A comparison of two murder stories "The Speckled Band" A. Conan. Doyle "Lamb To The Slaughter" Roald Dahl

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Wider Reading Coursework

A comparison of two murder stories

“The Speckled Band” A. Conan. Doyle

“Lamb To The Slaughter” Roald Dahl

We’ve read two murder stories, and they are both quite different from each other because of the different times, that the stories were written in. But they do have a few similarities.

The most obvious similarity is that they both involve murders. Then there are a few other little similarities, for example they both involve vulnerable females, Helen Stoner in ‘The Speckled Band’ and Mary Maloney in ‘Lamb to the Slaughter’. Each story also has a detective/s, Sherlock Holmes in ‘The Speckled Band’ and the police officers in ‘Lamb to the Slaughter’. They also both have unusual murder weapons used in them.

        Then there are the differences. A main one is that ‘Lamb To The Slaughter’ shows you things from Mary Maloney’s point of view, so you know whom the murder is, and how they did it, as soon as the crime is committed. But in ‘The Speckled Band’ you know who the murder is, but the reader doesn’t find out how the murder was done, until the end of the story. The other main difference is the language used in the stories. The language is different, because of the type of reader the story is written for. ‘The Speckled Band’ was written for a high-class group of people, who where used to a more formal use of words, and a more complicated vocabulary. ‘Lamb To The Slaughter’ was written in a more informal way, because it was written for a wide range of people, so needed to be easy for different types of people to read.

The plot of ‘Lamb To The Slaughter’ is about a pregnant woman called Mary Maloney, whose husband comes home, to tell her that he is leaving her for another women. Mary tries to carry on with what she is doing, but is in shock and when she gets a lamb of leg out of the freezer, she hits her husband with it, and it kills him. She then tries to construct an alibi for herself, by visiting the Greengrocers and acting normally, cooking the food. She then phones the police pretending she had found his body when she came back, and the police search the house for clues. After a long search, they find nothing, and Mary sees they are hungry, so in a funny twist, the police eat the murder weapon.

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The plot of ‘The Speckled Band’ is about a woman called Helen Stoner, who goes to see Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson to seek help. Her sister, Julia Stoner was killed just before here wedding, a few years back, from unknown circumstances. Helen suspects her stepfather Dr Roylott. Then Holmes finds out that in Helen’s mother’s will, it says that when one of the sisters gets married, some of the money Dr Roylott got, would go to that sister. But now Helen Stoner is getting married, and she starts to hear noises in the night, that her sister had said ...

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