Nature of the Murderers Essay

Compare the Techniques that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Ruth Rendell use to present the Nature of the Murderers, the Motives and the Consequences.  The two books I am going to compare are ‘The Hound Of The Baskervilles’ by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and ‘People Don’t Do Such Things’ by Ruth Rendell.  Ã¢â‚¬ËœThe Hound Of The Baskervilles’ is an intricate crime detection novel written pre-war in the 18th Century, where Doyle relays facts to the reader incredibly cryptically and at strategic points. These facts, if pieced together correctly, eventually inform the reader of the result of the book and what characters fit in where. It starts with Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson solving, really a puzzle rather than a mystery as they find a walking stick left in their office by someone unknown. This however develops into a full-scale mystery that involves murder, betrayal, dishonesty and revenge. This type of novel was popular around the time of being first published because they somehow matched true stories of the time, for example, Jack the Ripper. ‘People Don’t Do Such Things’ is a short story written post-war and has a much more modern slant on things. It is told through the eyes of the eventual culprit so as to only relay information that the narrator deems to be important and this resultantly deceives the reader in the overall ending of the story. The beginning of the story is a depiction of a happy stable marriage between the narrator and his wife but starts to go downhill from there. The story uses themes of betrayal and murder.  The nature of the murderers in ‘The Hound Of The Baskervilles’ and ‘People Don’t Do Such Things’ are quite different as Stapleton in ‘The Hound Of The Baskervilles’ is in mind to commit the murder so as to have personal gain by inheriting his families’ wealth. In ‘People Don’t Do Such Things’ the narrator is committing the murder in an act of self-denial as he is working with the view that if he canâ₠¬â„¢t have his wife, no one can. In both ‘People Don’t Do Such Things’ and ‘The Hound Of The Baskervilles’ neither author goes into any detail when describing the murders and it is left for the reader to form their own picture or suspicions as to what might have happened. In ‘The Hound Of The Baskervilles’ the first suspicions are set onto a mythical hound that roams the moors. This was a completely plausible theory at the time as a vast number of people still believed in such happenings. However in ‘People Don’t do Such Things’ the first suspicion is set onto the eventual joint victim. This method of putting someone else in the picture of committing the murder is much more modern as this is what generally tends to happen in modern day society. Mythical creatures roaming moors are somewhat absent from what we seem plausible. In both ‘The Hound Of The Baskervilles’ and ‘People Don’t Do Such Things’ the murderers are both killing a member of their family but for very different reasons. The motive of Stapleton in ‘The Hound Of The Baskervilles’ is to get rid of family members blocking the way between him and the his potential inheritance thus deriving a large amount of personal gain. The narrator in ‘People Don’t Do Such Things however kills a member of his family because of depression. He is depressed because he was under the illusion that his marriage was perfect and that a close friend of him and his wife was nothing more but this turned out to be wrong. This eventual false friendship was unknowingly cleverly set up by Reeve – the close friend – and was manipulated to his advantage. He suddenly felt like he had been used when he found out his wife had betrayed him but the person she had had the affair with didn’t want her anymore and neither did the narrator. This left her with nowhere to go and consequently caused problems for both people and son the narrator decided to get rid of the problem once and for all. Both murderers gained self-gratification from the experience but from different motives and from different situations. The two stories also differ from each other when the consequences of the murder are bought into play. In ‘The Hound Of The Baskervilles’ Stapleton’s plot is discovered and unravelled by Sherlock Holmes. In the end Stapleton doesn’t get bought to justice but dies by drowning in a swamp in an attempt to escape Sherlock Holmes, some might say he got what he deserved. In ‘People Don’t Do Such Things’ the narrator doesn’t lose that much, except a feeling of guilt will have settled in his mind, as in the end the wrong person is convicted of the murder. This comparison is a clear example of how the same sort of situation can have more than one, completely different outcome. As a general comparison both authors have written about the same situation but have followed on in different directions as to where the story ends up. Also the fact that the stories where written at completely different times in history affects the way in which the story is constructed and consequently written. Different aspects of the story are directly related to the surrounding society at the time when the story was written such as the language used which can be a major pivot point as to whether the reading audience can understand the authors writing or not. I think this is evident in both ‘The Hound Of The Baskervilles’ and ‘People Don’t Do Such Things’ as the language used in ‘The Hound Of The Baskervilles’ is clearly different from that used in ‘People Don’t Do Such Things’. This type of differential between the two stories can greatly affect how parts of the story are relayed to the reader. As I live in the modern world I can relate to and understand ‘People Don’t Do Such Things’ much better than ‘The Hound Of The Baskervilles’ because of the differences between the way of life in the 18th Century when ‘The Hound Of The Baskervilles’ was written and relatively close to the present when ‘People Don’t Do Such Things’ was written.  Overall I think that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Ruth Rendell both present the nature of the murders, the motives and the consequences in a definitive and individual way but both methods are separate from each other simply because of the difference in the surrounding societies’ believes and understandings.