These Stories are different because of the weapons; a leg of lamb and a snake and also the language is very old and archaic in ‘The Speckled Band’. But in other respects they are similar to ones I have heard about because of the thoroughness of the detectives and the motives are the same as they are nowadays.
The style of the writing in ‘The Speckled Band’ is very polite language using words like, ‘good day’ and using an older style of English, for example, using the term ‘the lady,’ you don’t hear that nowadays in modern English, and ‘my dear madam’ which is very polite English, and these terms are mentioned quite a lot in the story. But in ‘Lamb to the Slaughter’ the language is modern English and it is a traditional English household, where the female cooks the meal for when the male returns home from work, but in ‘Lamb to the Slaughter’ the audience know who the murderer is, but in the ‘Speckled Band’ the audience are kept in suspense right up to the end.
Arthur Conan Doyle uses the most descriptive words to set the scene by describing and using a lot of adjectives, for example, where he describes the snake when he says, “a peculiar yellow band with brownish speckles bound tightly round his head” this text I think is very descriptive and gives you a visual picture of the snake. In contrast, the ‘Lamb to the Slaughter’ does have some descriptive words but not so many.
Sherlock Holmes speaks in a very formal polite way, for example, he says, ‘good day’ and called everyone Mr, and Mrs, and Dr, maybe this was because schools were always very strict on their pupils and taught them to be very courteous, so it passed through the generations. Or it may be because Sherlock Holmes’s job was very important and he had to be very polite to his clients. Mary Maloney speaks in a very common way because in my opinion she is a typical housewife who isn’t shown to be of a higher class because she doesn’t say any quotes in the old English style. The story is modern and it reflects current language or maybe because she was so upset she didn’t know what to say so she wasn’t polite.
Both the stories have unusual titles because otherwise the title may give the plot away and neither author wants to do that because they want the audience to keep reading it and not to put it down until they have finished it.
At the start of the story people would be wondering what a ‘Speckled Band’ is. In the story it may try to make you believe that the gypsies are something to do with it because one of them has a speckled scarf on. However, ‘A Lamb To The Slaughter’ is also an unusual title because it appears to look at the subject from a few different angles, someone may think it was a nature story so they would have to read the book to understand it.
The two villains are from ‘Lamb to the Slaughter,’ Mary Maloney, and, in ‘The Speckled Band,’ Dr Grimesby Roylott. Mary Maloney was a housewife, married to her husband they are a happy couple but when her husband got home that day he said something to Mary to make her really mad, so she hit him round the head with a leg of lamb, probably one of the most unusual murder weapons ever. Arthur Conan Doyle makes Mary come across as kind at the start; however, by the end it shows her as sly and cunning. An example of this is when she fed them the lamb and said it was to help her get over her loss, which shows she is very manipulative. Her language is very clever because she makes herself look really upset but inside she is glad he is dead, this is shown in the text when the detectives say that the evidence is right under their noses when they’re eating the lamb. The other characters feel sorry for her, for example when she is telling the detectives what happened to her husband and they understand and feel sorry for her. Also, they do anything to help her and to this degree they even eat the lamb. At the start, the audience would think that the man would be carrying out the murder, but actually it is the female that does the murder. The attitude may change toward her when she kills her husband and the detectives pity her whereas the audience don’t feel sorry for her at all and want the detectives to find out that it was she and get full punishment in jail
Dr Grimesby Roylott is a very strong man shown when he bent the can but then Sherlock Holmes bends it right back and he gets angry very easily shown when he knew Helen had gone to Holmes, and he went mad and shows that he is sly and clever by following her and saying that he was going to London on business.
Dr Watson is the narrator in the Sherlock Holmes stories and he makes Dr Roylott sound strong and sly and he makes Holmes sound strong as well by showing that he can match anything Roylott can do.
Dr Roylott’s language is shown in a very angry tone, this is expressed when he is mad with Helen going to Holmes where he shouts in threatening tones and calls her stupid, and says Holmes is a meddler. He is overweight which make his figure look more intimidating and his language is very angry and he orders people about and his voice and presence scares Helen.
