while Roylott doesn’t?”
During our discussion we covered the following areas:
? Social, cultural and historical background
? Characters and relationships
? Motives and weapons
? Detectives and their methods
? Conclusion
We discussed social, historical and cultural background as we felt this was very relevant
to the question in that Mrs. Maloney was treated kindly by the police and was not found
to be the murderer because of her social status and also because she was a women.
Social background was also important in the other story as Miss. Stoner and her sister
had to obey their stepfather because women were subordinate to men, this is what
gave Roylott his opportunity to murder Miss. Stoner’s sister. We felt that this area was
very important and so tried to continue discussing it throughout the presentation.
Characters and relationships were discussed because these also affect the plot. Mrs.
Stoner got away with her husband’s murder because she was an innocent, gentle
woman who obviously loved her husband. Again this provides a contrast with the other
story in that Roylott was an evil man and the relationship between him and his late wife’s
daughters was not good so he might be more readily suspected of murder. Motives
and weapons obviously help determine whether a murder will be discovered and it
helped Mrs. Maloney that no-one knew of her motive and her weapon was easily but
cleverly hidden. Roylott’s motive was quite different and Sherlock Holmes had already
been told of the fact that Roylott would lose money when one of his stepdaughters
married by Miss. Stoner; Roylott’s weapon was cleverly hidden but unlike Mrs. Maloney
it could not be destroyed completely as a weapon. Detectives play an obvious role in
investigating crimes and the ones investigating Mrs. Maloney were not very thorough
even though they would have had a lot more technology than Sherlock Holmes who
cared about the case enough to risk his life by staying in the house and found Roylott
out.
We concluded that Mrs. Maloney got away with it because although both she and
Roylott hid their evidence cleverly, Mrs. Maloney also appeared to have no motive and
had the police on her side. Roylott however had the circumstances against him as he
had a good detective investigating his case and Miss. Stoner gave evidence against
him to Sherlock Holmes.
Alison Mares 10B
