The third story I am going to discuss is The Empty House. In this story we see the return of Holmes from the dead. Holmes and Watson then go on to solve the mystery of the death of the honourable Ronald Adair and the attempted murder of Sherlock Holmes. Apart from this story containing a mystery and the characters of Holmes and Watson, this story is completely different from the other two stories I have discussed. The Empty House is a biographical story, whereas The Speckled Band and The Man with the Twisted Lip are just murder mysteries.
Unlike The Speckled Band and The Man with the Twisted Lip in The Empty House there is no piecing together of the clues. Holmes already knows what is going to happen; the only twist is that Colonel James Moran uses the same vantage point to try and kill Holmes as Holmes and Watson are watching from. In The Speckled Band and The Man with the Twisted Lip, Holmes and Watson piece the clues together to solve the mystery. Compared to modern technology we have today, in the era Conan Doyle wrote his stories medical, and especially forensic, technology was primitive.
Whereas today we can test for DNA, blood, drugs, body fluids ect and we have UV lights that show up anything unusual, when the stories were set the most advanced aid in investigations were magnifying glasses. A good example of where modern technology would have solved a lot quicker than Holmes did is The Man with the Twisted Lip. When someone is taken into custody nowadays, a DNA sample and fingerprints are taken from the suspects to identify them. If this had have happened in The Man with the Twisted Lip the police would have realised that Hugh Bonne was actually Neville Sinclair almost immediately.
Conan Doyle’s stories are very popular. They are thought of as classic crime fiction. Holmes and Watson make up the most famous detective duo in the world. Conan Doyle wrote the stories in such detail that you can imagine yourself in the scene, as if you are standing in the middle of a cobbled street or the grounds of a stately home alongside Holmes and Watson. Conan Doyle’s stories are so detailed that when Conan Doyle went to Egypt the police there were using his stories as instructions for carrying out their investigations.
The stories were so inspired and original that the ideas have been copied so many times in television soaps like ‘Eastenders’ and ‘Dallas’. Another reason I think Conan Doyle has been so successful in his writing is because of the relaxed style. For example at the start of The Man with the Twisted Lip Watson’s own wife calls him James instead of John! For whatever reason, the Sherlock Holmes stories are among the most famous detective stories in the world and thousands of people around the world read the stories everyday.
