Compare 'Lamb to the Slaughter' and 'The Speckled Band'.
When many people think of a murder mystery, they think of a dark and stormy night, a large forbidding house, a gunshot heard by everyone yet seen by no one, and the phrases "you're probably wondering why I called you all here", "The butler did it", and of course not forgetting "elementary, my dear Watson". In the end, the intelligent and very observant detective solves the case, and justice, sometimes through the courts and sometimes poetic is served.
'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. Roald Dahl is famous for writing children's stories, like George's Marvellous Medicine and James and the Giant Peach. Roald Dalh also writes stories for adults. They are usually about ordinary people doing strange things. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote 'The Speckled Band' in 1892. His stories are about the famous detective Sherlock Holmes. Before readings this story I knew that Sherlock Holmes was a famous detective working with fellow college Doctor Watson and Scotland Yard.
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.
The two stories are both classed as murder mysteries, however when comparing these two stories the styles of writing and the way in which the stories are presented is completely different. An example of this would be the chronological order of each of the stories. What I mean by this is the traditional order of murder mysteries would be body, a motive, a weapon, a death, a suspect, an alibi and detectives. Both 'Lamb to the Slaughter' and 'The Speckled Band' have all of these and so are no exception to these 'guidelines'. However, 'The Speckled Band' follows this order and is a very traditional murder mystery. 'Lamb to the Slaughter' on the other hand does not follow the conventional style of murder mysteries and follows its own order. This order is; a motive, a weapon, a death, a killer, an alibi and detectives. In changing the traditional order of murder mysteries I feel that Roald Dahl is mocking the genre of Murder Mysteries.
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 is getting married soon. 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 ...
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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 is getting married soon. 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.
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 explained.
The short stories are told in different ways. 'Lamb to the Slaughter' is written in the third person. This means it is not told through the eyes of anyone. This gives an advantage to the reader because we can see everything that is happening in the story instead of just what one character can see. We know more than the characters because they don't know who the murder is or how the victim was killed. We are always one step ahead of the detectives. This also makes us want to read on which adds tension, because we want to find out what is going to happen, and whether she is going to get caught or not. It is also a disadvantage, because we know straight away who the murderer is, and we don't have the chance to try and solve the murder ourselves.
'The Speckled Band' is told through the eyes of Watson (one of the detectives). This is a disadvantage the reader because we can only see things that Dr Watson knows. This is a bigger disadvantage because although he is very clever he is not as good at seeing detail and seeing the things which can be worked out from the detail. This lets the reader compete with Homes at solving the puzzle. I suppose it is also an advantage because it adds tension and makes us guess how the victim was killed all the way through and makes you want to read on to see if you are correct. This story is not told chronologically. Watson is telling the story a long time after it actually happened when he is glancing over his notes.
'Lamb to the Slaughter' begins before the murder actually takes place. This is to show how cheerful Mary is, and adds emotion and it makes you feel sorry for Mary who has just found out that her husband is having an affair. It comes as a major shock to both the reader and her when she kills her husband.
'The Speckled Band' is told after the murder takes place. The reader gets to find out how both Julia and Dr Roylott were killed.
At the start of 'Lamb to the slaughter' Roald Dahl gives us a brief but good description of the setting, which is the living room of the Maloney's house. The room is 'warm and clean' it seems very 'tranquil' and calm. Mary is merrily sitting in her chair knitting away waiting for her husband to come home from work, 'punctually as always'.
'The speckled Band' is a completely different setting, because Sir Arthur Conan Doyle describes Stoke Moran. He gives us a very good detailed description. The building was 'Grey, lichen-blotched stone', it seams very deadly and a little bit grotty, two curving wings 'Like the claws of a crab' This makes you feel trapped, and threatened. Windows were broken. This shows the house was not very well maintained it was a 'Picture of ruin'. There is a link between the state of the house and the residents. In fact the lack of repair was part of the murderer's plan in forcing the two female residents into a room next to his own.
The Maloney's house is very orderly, organised and a very pleasant place to be, and everything seems to have its own place, which is a link to Mary who is very happy and pleasant. As for Stoke Moran it is 'a picture of ruin' not a nice place to be it seams very creepy and un-welcoming which is a link to Dr Roylott as he is very evil and not a very pleasant person. He doesn't seem to think about or care for anyone but himself.
The characters in both stories are different but also have things in common. Mary Maloney is 'six month with child'. She is a good housewife, and seems to keep the house very neat and tidy. She loved her husband dearly 'she loved him for the way he sat loosely in his chair'. She turns out to be very clever and cunning "Hullo Sam" she said brightly in an un-suspicious manner as she walked in to the shop shortly after she had just killed her husband.
Dr Roylott is a very unusual character with strange habits. He is very violent and has a history of it. He once killed his butler. He lets gypsies stay in his gardens. He also has a passion for Indian animals and he has a cheetah and a baboon, which wander freely over his grounds.
