Speckled Band Suspense

Tension; mental or emotional strain; intense, suppressed suspense anxiety, or excitement. The readers feel tension when the mystery elements create suspense in various short stories. The mystery elements are in “The Adventure of the Speckled Band,” “Lamb to the Slaughter,” and “An Invitation to a Murder.” First, mystery elements create suspense in “The Adventure of the Speckled Band.”
To begin with, hidden evidence, many possible suspects, and clues that have accumulated, create suspense in “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Hidden evidence is missing pieces of a mystery that seems unimportant. In the short story, detectives went into Julia’s room and hunted for clues about how Julia died. There were strange things

“Finally he took the bell-rode in his hand and gave it a brisk tug. ‘Why, it’s a dummy...” (p.123). This creates suspense to the reader because the bell rope seems unimportant, but it is important to solve the crime. This makes the readers uncertain on how to solve the mystery of Julia’s death. Additionally, many possible suspects create suspense, such as Roylott who is the stepfather and the gypsies that Holmes and Watson see when they went to Stoke Moran to investigate. Dr. Roylott was in Stoke Moran the night Julia died, and there were also gypsies that were always around. Having many possible suspects such as the Roylott and the gypsies in “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” makes the readers uncertain what clues to believe and who is the guilty one. Moreover, Holmes gathered many strange clues when he arrived at Stoke Moran where Julia

Patrick's wife, Mary, adores him and she waits and prepares for his arrival every day from work. Therefore, one day he came home, and he was acting strange because he had bad news that he was going to leave her. The readers can then can make an inference that Mary is angry and hurt. “Her first instinct was not to believe any of it, to reject it all… it occurred to her that perhaps he hadn’t even spoken, that she herself had imagined the whole thing” (Dahl 113). Foreshadowing develops suspense because the readers are curious to know what will happen with the hints and clues given. Dramatic irony is a big role in creating suspense when the detectives are trying to find the murder weapon. Mary then realized that she has to remove the murder weapon so she then offered the lamb leg to the people at the scene to try and eliminate it. The investigators did not realize they were eating what they were looking for. Dramatic irony is when the audience knows that the lamb leg is the murder weapon and that the detectives were abolishing the evidence, but the detectives do not know that. Moreover, as clues accumulate suspense is added when the detectives gathered clues about what the murder weapon looks like. “...had been killed by a blow on the back of the head administered with a heavy blunt instrument, almost certainly