Analyse the way the villain is presented in three Sherlock Holmes stories :: English Literature

Analyse the way the villain is presented in three Sherlock Holmes stories Analyse the way the villain is presented in three Sherlock Holmes stories. Is there a stereotype? In Conan Doyle’s stories, ‘The Adventure of the Speckled Band’, ‘Silver Blaze’ and ‘The Adventures of the Dancing Men.’ the villain is always used as the key element. It’s interesting that Doyle always makes the villain more fascinating than the hero. This is certainly true in each of these of these stories. In the Speckled Band, the villain is a Dr Roylott. This was not made clear to the reader until the very end of the story, a trick that Conan Doyle uses in all three of these stories. Dr Roylott is the stepfather to Helen Stoner and her sister Julia Stoner. He is presented by Helen Stoner in the beginning of the story when she goes to visit Sherlock Holmes. She describes past events and her suspicions about her stepfather. She begins by flattering Sherlock Holmes by saying ‘I have heard†¦, that you can see deeply into the manifold wickedness of the human heart.’ She then begins from the beginning telling Mr. Holmes everything about her life and why she ended up at his door. She starts by describing her stepfather as a man who is the last survivor of one of the oldest Saxon families in England. He has access to  £1000 a year which was left to him by his wife, a vast sum in those days. Rylott was then supposed to give Helen and her sister a yearly allowance when they married. As soon as his wife left the money to the stepfather in her will, coincidently she died in a tragic railway accident which had happened eight years previously. These are big clues to the reader to make them suspicious and to make them think he is a villain. Helen and her sister from that moment have been very isolated from the outside world. They had been living in the house with their stepfather and his two Indian animals, which are a cheetah and a baboon, which were both allowed to walk free around the grounds. Helen goes on to describe some nasty fights and the stress caused by these. incidences. She describes to Sherlock Holmes the fact that her sister was particularly distressed. ‘She was but 30 at the time of her death, and yet her hair had already began to whiten, even as mine has.’ It is then that we learn that her sister is dead and that her death occurred within two weeks of her getting engaged to a young man.