Both Mary and Dr Roylott have a few things in common. For starters probably most obviously they are both murderers, although when Mary killed her husband it wasn't pre-meditated but she still murdered him. They are both very clever and find a way to cover up the murder and although they both kill someone neither of them feel sufficiently guilty, to own up to the murder. In 'Lamb to the slaughter' we are much closer to Mary. She seems innocent and very pleasant. In 'The Speckled Band', Dr Roylott only appears when he is very angry. We like Mary Maloney more and can admire her sense of humour in getting the detectives to eat the evidence. Dr Roylott seems entirely unpleasant. We cannot be fond of him or admire him. His cleverness is cruelty, and his cruelty is cunning. We are pleased that he dies a horrific death.
The victims are also different in 'Lamb to the Slaughter' we only really know that Mary is blameless but in 'The speckled Band' Dr Roylett seems a heartless and cruel man. It might not be right to kill him but his death does not seem a great loss.
In 'Lamb to the Slaughter', the detectives make several basic and unforgivable mistakes. They assume that the murder is a man 'get the weapon and you have got the man'. There is no evidence to say that the murderer is a man. They also drink whisky whilst on duty "its not strictly allowed, but I might just have a bit to keep me going", then they eat the lamb which unknown to them is the murder weapon "Personally I think it is right here on the premises", "Probably right hear under our very noses". This is one of many times where irony is used and Roald Dahl is ridiculing the detectives. They are there only to show how clever she is. Her revenge on them is part of her revenge on her husband because they were all detectives.
In 'The Speckled Band' everything is really about how clever Holmes is. The details are used to make us feel more bewildered, so that at the end, when everything is explained, we feel great admiration for Holmes and Watson.
An important difference is that both stories are complicated but in very different ways. 'The Speckled band' is like a crossword puzzle, which we are not meant to solve. All the characters are simple. They are either good or evil, and there seems to be nothing in between. In 'Lamb to the Slaughter' the story itself is very simple, but because we change the way we see the people, and how we feel about them, the story is really more complicated than it seems. The victim starts as our friend, and becomes somebody we do not like. He is then treated harshly. So do we feel sympathy for him or not? It is not clear. We cannot be either entirely sympathetic, but we feel some sorrow. The murderer also starts as our friend. She seems very kind and loving. Then we feel a lot of sympathy for her because of what her husband tells her, but we are shocked that she is able to kill her husband. We think it is very much out of character. We then learn that she is also very cunning when she takes control. The way she treats the detective's seems to show contempt, which is not explained by what her husband had done. She enjoys making fools of them. Do we sympathise with her? Can we still believe that the crime was just a sudden outburst, or is her character actually much darker.
In 'Lamb to the Slaughter' the story works because everything seems so ordinary and every day. She doesn't use anything special to kill and she uses the simplest way of destroying the evidence. In 'The Speckled Band' the emotions are all very high; people scream, cry and shout. The murder weapon is an exotic snake and the method used involved months of preparation and planning.
In the years between Roald Dahl and Conan Doyle things have changed. Our sense of what is just and fair, is now more complicated and we know that we live in a world where we do not know how things should end. We can accept endings, which might be unfair. In 'The Speckled Band' the story ends with a simple ending but one, which I think is fair. Dr Roylatt's murder weapon in fact kills himself. Although the two stories seem very different it is odd that both stories use irony to make their final point. In 'The Speckled Band' it is ironic that the murderer is killed by his own murder weapon and in 'Lamb to the Slaughter' it is ironic that the detectives eat the evidence. Perhaps irony is a very English thing. What brings the stories together is the way they use irony. How might an American or French person have told the same story?
Dahl and Conan Doyle have engineered the two stories well, but in my opinion, Dahls story, 'Lamb to the Slaughter', is the better of the two, for two main reasons. Firstly, Dahl has written this story specifically to go against the traditional detective story, making the setting, plot and characters untypical. Secondly, I particularly like the way in which Dahl's characters develop as the story goes on. Mary Maloney goes from loving housewife and potential victim to possible psychopathic murderer. Patrick Maloney develops from potential psychopathic murderer to dead victim, and the detectives... well the detectives are pretty dim to begin with anyway. While Conan Doyle's stay rigid and static. Dr Roylott stays violent, Helen Stoner stays terrified, and Holmes stays as vigilant and observant as ever.
The main ingredient of a detective story is that the villain is caught and justice is achieved. This happens in 'The Speckled Band', with the poetic justice of Dr Roylott's death, but in 'Lamb to the Slaughter' it doesn't, and the villain gets off "scot-free". Even if they had found her out, they wouldn't have any evidence. The main ingredient is missing in 'Lamb to the Slaughter', but even so, that doesn't make the story any worse.
It seems odd that two stories both aimed at different age groups. Roald Dahl's audience is normally children, and Conan Doyle wrote for adults. One story ends with a clean and reassuring justice, 'The Speckled Band', the other ends with complications.
I would say that the main difference between the two stories is, one is serious, and abides by 'the rules' of traditional murder mysteries ('The Speckled Band'), and the other is just comical, making fun of the police force, ('Lamb to the Slaughter'). This one difference pushes the stories poles apart from each other, and yet, they both make for an interesting read.
All in all, people will always like to read Murder Mysteries because they are interesting and they make you think about what will happen, and you have to work things out using clues which you have been given.
