Compare 'Lamb to the Slaughter' and 'The Speckled Band'.

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'Lamb to the Slaughter' and 'The Speckled Band' are both stories based around a suspicious death. Roald Dahl wrote 'Lamb to the Slaughter' in 1954. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote 'The Speckled Band' in 1892. Because of the times when they were written, the language is different also. Conan Doyle uses the Victorian style of language. His writing is more complex. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's language is more descriptive. It takes him about half a page just to describe the setting of the story. Conan Doyle sometimes uses phrases, which can now be quite tricky to understand such as 'knock you up'. This is archaic language, which is not regularly used nowadays. Roald Dahl uses short but sharp sentences, and writes as if he is talking to a friend.

In 'Lamb to the Slaughter' there is a couple who seem content and loving. Mary is heavily pregnant. One day her husband comes home from work and breaks some devastating news. He is in fact having an affair. She doesn't know how to react to this, so she hits her husband with a frozen leg of lamb around the back of his head. It knocks him over, and kills him. She is very shocked, but still manages to work out an alibi to cover up the death. She decides to pretend that nothing has happened and go to the shop perfectly calmly and normal. This makes Sam the shopkeeper give Mary a good alibi. He would say that when she went to the shop, she acted totally naturally, and he had nothing to suspect. Because Mary's husband was a detective himself she knew the other two detectives that came to the house. She offered them some lamb. She said she didn't want it to go to waste so they ate it. Little did they know this was in fact the murder weapon. This leaves a mystery to all the characters on how Patrick was killed. Only the reader and Mary who know the truth.

In 'The Speckled Band' a lady comes to visit Holmes and Watson. She is very frightened. Her sister has died under strange circumstances shortly before she was about to get married. She has fears that she may be the next to die, because she was soon to be getting married. Holmes asks her to give him every detail. She tells of her sister's terrifying death at home. No cause of death was found, but as she died in her arms in her bedroom, her sister had said something about a 'speckled band' and pointed towards the ceiling by her stepfather's bedroom next door. We are given many details but do not understand which are important or why.

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The stepfather appears. He is so violent and threatening that Holmes becomes more convinced that the lady is at risk. Holmes and Watson later go back to the house to examine the room and decide to stay overnight. In the middle of the night Holmes sees a speckled snake climb through a fake vent in the room and begin to descend towards the bed where she would have slept. Holmes drives the snake away and they rush in to the Dr Roylatts room to find him dead with the snake wrapped around his forehead - the speckled band. Everything is ...

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