Creating a mystery is a very complex process because there are some criteria that must be followed. The author must create their piece in such a way that readers are unable to determine the outcome, while still leaving all the right hints for them to try anyway. Conan Doyle managed to keep readers' interest alive in his story “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” by respecting the guidelines of a mystery. He engages his readers by playfully leaving clues and red herrings that lead them away from the path to understanding the ending. Once readers reach the end, they will be in for a pleasant surprise. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Every mystery must contain clues so the detective can piece together the story of what happened and who committed the crime. A common tendency in the Mystery genre is to impose a signifier on readers (in the form of a clue) without revealing the meaning until later. Conan Doyle enjoys introducing a meaningless sign to get his readers' attention. “Did you observe anything very strange in that bed?” "NO." “It was fixed to the floor. Have you ever seen a bed made like that before?" “I cannot say I have” (109). In this passage, Holmes asks Watson if he has ever seen a bed made like that before. When Watson says no, an alarm bell goes up in the minds of Doyle's audience. As his readers flip through the pages, their hunger of connecting the signifier with the signified increases. They are immediately pervaded by a feeling of unease that does not leave them until they finish the story and all the loose ends are resolved his tale, appealing to the curiosity of every human being. They are eager to continue reading and find the next clue to try to solve the mystery. Red herrings are used in mysteries to achieve a goal; to lure readers away from the ending real. By making them believe that the real killer is someone else or that the means of killing are different from what actually happened, this makes the true explanation even more difficult to predict. “Ah, and what did you deduce from this allusion to a spotted band?” “Sometimes I thought it was simply wild talk of delirium, sometimes that he was referring to some group of people, perhaps these very gypsies on the plantation. I don't know if the spotted handkerchiefs that many of them wear on their heads could have suggested the strange adjective she used. (103). In this passage, the author cleverly disguises the real turnout, the bite of the poisonous snake that kills the girl, and replaces it in the readers' minds with the fact that gypsies are the killers because they wear "spotted bands" on their heads and this may be what the dying girl meant when she said “It was the band! The spotted band! (102). It also masks the word "gang" as a group of people (the gypsies) rather than a gang that can envelop someone, and even further from the truth that the gang is a snake. Readers are filled with joy as they try to piece together the story. When readers learn the full story, they realize that all the information was there and that the mention of the gypsies had been the reason their minds had rejected the possibility that the gang was snakes. The attempt to reconstruct history is what captured the interest of..