An Inspector Calls and The Golden Day are both excellent examples of Mystery Novels
INTRODUCTION
Ursula Dubosarsky’s “The Golden Day” and J.B Priestley’s “An Inspector Calls” are both excellent examples of mystery texts, which are both focusing on major social change. They use a series of mystery conventions, including foreshadowing and atypical detectives, as well as subverting the already popular conventions, to keep the readers hooked until the end.
PARAGRAPH 1
The novel, “The Golden Day” written by Ursula Dubosarsky explores multiple mystery conventions, through the innocent students, who attempt to solve the mystery of what occurred to Miss Renshaw (who is Miss. Renshaw) on that fateful day. “The Golden Day” already, is relatively different to most mystery novels, since it does not contain a motive or an antagonist. The detective that is often used in mystery texts, seems to be portrayed by the girls, mainly Icara and Cubby. The author chose to do this, so that the reader would be even more intrigued by the storyline, so that it would further stand out, and that way the readers opinions on what should be in a mystery novel could possibly change. In “An Inspector Calls”, the inspector seems to be an atypical detective. Inspector Goole seems to already know about all the events the lead up to Eva Smith/Daisy Renton’s death. His name is similar to the term Ghoul, which by the dictionary is an evil spirit or phantom, or a person morbidly interested in death. At the end of the novel, the Birlings find out that Inspector Goole was never a detective, and it is left to the reader to decide what Inspector Goole could have been.
PARAGRAPH 2
Foreshadowing was clearly used throughout these two mystery texts. The first line in the novel is ‘the year began with the hanging of one man, and the drowning of another’. At the end of the novel, it is not clear to the reader what occurred to Miss Renshaw, and whether or not she came back at the end of the novel as a ghost or not. They are left wondering if Miss Renshaw could have contributed to the deaths that occure throughout the novel. In “An Inspector Calls”, the open...
