The language the villains use suit them perfectly, for example, Colonel Lysander Stark is a very suspicious person who has “something of a German accent” (page 206). The fact that he is from a different country just, in the reader’s eyes, makes him even more suspicious, whereas Vincent Spaulding is a very clever and obliging person who doesn’t say very much but when he does speak, he is quite polite which draws attention away from him.
Their personalities show us that, in their own different ways, they shouldn’t be trusted, as they are all suspicious, even if it is only very slightly like in Vincent Spaulding’s case. The only suspicious thing he does is “Then diving down into the cellar like a rabbit” on page 33. Colonel Lysander Stark is very suspicious because he is very insistent on keeping everything a secret as he keeps telling Victor Hatherly on page 207 “absolute secrecy is quite essential absolute secrecy”
All these stories and the villains in them are typical of the detective genre because they both keep the reader guessing until almost the very end at which time it keeps you guessing at how Holmes figured everything out. Another thing that keeps the reader interested is that they aren't easy to figure out because of all the clues and all of the red herrings. There are a lot of these false leads in the stories such as in The Red Headed League the red herring is that the Red Headed League doesn’t exist. Although they are typical of the detective genre, the stories and characters are still very different from each other which helps to hide the suspect when it comes to reading one story after another so that it is a surprise to find out who did it every time. The thing that is most typical of this genre is that nearly all of the characters in these stories, have a sidekick or and accomplice.
The way the villains are described is designed to make the audience feel scared or fearful of the character as if they are an actual person you are meeting, not just a character out of a book. For instance the fact that one of the characters is foreign, makes the audience immediately feel wary and suspicious and they immediately mistrust him, which is how they are meant to feel towards that character. Some of the developments on the characters are there to trick the audience into believing something, for example, the audience are lead to believe that Vincent Spaulding is a “smart assistant” (page 33) whereas he is really called John Clay and is a “murderer, thief, smasher and forger” (Page 48).
I think that Conan Doyle’s style of writing is very effective, as his stories were popular when they were first released and still are today. His style of writing is very clever in the way he has described his villains and how he has made the plot unfold. This style of writing is particularly good because he has written it from a different perspective, so that the reader won’t work things out with Holmes like in most detective books. He has made his villains unfold very well, especially, I think, with Vincent Spaulding as he was the hardest to work out as he seemed to be a very quiet and helpful person, but this is all unravelled by Holmes in the end.
I think using a different narrator to the main character was effective because the reader is looking at this through Dr Watson’s eyes, the mystery remains right up until the very end at which point everything is explained to us. Not looking at things through Holmes’s eyes also makes it so that the audience also falls for all the red herrings Conan Doyle liberally places throughout his stories. This makes the story more exciting as the reader can keep guessing at who did it and it won’t be spoilt by the narrator keep saying what’s going to happen next.
I think that if any of the stories were too long they would be less interesting and wouldn’t hold the reader's attention for very long. As the stories are short they constantly have something new or exciting happening because all the clues and things don’t have to be drawn out to last longer. There is a lot of tension in these stories that is only supposed to last a little while as the story comes to an end and the reader finds out how Holmes figured it out. I think that if the stories were much longer than they are now then the tension wouldn’t really be noticed and after a while which would make the end a lot less spectacular.
By the end of the stories the villains are always found out and they are usually caught. I think that the moral of the story is that the villains in the stories always get their comeuppance. For example, in ‘The Engineers Thumb’ Colonel Lysander Stark gets away, but the person he’s working with looses his house and they have to move to a different country where no-one will recognise them. Also in ‘The Speckled Band’ Dr Roylott kills someone with a swamp adder which then turns on him and he “died within ten seconds of being bitten”. This shows that criminals never get away with it and the hero’s of the story always find them out.
I think that Victorians enjoyed Conan Doyle’s detective stories so much because, I imagine, it made them feel safer as in those times there were people like Jack the Ripper on the loose and the fact that the criminals were, more often than not, caught in these stories, it helped Victorians believe that there was justice after all, because, lets face it, the police weren’t very good at their jobs and so couldn’t give people the security they needed. The fact that the crimes in these books were common ones only made them even better as it showed that there are ways of solving crimes. I think that these were also fairly popular because there couldn’t have been very many detective stories around at that time.
