“The Advantages of the Setting of the Country-House in Detective-Stories”

Type :

School essay

Pages :

3 pages

Format :

.doc

Published date :

10/09/2007

Category :

Philosophy & literature

Sub category :

Literature

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Summary :

Introduction
Isolation as one of the advantages a detective story writer gains
Loyalty and faithfulness to the household
Lucid descriptions and Sir Henry Baskerville's death
Conclusion
Bibliography

Abstract

the author of either a novel or a short story has one main purpose: to dazzle the reader. However, dazzling the reader is a difficult process because we don't all have the same attention spans, or have the same interests, or even enjoy the same words on the pages that other reader's find enjoyable. It's a phenomenon of sorts, when an author attains such remarkable success in the eyes of the reading public; one has to remark to oneself: 'Why does everyone want to read this particular author's work?' In short, the reader's were dazzled by the presentation of characters, the situation, the consequence, the author's careful manipulation of certain details to provide those nearly elusive underlying themes. Such authors as Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle enjoyed staggering success with populations across the world - but how did these detective-story writers do it? What was it that these author's possessed for them to seemingly somehow conjure millions of people to read their body of work? In such stories as Agatha Christie's the Mysterious Affair at Styles, and Arthur Conan Doyle's the Hound of the Baskervilles, they convey the author's mastery of tension. In a detective story, it is important for the author to pique the reader's interest, and then lure them along with the correct amount of tension that doesn't reveal too much, but just enough to move the story along. In both stories by Christie and Doyle, the author's use a specific setting of the isolated country-house to create the effects of tension. the country-house is inherently thought of as being inhabited by noble, wealthy aristocrats, who have a staff of servants to run the household.