Every year I do a few weeks’ lessons on the detective genre. I do it for GCSE using the Hound of the Baskervilles for the pre-1914 prose, but I also introduce it in year 7.
This year I have a particularly lively first year group who are intrigued by detectives. It’s great fun seeing their eyes open when they are introduced to all the different elements of a detective story as they realise how familiar it all is. Since they are all used to modern detectives like CSI where a lot of detection is dependent on getting “samples” to the “lab”, they are intrigued that a character like Sherlock Holmes was dependent on intelligence, powers of observation and skill to solve his crimes.
I introduced them to the murder of Duncan in Macbeth and got them to try to work out how they could discover the murderer without the technology that they are used to seeing in modern stories. Initially they found it terribly hard and kept suggesting fingerprinting and testing for blood spatter patterns…(Thank you CSI!) Then they began to think constructively and imaginatively.
The next lesson, I told them of a woman who met a terrifying death in a room locked from the inside and whose final words to her sister were “The band! The speckled band!”
I then assumed the persona of Helen Stonor from the story “The Speckled Band” and got them to be Holmes and Watson. Their task for the rest of the lesson (almost an hour) was to question me about my ‘sister’s’ death. I gave them only the information that Holmes is given in the story itself. After some fifteen minutes or so, I asked them to decide what they should now do as they had questioned the witness for long enough. Nearly all of them, relying on their own experience of modern detectives, suggested visiting the scene of the crime. They then asked the witness to describe the room in which the woman died. It was all question and answer. Eventually they got a picture of the room and then someone suggested examining the room next door (the villain’s room).
They asked a series of questions such as: “The chair in Dr Roylott’s room, where is it?”
(“Next to the bed, against the wall.”)
“Is there anything on the wall? Above the chair?”
(“A ventilator”)
“Is the chair against the outside wall then?”
(“No”)
“Is it against the wall between the two bedrooms?”
(“Yes”)
And eventually they worked it out.
It was a long process, as it involved feeding enough clues from the story (nothing new added) to point them in the right direction without giving anything away. It also meant giving answers at a level of detail that would keep them going for a whole lesson and not go over the time allowed (time management is a key teaching skill!)
Through inference and deductive skills they actually worked out what had killed the woman and how it was done. They were absolutely ecstatic as they felt that they had done it all themselves.
It was a fascinating and I think, a rewarding exercise, as it not only taught them to think imaginatively, but it also did not limit itself to the ‘cleverer’ student; the child who finally deduced that the “band” was a snake was not one of the recognised “high achievers”. It took his unique insight into the crime to point the rest of the class in the right direction. It wasn’t a guess, he actually worked it out from the limited information he was given. To realise that it was he who had more or less solved the crime made his day and he left the lesson with a huge grin of satisfaction on his face.
So did I.
Silence is Golden
Macbeth in the East End
