In contrast to how Mary acts Dr Roylott, who is the murderer in The Speckled Band, is a huge, ferocious man. He is very intimidating and carries a hunting crop that frightens people. He’s very tall with a large face and “bile shot eyes.” He is a selfish and vicious person, who scares the town’s people with his creatures and even his temper. His stepdaughters are even scared of the vicious man. This makes you suspect him of being the murderer as soon as you hear about him. His motives were money based and he kills his stepdaughter so that he can keep his wife’s income that is left to him in her will. This is also why he wants to kill his other soon to be married stepdaughter. He obviously planned the murder due to him going through the trouble of getting a fake bell and air vent fitted in his stepdaughter’s room. But his elaborate scheme of making a snake go through the air vent and down the bell string to kill anyone in the room backfires when Sherlock Holmes causes the snake to return back through the air vent to Dr Roylott. The snake bites Dr Roylott and when Sherlock Holmes goes to investigate Dr Roylott is dead.
Dr Roylott is the more stereotypical and believable role for a murderer but his plan is too complex for nowadays. No recent murderer would concoct a plan to kill someone with a trained snake. However the way Mary kills is probably more common than Dr Roylott’s intricate plan. They both manipulate the people around them though and this might be a big part in the way murderers are depicted as devious. Mary manipulates people with her speech and circumstance, whereas Dr Roylott takes on a more upfront approach of frightening people into submission. Mary has the better style of manipulation though, due to her getting away with it. In contrast its Dr Roylott’s downfall because Sherlock Holmes isn’t intimidated by him and therefore carries on investigating the case.
In the Speckled Band, Sherlock Holmes is the detective and seems to be the most perfect detective for any case he chooses. Sherlock is a very intelligent and polite person, who doesn’t miss any detail. He is very strong but doesn’t parade around showing this, because of his decorum. Like most Victorians, of the same time this book was published, Sherlock strives to be a gentleman at all times. He is formal and respectful to everyone he meets, unless he knows that the person he meets is a crook. If so, he takes on a more aggressive approach to them and seems to have little time or want to talk to them. Due to Sherlock being so polite he usually gets answers from the people he talks to, unless he is accusing the person. If however, he doesn’t get verbal evidence, he will have found some physical evidence that will back up his theory. This is due to his hawk like ability to spot every little detail and digest it to make sense of the situation. All of these “super” abilities make Sherlock the perfect detective in everyway, but he doesn’t solve any cases. Sherlock only solves the cases that he thinks will either challenge him or be of great help to someone in need.
Like in the big contrast between the villains, there is also a big contrast between the detectives. The detective in Lamb to the Slaughter is Jack Noonan. Jack isn’t as quick as Sherlock Holmes and seems quite ignorant to detail. He comes into Mary’s house after the murder and consoles her. This shows that he isn’t perhaps as thorough in his work as Sherlock. Jack is caring and polite but this makes him gullible and easy for Mary to manipulate. He seems more interested in Mary than the murder scene and talks to her for most of the investigation. He seems quite careless of the fact there is evidence in the room and adds to this by eating the same leg of lamb that Mary hit Patrick with. He doesn’t seem to realise this at all through the story and seems to rush through the rest of the investigation so that he may attend to more important matters. All these qualities make him seem quite bad at his job, but this isn’t the case. Jack is good at his job and this shows in the amount of time he’s worked on the police force.
Sherlock Holmes might be the “super” detective out of the two stories, but Jack is probably the most likely detective of this time. Jack seems quite careless, but this is most likely the way detectives of today work. They solve the crime in very different ways, Sherlock quick and intelligently collects the well-hidden clues to solve the crime. Where as, Jack doesn’t seem to get any closer to solving the crime, than what he was when he started. He seems to believe the story that Mary paints out for him and is manipulated by her easily. This causes Jack not to come to a conclusion in the story and it doesn’t seem likely he will. In contrast, Sherlock Holmes comes to the solution quickly and intelligently reveals it to us at the end.
