In ‘Lamb to the Slaughter’ the murder takes place very early in the story and you are actually ‘witnessing’ the murder. This then turns your attention to whether or not she will get caught. It still keeps you interested and there is still quite a lot of suspense in the way she makes the police inspectors eat the murder weapon and thinking are they going to find out. When you first join Mary Maloney at the beginning of the story every thing seems normal. She keeps looking at the clock and just like routine her husband comes home on time. Everything is the same as always it would appear. This builds up the suspense because you would expect something to happed and make it an ‘out of the ordinary’ day. This is all until Mr Maloney says he doesn’t want to eat out. This makes you think that this is breaking their routine and that something else that is ‘out of the ordinary’ might happen. When Mr Maloney says he has to tell Mary something and you don’t find out what it is adds suspense to the story and what he tells Mary is the motive to kill him. So it must have been such shocking news that it drove her to kill the man she loves. The police then tell her that a blow to the head killed him and if there’s anything that could have done that kind of damage round the house. She tells them there might be something like that in the garage “She didn’t think they had a big spanner. But there might be some things like that in the garage.” This is all a big ‘red herring’ and leads the police away from what did kill him. To make matters worse for the police Mary asks them to eat the supper she had make for Mr Maloney “Why don’t you eat up that lamb that’s in the oven” this is a very good way of getting rid of her murder weapon.
In ‘The Speckled Band’ the murder had happened two years previously and now there were trying to prevent another murder and solve the existing one. This is a true ‘murder mystery’ because you don’t know who committed the crime until right at the end whereas in ‘lamb to the slaughter’ you know from the start. The whole story is building up suspense until you finally find out who killed the girl. This is the main focus rather than in ‘Lamb to the Slaughter’ the main focus is how Mary’s going to get away with the murder and not get caught. In ‘Speckled Band’ there is a strong motive for Dr Roylott to kill his two stepdaughters because he has become quite poor and when the girls are going to get married he has to give them a substantial amount of his money. When Helen Stoners sister was killed she was about to get married, and now Mary is about to get married and is worried the same is going to happen to her, “It’s fear Mr Holmes, it’s terror.” There are several ‘red herrings’ in this story, such as the gypsies, which had nothing to do with it, whatsoever, and the wild animals Dr Roylott keeps. These add twists to the tales and make you think that it could be done another way. There are also many clues but only Holmes seems to know how to piece them all together and sole the crime.
In ‘Speckled Band’ the ‘villain’ is presented as a big tall dark man and seems evil from the start, “So tall that his hat actually brushed the cross-bar of the doorway, and his breadth seemed to span across from side to side. A large face, seared with a thousand wrinkles, burned yellow with the sun, and marked with every evil passion.”
Mary Maloney on the other hand is presented very differently. She seems a nice caring loving wife to a man she loves. She was pregnant and seemed nice and calm.
Mary did the murder though anger and being hurt by someone she truly loved, and still loved
“When she saw him lying there on the floor with his legs doubled up and one arm twisted back underneath his body, it really was rather a shock. All the old love and longing for him welled up inside her, and she ran over to him and began to cry her heart out.”
The victims in both stories also greatly differ. In ‘lamb to the slaughter’ the victim is Mary’s husband and has just told her some news she didn’t want to hear. He is a respected police officer and a popular man. In ‘speckled band’ the victims are ‘defenseless’ stepdaughters and are at the mercy of they’re over powering stepfather. It’s interesting the way that in ‘lamb to the slaughter’ the villain is a quiet woman you wouldn’t expect to be violent and in ‘speckled band’ the ‘villain’ is a traditional villain, (big, bold, strong, evil). This is the way in which a Victorian audience would expect the villain to be portrayed and this is to satisfy the Victorian audience.
In both of the stories there are detectives, who try to solve the murder. In ‘Lamb to the Slaughter’ the detectives seem to be unprofessional by drinking the whisky and not suspecting Mary Maloney because they knew who she was, when every thing was pointing at her they appear to be almost ‘bumbling idiots’ and cant see what’s right under their noses “ Probably right under our very noses. What you think, Jack?” In ‘speckled band’ the police couldn’t crack the case so Miss Stoner had to call upon Holmes.
In ‘Lamb to the Slaughter’ the police are so stupid as to eat the murder weapon and are totally fooled by Mrs. Maloney.
There are many more differences than similarities between the two stories. I think this is because the writers are two very different people and they have different backgrounds, Roald Dahl mostly wrote for children and that perhaps it is very light hearted the way that he has ‘pops’ at the detectives, but Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a doctor and knew all the medical views of the cases which makes his books more real and perhaps he had a more of a respect towards the police than Roald Dahl did. The stories are different because of the time they were written, Roald Dahl wrote about a women killing her husband and that may have been less common in 1892 and that Is why Conan Doyle wrote about the women being a victim and her stepfather killing the girls.
