the same convolution of the inner cartilage.In all essentials it was the same ear.” He comes to the conclusion, that one of Miss Cushing’s sisters, who is mentioned at the beginning of the story, and her lover were killed by her jealous husband.He was driven back to drinking by the rumours spread about him by the third of the Cushing sisters.