Lamb to the Slaughter is set in only two places and we can presume it was set in the same time written which is 1954. The first place that we find described is the house, in particular the living room. This room is where the murder happens and is the main scene for the whole of the story. The living room is calm and relaxing and seems to reflect what has been described of Mary at that point. It isn’t the most likely place you would think that a murder would take place and so you don’t expect it to happen there. The loving atmosphere is a drastic change to the stereotypical sinister and dark places murders usually happen in. The loving and homely atmosphere works as an alibi for Mary and makes the detectives believe that a person who put so much of themselves into a room like this could ever kill someone. The other place where the story is briefly set is in Sam’s grocers but we get no description of it.
The settings are another contrast in both stories. There are three main places in the Speckled Band. These are the living room at Sherlock’s house, the old mansion where the attempted murder and murder take place and the hotel opposite the old mansion. Sherlock Holmes’ house isn’t described at all an is only used to set the atmosphere of the rest of the story. Also the hotel isn’t described much and is only used to quickly analyse the evidence and think of theories. The mansion however, is described in detail as a decrepit, dank, sinister and a cold, harsh atmosphere. It is the stereotypical place for a murder to be committed and there is one. As did Mary’s living room mirror her, this dank mansion mirrors Dr Roylott. In contrast again to Mary’s living room, you would expect a murder to happen in this mansion.
The Speckled Band is written in a classic mystery format because you don’t know who the murderer is all the way through the story. This causes you to analyse all the characters in the Speckled Band to find out if they might be the murderer. Red herrings are obviously put in to make it harder to find the murderer. This is a huge contrast to Lamb to the Slaughter’s plot where you know the murderer all the way through the story, this means you lose the piecing of the evidence and the suspiciousness you have to all the characters. Lamb to the Slaughter uses simple chronological order to tell its story, where as the Speckled Band is in chronological order it also has flashbacks to make a complex plot. The stories focus on the crime itself or the investigation, which depends on who the main character is. If it is Mary the story is focused on the crime, where as if the stories focus on Sherlock Holmes the investigation is focused on. We don’t know the narrator of Lamb to the Slaughter, but in the Speckled Band we know the narrator as Sherlock’s sidekick Watson who knows all of Sherlock’s feeling at all times.
In the Speckled Band the ending is quite exciting and fast. The start of the end is when Sherlock and Watson stay in the bedroom where Helen Stoner is going to be killed. They sit quietly until Sherlock suddenly stands up and starts to swing his cane aimlessly. We find out later that he is actually trying to hit a snake. By swinging his cane he sent the snake back up the fake bell rope and through the ventilator back at Dr Roylott, the snake then kills Dr Roylott. Once Sherlock finds Dr Roylott we are then taken back to the hotel where he explains how he figured out Dr Roylott’s plot.
The Lamb to the Slaughters ending is quite placid as the story winds down from the excitement of the murder. Lamb to the Slaughter’s story is ended with Mary getting away with the murder due to the police eating the only evidence they had on Mary. As they eat the lamb, Mary seems slightly unhinged as she sadistically giggles at what she has made them do.
Both of the stories have twist in the tales. In the Speckled Band, Dr Roylott dying from his own methods is a twist in the story and in the Lamb to the Slaughter’s twist is when Mary giggles and that makes us feel more distant from her than any other time in the story. You don’t expect Dr Roylott to die, what you do expect is that he is caught and sent to jail. Also you don’t expect Mary to giggle, you have built a bond with Mary through the story and when she giggles that bond is broken. The Speckled Band and Lamb to the Slaughter’s titles are revealed later on in the story. You find that the Speckled Band is describing the snake’s patterned skin and the Lamb to the Slaughter is metaphoric but has a link to the murder weapon. Both titles are intriguing, but for different reasons. The Lamb to the Slaughter is interesting because it sounds quite gruesome and you want to know what happens, where as the Speckled Band is intriguing because it sounds complex and intellectual, which grabs your attention.
I enjoyed Reading the lamb to the Slaughter more because I felt it was more realistic for the time I live in now. I might have enjoyed reading Conan Doyle’s piece if I was looking for a intellectual thriller, but at the time I wanted something interesting but easy to read and so I chose Lamb to the Slaughter. I felt that my chosen story was more compelling because I wanted to find out if Mary would get away with the murder.
