Lamb to the slaughter

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 con...