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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 has ingredients for a detective story, i.e. it has a murderer who is cold and calculating, and just that little bit mad. On the other hand, they are presented to us very differently, making one story very typical of its genre, and making the other very untypical of the murder mystery genre. Dahl used various techniques to make his story more interesting; for example, the story revolves around the character of Mrs Mary Maloney, loving housewife and psychopathic killer. Whereas many stories concentrate on the detective or sometimes the victim, this story concentrates on the character of the murderer. This perspective helps with the telling of the murder, making it more unexpected. The story includes two major plot twists; the first being the murder itself, made unexpected by what we have seen of Mary Maloneys character, the setting, and the form the murder weapon takes among other things. The second plot twist is at the end, where the detectives eat the murder weapon. The typical components of a detective story, they are presented differently, differing noticeably in the setting, the characters and of course the plot, as I intend to show in this essay. In “Lamb to the Slaughter” however, the murderer is not so typical. In fact, Mrs Mary Maloney is more of a typical victim than a murderer. Would you suspect a person who is described as someone who ‘now and again… would glance up at the clock… merely to please herself with the thought that each minute gone by made it nearer the time when he would come.’ (The ‘he’ being her husband, the man she is going to kill.) She already seems like a loving, caring housewife waiting for her husband to come home on a Thursday night, hardly capable of murder.
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