Smoke-laden Essay Example for Free

Smoke-laden Essay We read the following Sherlock Holmes stories; The adventure of the veiled lodger, The speckled band, The red headed league, The crooked man and The silver blaze. In detail I studied The adventure of the veiled lodger, The speckled band and The silver blaze. In terms of narrative of the characters, the use of language, Structure and the authors view point and then compared them. In The veiled lodger Holmes is passed on a message by a landlord, from a tenant. It said do you wish to find out what really happened to Mr. Render. When Holmes and Watson got to the house they find out that the tenant was Mrs. Render. They also found out that Mr. Render did not die the way they originally thought, which was being attacked by a lion, but it was a murder carried out by Mrs. Render and her lover called Leonardo. They did this because of the way that Mr. Render treated Mrs. Render, he would abuse her when she commented on how he had other women. They made the murder look like it was a lion from the circus attacking him, by using a club with nails attached, to look like claws but the plan went wrong. They managed to attack Mr. Render but when Mrs. Render opened the loins cage to let the lion loose from the cage the smell of blood had sent it wild and it turned on Mrs. Render. The Speckled Band is about a family of two sisters and their step father. The mother had died and left a sum of money in the step fathers possession to keep the whole family going. When the daughters gets married some of the money was to go to them, so that the money in the end will be split three ways between them. When one daughter does get engaged she starts to notice strange occurrences, like a low whistle early in the morning about three am which is not normal. She then dies in mysterious circumstances and the case was never solved. When the second of the daughters got engaged she had to move into her sisters old room as her room was supposedly being decorated, she too started to hear a low whistle early in the morning. She then comes and finds Holmes and explains her situation she asks him to investigate what is happening. Holmes looks at all the evidence and clues only to discovers that the step father is planting a deadly snake in their bed each night and then calls it back after so long using a whistle and milk. The plan was that the snake would bite the daughters and then he could call the snake back before someone could see it. In The silver blaze Holmes is called to investigate the murder of a man and the where abouts of a lost racing horse. When Holmes gets to the site he notices something even before he has left the carriage, he stays sat down quiet for a moment and when he gets up he doesnt say what it was he noticed, which was that some of the sheep seemed to be lame. When the case is closed he then reveals what he found and how he got his conclusion. What actually happened was the victim had drugged the stable boy and taken the horse out in to the moors, where he attempted to take a nick out of a bone of the horse so that would be paralysed . It would therefore lose its next race. He did this because he had a bet on another horse to win. But the plan went wrong when he started to cut the horse, as it kicked him in the head killing him. The horse had wondered off and had been found by the rival horse trainer and then hidden. In these three short stories there are some big similarities, they all contain a murder they are either at the start of the story, end or both. The plots begin very close to the start of the stories this makes the readers intrigued sooner and therefore continue to read the stories. The odd murder is in The veiled lodger where the story is been told as past not present like The Speckled Band and The silver blaze. There are more similarities in The Speckled Band and The silver blaze because of this. For instance both the stories were solved by Holmes instead of Holmes been told the story, this could have a negative effect upon the reader because it is harder for them to become involved in the story as they already know the outcome. The characters in The veiled lodger and The Speckled Band have similarities between them, for example Helen and Mrs. Render both have a dominant male in there lifes who they fear. Helen goes behind Dr. Royllots back to see Holmes and does not confront Dr. Royllot. Mrs. Render also describes Mr. Render as being the devil. But there are still some similarities with The silver blaze, for example the victims wife in The silver blaze and Mrs. Render in The veiled lodger both have men which dont stay faithful to them. In The veiled lodger Mrs. Render is a middle aged widow, she got married young to the circus manager and found out too late it was a wrong decision because he physically abused her. This drove Mrs. Render to her limits and she planned his murder. She did this with Leonardo a lover of hers he was the strong man in the circus. He came up with the killing method but when the plan did go wrong he ran from the scene. When the other people heard Mrs. Render they came to help and Leonardo came to. This shows what judge of character Mrs. Render has, it is clear that she has a poor judge of character.