The story is narrated in the third person, and not by Mary Maloney. However it is told through her eyes and from her point of view. This is quite unusual as most detective stories are told from the perspective of the detective. This method of story telling gives us an insight into Mary’s life without being too biased, as we don’t hear only her thoughts. Although we are quite biased anyway as we are on her side throughout the story!
I don’t identify with Sherlock Holmes as much as Mary Maloney for several reasons. Firstly, we see him from the outside - the story is told through the eyes of Watson, Holmes’s faithful friend. This distances us from Holmes, and indeed he is quite a distanced and solitary character, which does not help us to feel close to him. Watson is also the only significant relationship that we see Holmes having. We are not told a great deal about what Sherlock Holmes feels throughout the story or about his background. Unlike Mary Maloney, we can hardly ever tell what Holmes is thinking - we have to be told his thoughts through him talking to Watson - and this also keeps us distanced from him. We can’t tell what Holmes is thinking because he has a superior mind to (most of) his readers and is very intelligent. In spite of all this though, you do feel some empathy with Sherlock Holmes. He is a likeable person, and funny in a quiet and clever way. He is also surprising - for example when he displays great strength you would not expect him to have - when he bends back the poker that Dr. Roylott has just bent. This makes you realise even more how little we actually know about Sherlock Holmes. But we admire him for it and you cannot help liking Sherlock Holmes, even if you are not close to him or know every detail about his life. The fact that we don’t know a lot about his past actually makes him more intriguing and mysterious, which I think is an excellent quality to have in a detective! It is a classic detective story, although you do spend more time thinking about how the murder happened, and not about who did it.
We are not told much about the personality and background of Sherlock Holmes, but we can observe how he solves the crime in this story. We see how Holmes notices little details that we would not necessarily see, or regard as important. For example, he can tell that Helen Stoner travelled to see him by train because he noticed the ticket in her hand, and that she travelled from the station in a dog-cart because he could see the mud stains on her arm. He is very observant, and draws his conclusions from these observations.
If you compare Sherlock Holmes to the police detectives in ‘Lamb to the Slaughter’ you find several differences. Firstly, the detectives in ‘Lamb to the Slaughter’ are much more police-trained than Holmes and immediately begin to search the house, and take photos, and question Mary, and find an alibi for her (the grocer). They follow all the rules, but don’t use any imagination in solving the crime, unlike Sherlock Holmes. They were more technologically advanced than in Holmes’s time, but they still couldn’t solve the crime. You get the impression that these officers were not hugely intelligent, but to be fair, they were at a disadvantage - being personally involved. It would be very awkward to accuse your ex-colleague’s wife of killing him. Plus, they had probably met Mary before and wouldn’t think she was capable of murdering anyone, let alone her own husband who anyone could see she adored.
‘The Speckled Band’ is narrated in the first person, from the point of view of Watson, Sherlock Holmes’s very good friend, and indeed the only other character close to Holmes that we are told about. This is a fairly good perspective to see the story from because Watson knows Holmes very well and can tell the reader a lot about him, and if he is acting strangely or has something on his mind. It is a bit biased because you can tell that Watson admires and looks up to Holmes, and that he wouldn’t say anything too bad about him.
Sherlock Holmes is presented as a very intelligent, observant, witty and surprising man, but he is also a little reserved and you get the impression that he is a very private person.
I have compared Sherlock Holmes with the detectives in ‘Lamb to the Slaughter’, and now I am going to compare Mary Maloney with the other murderer, Dr. Roylott. Dr. Roylott was a rich man who had married a woman called Mrs. Stoner, the mother of two girls called Helen and Julia. Their mother died and Dr. Roylott and the girls went back to his hometown, where his family had once been very rich, but were now poor. Mrs. Stoner had said that when the girls got married they had to be given a large sum of money, which Dr. Roylott no longer had. When Julia got engaged, Dr. Roylott thought of an extravagant plan to murder her. He killed her in cold blood, and was planning to do the same thing to Helen. Mary Maloney was totally the opposite of this as she and her husband were fairly middle class and normal, and she murdered him in a moment of passion and shock. She had not planned to kill her husband. A similarity between her and Dr. Roylott though, is that neither of them was punished by law for murdering someone. Dr. Roylott might have been, but he was killed, ironically, by the snake he had used to kill Julia Stoner, and Mary Maloney, as far as we know, got away with it by carefully planning for the police officers to eat the evidence.
