“The Advantages of the Setting of the Country-House in Detective-Stories”
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school essay
published 09/10/2007
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SummaryThe 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.
Table of Contents
- The author of either a novel or a short story has one main purpose: to dazzle the reader.
- Isolation is one of the advantages a detective-story writer gains by setting the action in a country-house.
- Loyalty and faithfulness to the household can go so far; however, there lies another advantage for the detective-story writer in setting the action in a country-house – the servants always have a motive for committing a crime.
- For a family sect to own a large country-house and to employ a staff of servants to run the household, it assumes that there is a decent, if not bountiful sum of money running through the owner's blue blood.
- What Doyle shows is a country-house estate, one that has fallen from grace, and needs to have its good name restored to the glory that it once possessed.
- The detective-story writer gains several advantages to setting the action of the story in a country-house:
- Perhaps the setting of a country-house has become cliché over the years, but both Christie and Conan Doyle established the country-house setting as one that is beneficial to the advantage of the detective-story writer.
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