Both the speckled band and the lamb to the slaughter are murder mysteries. They involve a murder but in the speckled band you are trying to work out who did the murder and how. In the lamb to slaughter, you know who did the murder but you do not know if she gets away with it.
The stories have a good pun in their titles. They are ambiguous because they mean different things. In the lamb to slaughter the title usually means a little innocent lamb going to get killed like the man gets killed and he has no idea, But it also refers to the comic way to the piece of lamb that is used to slaughter him.
The speckled band has a red herring type of title. It leads you off the plot. You would think you wear a speckled band. There are gypsies staying in the premises and they would wear a speckled bandanna, you might think that they killed Helen but you later find out that the snake was the murderer.
Sherlock Holmes is a very clever man compared to the police. He is very good at making deductions like when he says ' you have come in by train this morning I see' then you later find out that he just sees the second half of a return ticket in the palm of her hands. He also pays a lot of attention to detail as shown when he notices the dummy bell rope, the ventilator that does not ventilate, and the bed is bolted to the floor. He is an intelligent man because he does not say if he has any suspicions of who or what killed Helen. ' I should prefer to have clearer proofs before I speak'. He is very good at linking all the clues found together ' the lady could not move her bed. It must always be in the same relative position to the ventilator and to the rope- for so we may call it since it was never meant to be a bell pull'.
The stories have a good pun in their titles. They are ambiguous because they mean different things. In the lamb to slaughter the title usually means a little innocent lamb going to get killed like the man gets killed and he has no idea, But it also refers to the comic way to the piece of lamb that is used to slaughter him.
The speckled band has a red herring type of title. It leads you off the plot. You would think you wear a speckled band. There are gypsies staying in the premises and they would wear a speckled bandanna, you might think that they killed Helen but you later find out that the snake was the murderer.
Sherlock Holmes is a very clever man compared to the police. He is very good at making deductions like when he says ' you have come in by train this morning I see' then you later find out that he just sees the second half of a return ticket in the palm of her hands. He also pays a lot of attention to detail as shown when he notices the dummy bell rope, the ventilator that does not ventilate, and the bed is bolted to the floor. He is an intelligent man because he does not say if he has any suspicions of who or what killed Helen. ' I should prefer to have clearer proofs before I speak'. He is very good at linking all the clues found together ' the lady could not move her bed. It must always be in the same relative position to the ventilator and to the rope- for so we may call it since it was never meant to be a bell pull'.
