Examine the settings that the writers have chosen for their stories in "The Signalman", "The Man With The Twisted Lip" and "The Red Room".
Consider the effects that each writer has created and how they contribute to the atmosphere.
The three stories were all written in a style that attempts to hold the reader in suspense. .
Dickens creates suspense by allowing the story to develop at a well-controlled pace only gradually and by sharing his feelings, his inner thoughts an about the Signalman and his environment with the reader. He tells us that he finds the signalman in "as solitary and dismal a place as I ever saw". This description immediately sets the scene as isolated, grim and especially spooky and also has the effect of making the reader feel sympathy for the signalman who has to remain there in a place of "so little sunlight" that also "had an earthy and deadly smell". The end of this story is unexpected and the revelation at the end makes the reader realise how well-hidden were the clues to solving the mystery.
The writer of this story creates suspense by including a number of sub-plots to the main story. In this way the reader is led down a series of blind alleys and you are never quite sure what will happen next. The setting for "The Man With The Twisted Lip" is the streets of London but unlike the other writers Doyle's story changes location to include the range a contrasting situations for the main character. The reader is taken by surprise from the comforts of the doctor's living room to an "opium den in the farthest east of the City" to where the doctor's been called to rescue one of his "respectable" patients. The ending of this story comes as a sudden revelation about the truth surrounding the "Man with the twisted lip" that concludes the mystery in a satisfying way.
HG Wells" story is set in an old castle that's inhibited by equally ancient and mysterious people who the narrator describes as his "grotesque custodians".