However the murderer in “Lamb to the Slaughter” is very different because Mary Maloney is female which is unusual and she is also pregnant”. Her skin for this was her sixth month with child”. This quote shows us that she is six month pregnant. She is also a very loving and caring wife. Now and again she would glance up at the clock, but without anxiety merely to please herself with the thought that each minute gone by made it nearer the time when he would come”. This quote shows us that she likes the company of her husband and cannot wait until he comes home.
In the “Lamb to the Slaughter”, they make you feel sorry for the murderer, Mary Maloney, rather than the victim Patrick Maloney. The writer makes you thinks that he deserves the fate as he was leaving Mary in an impossible situation. “And I know its kind of a bad time to be telling you, but there simply was not any other way”. This quote shows you that he knows it is a bad time to tell her, this was after a chat they had that was not written in the story but you kind of can guess what he had said after reading this sentence from the book.
In The Speckled Band they make you hate the murderer and feel sorry for the victims. Julia and Helen Stoner. “Do you not think you could help me too and at least throw a little light through the dense darkness which surrounds me? This is Miss Stoner asking Sherlock Holmes if he could help and solve the mystery that surrounds his sister’s death. This makes you feel sorry for her straight from the start.
In “The Speckled Band” the police are represented by Sherlock Holmes and he is presented as a smart and clever character. This is shown by “You have come in by train this morning, I see”. Sherlock Holmes came out with this without warning and shocked Miss Stoner, who wondered how he knew how she got to London. This shows us that he is very clever in the way that he sees things in a different way from everyone around him. This sometimes means that he finds out more about the crime than most other people.
In “Lamb to the Slaughter”, the police are presented very differently by that they are made fools out of by making them eat the murder weapon that they need to find so that they can find out the murderer. This is shown by “their voices thick and sloppy because their mouths were full of meat”. This quote shows you that the police ate all the evidence and tells you that they are unaware that you could kill someone with a leg of lamb, even though it has lots of weight behind it to help. They also don’t realise that a woman could kill someone.
Both stories are murder mysteries but because they are written at different times they are very different. The Sherlock Holmes story is very traditional because the murderer is a typical evil person and has a strong motive. It is set in a traditional British Country Mansion. There is a lot of suspense in the story, as you don’t know who the murderer is until the end. There was justice in that the murderer got killed by what he was trying to kill his stepdaughters with.
Whereas “The Lamb to the Slaughter” is more unusual and introduces twists, for example the murderer is a female, the sympathy is on the murderer. The reader knows who done it from the start and there was no justice for the murderer just the victim.