Frightening details are the best part, showing how evil and calculating the human mind can be, like in “lamb to the slaughter” Mrs Maloney becomes a cold calculating person rehearsing her speech in front of a mirror so as not to sound odd.
Strong main characters are a must and usually they would have a slightly useless, clumsy sidekick which would make them seem even cleverer.
Third person mysteries tend not to be as good as first person ones as then you learn more about things then you would in first person so it lessens the mystery.
Roald Dahl set his murder mystery in a warm friendly atmosphere so that it is almost frightening that a murder would happen in this place, This is the effect it has on the reader, a happy atmosphere in a warm house, but still murder is afoot. This scene is so much from the scene one would expect from a murder that it is worrying to think that one does happen in such a place. “The room was warm and clean, the curtains drawn, the two table lamps alight.” This is what sets the homely atmosphere and setting, “She laid aside her sewing, and went forward to kiss him as he came in.” Typical sexist view, the wife at home sewing then coming to kiss her husband who she has missed so much.
Conan Doyle sets “the speckled band” first at bakers street in London, where Sherlock Homes’s office is and, secondarily at stoke moran, at a mansion, A mansion out in the countryside which no one visits and where a girl mysteriously died years ago, This is you average scary place and actually quiet typical of a murder mystery, this or a castle any way, so you know right from the start that this is going to be a scary place especially when you hear that a girl died here previously of “fright”
The Atmosphere at the house at stoke moran is very mysterious, but also low key, The step father is a very grumpy, large man, who one defiantly wouldn’t want to cross, so it is always very tense.
The reader doesn’t expect Patrick Maloney to be a victim because he is ment to have a loving wife in a picture perfect setting and no one sane murders a high ranking police officer. Patrick Maloney is a grumpy self centred fool, who seems to care for no one but himself and I feel absolutely no sympathy for his death considering how he treats his wife like something he stepped in, and then cheats on her, it is actually no small wonder that she murders him.
In “the speckled band” there are two victims, the sister Julia and Dr Grimesby. We are told Julia the fist victim had no great pleasure in life and that she was engaged and was to be married two weeks after her death. We expect Helen to be the second victim because she also is engaged and it is two weeks until her marriage and is also hearing whistles in the night as her sister did. We feel sympathy for her because of how her life is with Dr Grimesby and her sister dying. She seems to be a typical murder mystery victim. Conan Doyle instead turns his murderer into the second victim as an element of surprise and of a twisted sense of justice.