The audience may find his presence intimidating. I thought he dominated the family and I also felt sorry for Helen and Julia. The audience may feel that Sherlock Holmes is a strong powerful figure but may not look it, so the audience will think that Dr Roylott is a strong nasty man.
The two detectives in the stories are Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson in the speckled band and Jack Noolan in the ‘Lamb to the Slaughter’ Sherlock Holmes sets about his job by not trusting anyone or anything and looking at every clue and using everything as evidence like he doesn’t always trust John Garridebs in ‘The Three Garridebs’ that’s why they move cautiously when investigating him and as the case unfolds they become more weary of him.
I think that Sherlock Holmes is much more professional because he doesn’t trust or do anything to harm potential evidence, unlike the detective who drunk wine on the job and ate the evidence, and also he never solved his cases, unlike Sherlock Holmes who solves all his mysteries. Contrary to the detective who never solved his.
If Holmes was investigating the Mary Maloney case he would have done it in a more professional manner, by not taking the offer to eat her food or feel sorry for her. I think that he would sense that she was the murderer and arrest her because he is an experienced professional and the books would never make Sherlock Holmes fail in a case because it would ruin his credibility.
Jack Noolan was not very thorough and helps Mary out, and does what ever she says to help her grieve the loss of her husband. He goes about his job making assumptions and presuming that he was hit by a hammer and the killer was a male, which shows he is not a good detective.
The place of the murder in ‘The Speckled Band’ was at an old mansion house called Stoke Moran. It is typical of an old manor house, it is big with grey stone walls (typical of a murder mystery story) because they always have large houses and usually the murder is to do with money. And in the surrounding fields at Stoke Moran there are gypsies and also Dr Roylott keeps a tiger and a monkey in the grounds. In the ‘Speckled band’ I only have a vision of the house by the picture I have seen and also seen the video but in the text it only gives a basic, description of the house and the surroundings.
In the ‘Lamb To The Slaughter,’ the house is modern and it is given a very brief description. We are only told about the rooms in which they are in and what happened in them. I do not have a vision of this house. It is hard to imagine because there is not a lot of information on it in the text and we have not seen a video about it.
The places are dissimilar to each other in many ways, one is very large and old, and the other one is of a moderate size and very modern. But in other respects, they are like each other in that we only see a few rooms of each of them.
Murder mysteries have changed over time because public interests have changed and they are now on TV and they were not back in the Victorian times because they were read in magazine newspapers and books. Also I think weapons have changed, for example, nowadays there are sniper rifles and silencer pistols, however, back then there only was loud and not accurate weapons like the revolver. Now crimes are a lot more violent, the murders are more brutal and they are described in more detail. Both these stories are typical of murder mysteries in the olden days, and they are not very violent killings unlike today. Murder mysteries have changed in the way that the language has changed and the violence and the motives have worsened because of the murders that have happened today, and there a lot of murder mysteries on TV and in film, so to interest people they have made them more gory because times have changed and weapons have got better, so the murder gets more brutal.
The effects of the writers language and form is that in ‘Lamb to the Slaughter’ they describe the killing by using very strong adjectives such as ‘swung the big frozen heavy piece of lamb’, and ‘she might as well as hit him with a steel club’. These are very strong pieces of descriptive language which bring the point across very dramatically which I think he intended to do.This is typical of language of this time it is very formal and doesn’t use words like good day and have such a posh English accent.
In ‘The Speckled Band,’ the language is very old and formal old English like Good day and calling everyone sir and madam and it shows how much language has changed in time and peoples politeness because now not many people speak in the tone that they do in, The Speckled Band’. Arthur Conan Doyle is a well spoken and this comes across in the story and I also have noticed, that there is no slang words in ‘The Speckled Band’. This book is almost 100 years old so it would appeal to the people of its time.
Chris Connor