The language of Victorian times is very different to that which we have now, they also had different everyday items, with "frock-coats and "high gaiters" being common items of clothing. Modern printings of Victorian writings have to show what these out dated words mean lest the reader be held in confusion. Lamb to the Slaughter however is contemporary and therefore uses modern language as they had modern items then.
There are few similarities when compared to the number of differences between these stories. The perpetrator of the murder in The Speckled Band was a large, powerful, violent man though he chooses a method of killing which requires no physical strength. Dahl's murderer is a quiet, loving housewife however bashes her husband over the head with a large leg of frozen ham.
Dr Roylett has a lot of space given over to describing him in great detail, each word is angled to make the reader hate him. "A huge man", this gives you an impression of a man who could do a lot of physical damage to someone and gives an impression to the reader that he would. The man seems to have dressed up to stand out, "his costume was a peculiar mixture of the professional and of the agricultural" there is something about how he has dressed up that is dislikeable. Adding to the image of a man eager to do physical harm is that he has "a riding crop swinging in his hand" why would someone have a riding crop when they've gone to talk to a PI, it is there merely as a prop to make him seem more violent. The cream on the cake, what makes him seem evil with no redemption is that his face is "marked with every evil passion", the reader will really despise this man by now with his "bile-shot eyes". A man who has a resemblence to a "fierce old bird of prey". This is vastly different to Dahl's minimalist approach to character description, preferring instead to let the reader make their own minds up about what the characters look like. One person's interpretation of Mrs maloney could be very different to another's. Dahl prefers to describe objects and places more than humans. This style of description gives you an idea of what the person's life is like and you don't receive a skin deep knowledge of them. Using this description you can also detect things like time and what it must be like outside, "the room was warm and clean, the cutains drawn", from this you can tell that it is probably during the day or early evening, the fact that it mentions the room being warm indicates that it could be cold outside. From "the two table lamps alight" you can narrow down the time to the evening. Wher it says "the empty chair opposite her" it is obvious, her being "Mrs" Maloney that the other chair belongs to her husband and the "whisky" points the mind towards Scotland. There only being two chairs also tells us that she has no children, though later we find she is pregnant. Her being pregnant shows that she is probably young to middle aged.
Mary Maloney loved her husband greatly as she waited "for her husband to come home from work" patiently while sewing. She is shown as a kindly woman and very motherly, "there was a slow, smiling air about everything she did". She is described as "tranquil"and "her skin" had "accquired a wonderful translucent quality", her "mouth was soft, and the eyes" "seemed larger, darker than before. That whole description excudesa sense of calm which is completely at odds with her reaction to Mr maloney's revelation. This could be laid down to her pregnancy, pregnancy of course bringing rapid mood swings due to the imbalance of hormones.
There are great differences in the detectives in the two stories. Doyle's Holmes is very quick off the mark with everything going on, this is amplified by Watson's apparent slow wittedness and his prompting, nuch like a beautiful person being placed next to an ugly one. This is in great contrast to Dahl's detectives who are blinded by their own preconceptions about the poor little housewife and her well prepared story and alibi. Sam the grocer plays his part unintentionally "...acted quite normal...very cheerful...wanted to give him a good supper...peas...cheesecake...impossible that she..." This strengthened the detective's belief in their preconceptions. Then just to add a twist, she gets them to eat the evidence. She has a very sharp mind.
Motives, every good murder mystery has them in some form and these stories are no exception. Roylett's motives to kill his stepdaughter are that he wants to keep all of the money he received when his wife died and the stepdaughter is entitled to a portion of that money when she marries and she is about to. Roylett killed the other stepdaughter just before she got married as well. So Helena Stoner goes to holmes fearing her stepfather with her wedding closing in. In comparison, the motives of Lamb to the Slaughter are hidden, never released to us. They stem however from a madness at being seperated, it is something that Mrs Maloney cannot handle and she goes over the edge. We know that this seperation is inescapable when her husband says, "I'll give you money and see you're looked after. But there needn't be any fuss." "It wouldn't be good for my job." He is obviously putting his job and personal happiness before hers, while she is pregnant, this does not make the reader view him in good light. We can only speculate what Detective Maloney told his wife that evening. I however, believe that he told her he had found someone else and was going with them for dinner, this would explain where he was going when he said he was "going out" and why she went mad.
The official punishment for both would have been to be hung, though neither received this. Mrs Maloney being "the wife of a detective, she knew quite well what the penalty would be". She however survived unlike Roylett who died in a very different way from the one prescribed. It was the well-held Victorian belief that for a murderer to be killed was the ultimate revenge, in this way he received a worse punishment than he would have, keeping the Victorian readers very happy. Mary maloney however got away as clean as a whistle, she tricked everyone and saved her baby which shows a great contrast in the two villains, one merely evaded the law to keep her baby alive, mother's instict, and the other did it because he was miserly.
Arthur Conan Doyle had a story within a story, Helena Stoner's tale. in this story the weather becomes a character of in it's own right when "the wind was howling outside, and the rain was beating and splashing against the windows". This pathetic fallacy shows the heroine's fear and the setting is stereotypical with the scary, old house with a storm outside. If someone is going to die, the weather is going to be like a "gale" because it was what the Victorian audience expected. There is a large use of very powerful words, "suddenly", "sprang", "rushed", "ran", "threw", "stabbed" and "convulsed". These words convey a sense of speed and urgency and turn the passage into a race against time. This race seems to start at "there burst forth the wild scream of a terrified woman". There is a great urgency at the beginning which slows at the end, climaxing in the statement, "such was the tragic end of my beloved sister".
The Victorian views about mentality and behaviour are vastly different from those commonly held today. They believed in life as black and white with evil one side and good the other. We know that this is wrong and that grey is the predominant cast for people. Even Osama Bin Laden, though every one considers him evil, must love his wife, maybe he helped a cripple cross a road once. You can't judge anything too strongly or you end up as a zealot. Victorians also held that women were frail, delicate things which needed protection. Violence was taken in a far more tolerant light than it is today with "fisticuffs" being a popular way to establish an end to arguements among gentlemen. Murder however they took a very firm line against, they considered an eye for an eye acceptable and hung murderers.
To conclude, the writers explore the genre of the murder mystery in very different ways, Dahl goes against all of the preconceptions one makes of them, setting off in a direction completely different to any we have seen before. Doyle however is really the one who created the preconceptions in the first place. He became internationally famous and popularized the detective story genre with his sixty stories featuring Holmes, the bumbling but good-natured Dr Watson and occaisionally Holmes' arch-nemesis Professor Moriarty. He injected knowledge he had gathered in his years as a medical physician. Holmes himself was based on a professor Doyle knew at his university. The stories reflect greatly the society and time they were written in, Mrs Maloney would not have gotten away with the crime with modern forensics and the modern police policy of everyone being a suspect. The forensics would have discovered fragments of pork in the wound. However in modern times she wouldn't have been hung so she might have handed herself in, the only reason she was evading the law was because she thought they might not allow her to have the baby before she was hung. Mrs Maloney wouldn't have been perceived as just some poor, little housewife but as a suspect. Doyle's play is very set in the time it was written with the villain looking evil, in a contemporary story he would probably look normal. Helen wouldn't have told the story in the way she did as women are no longer frail, delicate things which need to be protected. Doyle's story was set in a time when the world was very male-orientated, few women these days would act the way she did, they are far more independent now. Detectives in the modern day and age also have far more paperwork to fill out and spend less time on the crime scene also, noone outside of a book could look at a house and know exactly how everything happened. Otherwise they would catch their man everytime. Perhaps Holmes was the Victorian version of Superman.
