“Silver Blaze” starts out to be a murder but ends up being an accidental death. This story is set on Dartmoor.
“The Cardboard Box” is a murder mystery because of jealousy. The story is set in a normal road in Croydon but the story is quite unusual.
Holmes has a side-kick called Watson. Watson is an amateur detective who helps Holmes solve the mysteries. He is very loyal to Holmes and is a very good friend. They live together in London. In the Victorian Period it was quite common for two professional gentlemen to live together being taken care of by a home keeper. Nobody took any notice of the men living together. Nowadays people would have suspicions and think that they are gay and not just two working colleagues.
All three stories are set in three completely different places; “The Speckled Band” is set in a near-derelict house, in a small country village called Stoke Moran. There are gypsies camping on the estate and Indian animals roaming the gardens freely.
“Silver Blaze” is set on Dartmoor in the middle of no-where, mist hangs on the hills and this gives a spooky feeling to the story. This is a good place to have a kidnapping storyline because Dartmoor is so big.
“The Cardboard Box” is set in a normal house on an ordinary street and this gives the story a bit of a “twist” because the story is about people who don’t live in the street.
In any detective story there are always villains. In the three stories that we read the villains were all different.
Dr Roylott was a stereotypical villain. His clothes are very cold colours and he isn’t a friendly person. Doyle describes Roylott in great detail; he says “his costume was a peculiar mixture of the professional and of the agricultural, black top-hat, a long coat with a hunting crop swinging in his hands”.
On the other hand Jim Browner seems less stereotypical. He only murders someone because of jealousy and by the end of his statement we feel quite sympathetic for him because of what happened, he clearly shows remorse.
John Straker is a totally different villain compared to the others because we think that he is the villain until the end story when Holmes solves the mystery and tells everyone that Straker was committing a crime. This makes the story interesting because it has a big “twist” in it.
The stories intrigued the Victorian readers very much because unusual creatures are mentioned in the stories. The mention of gypsies kept them reading as they disliked them.
Holmes sometimes took the law into his own hands which wasn’t legal; in “The Speckled Band” he makes the snake go and attack Mr Roylott knowing that it would kill him! The Victorian reader would have been concerned about the amount of undetected crime. In the Victorian period the pace of life was very slow. If someone wanted to get somewhere or know something they couldn’t just phone or email someone.
The crimes and their solutions, therefore, take time to be resolved and depend more upon Holmes’ powers of observation than scientific evidence.
I think that the stories are still popular today because of such exciting stories Doyle wrote, he used detail, suspicion and murder which is just what people like to read.