I also think the period that the stories were written in makes a significant difference. ‘The Speckled Band’ was written in 1888 and is written in language appropriate for the time. For example, the sentences are much longer and detailed in ‘The Speckled Band’. The reason the sentences are shorter in ‘Lamb to the Slaughter’ is that it is a more modern story for modern people, and as we watch a lot of films and television programs, we have shorter attention spans and have less time to read. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle uses slower and more elegant language than Roald Dahl, who gets straight to the point, and uses fairly simple language.
I think also the fact that Sherlock Holmes was written in a time when people talked a lot less about their feelings has something to do with his reserved and solitary character, and that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote him this way.
‘Lamb to the Slaughter’ was written in 1954 and displays some characteristics specific to that time. The main one of these is the attitude of Mary Maloney. She is perfectly happy to stay at home and is willing to do anything for her husband. Her main ambition in life was probably just to be the best housewife and mother she could. This does not make her a bad person - this was the accepted role of women in the 50’s. The murder of her husband was probably partly to do with the fact that she would look bad if her husband left her, although this would be subconscious because she did not really know what she was doing when she killed him - she was in shock.
These two stories were written in different times, which makes them differ slightly, but there are also some similarities in them. One is that the murderer has a personal and family-related motive for the murder. They both involve an unusual murder - in ‘The Speckled Band’ the murder is very extravagant and well planned, and in ‘Lamb to the Slaughter’ the victim was killed by a leg of lamb, which was later eaten by his ex-colleagues - the police working on the case! Another similarity is that neither murderer was punished by law for committing the crime.
I think that in both ‘The Speckled Band’ and ‘Lamb to the Slaughter’, the reader is very much involved with the story.
Firstly, in ‘The Speckled Band’, the reader feels involved because Watson is speaking in first person and it’s like he is talking to you. Also the clues are drip-fed to the reader in a way that they build up and you have a chance to make your own theories as to what happened. We are more involved because when the reader begins to get confused, we find out Watson feels the same and he asks all the questions we want to ask Sherlock Holmes. Finding out that Watson is just as confused as we are makes us feel less dense!
We react to the story in that we really try to find out how the girl was killed. I know that when I was reading ‘The Speckled Band’ and had to put it down, I kept thinking about how the murder had happened, and it was almost a relief to finish it! It is an unusual story in that you want to know how it happened and not who had done it.
In ‘Lamb to the Slaughter’, the reader is very much involved right from the beginning. We are drawn into the story when we find out all about Mary Maloney and how she feels and what we learn about her life. We become emotionally involved with her. We know how and why she killed her husband and this gives us a link with her. We are personally involved with this woman and then her actions.
We react to the story because we feel strongly about why Mary killed her husband and we feel sorry for her. We are glad when she kills her husband, we are glad that she is showing that she has some backbone and spirit in her. When the police come at the end we hope that they don’t find out it was Mary, and are relieved when they don’t. I know that at the end, though, I was a little confused, because the line, ‘And in the other room, Mary Maloney began to giggle’, gives a big twist to the ending of the story. It makes the reader wonder if Mary is really as ‘good’ as we thought she was? Because we became personally involved with her at the beginning, did that cloud our judgement of her, like it did with the policemen who knew her and her husband? It makes you ask questions, for example, perhaps Mary had already known about the affair and had planned it? Or maybe she laughed because she is glad her husband is dead and she’s free? Then you think of all the reasons why this couldn’t be true, but there is still some doubt in your mind. You also wonder what is going to happen next - does she get away with it? What does she do next? This is a completely different ending to that of ‘The Speckled Band’. In this story, all the loose ends are tied up and explanations are given. You find out what happens to the murderer, Dr. Roylott and your mind is at ease. It’s almost like the case is closed and filed away in your mind.
So in conclusion, I feel that I identify more with Mary Maloney than I do with Sherlock Holmes, for several reasons. I think that Mary is an easily likeable character, because she is basically good and sweet. Although she is a bit weak and dependant at the beginning, you are assured that she is not completely like this when she murders her husband!
I can also identify with Sherlock Holmes, but only up to a certain point. Although he is a likeable and intelligent person, I feel that you cannot get completely close to a character if the writer did not mean you to, and I think this is the case with Sherlock Holmes. If you knew all about Sherlock Holmes and his intimate past, I think that the character wouldn’t work. The main part of his charm and personality is that there is always an air of mystery, and you never know what he has done in the past. Nor, if you really knew and understood the character, would you want to, I think.
I think that both ‘The Speckled Band’ and ‘Lamb to the Slaughter’ are brilliant detective stories, and their foundations are the strong and endearing characters that are at the heart of the story.