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Lamb To The Slaughter Essay

Decent Essays

"Lamb to the Slaughter" by Roald Dahl tells an intriguing short story about a traditional married couple, Patrick and Mary Maloney. Mr Maloney announces early on in the story that for unknown reasons he needed to leave his pregnant and loving wife. This news resulted in the sweet and nurturing Mrs Maloney killing her insincere yet innocent husband. After killing her husband, Mrs Maloney, as a new widow of a detective was faced with the challenge of coming up with a convincing story to hide her guiltiness. An investigation conducted by police and detectives did not suspect that Mrs Maloney was a culprit. During the investigation, Mrs Maloney comes up with a cunning plan to dispose of the only piece of evidence, which was the weapon that killed …show more content…

The way that the police approached the investigation seemed very unprofessional which made me question how they should have examined the crime scene. An example of this improper investigation was when Mrs Maloney was asked "If she wouldn't rather going somewhere else" and she replied "No…she didn’t feel she could move a yard at the moment" which police surprisingly accepted. I thought this was rather odd considering in a routine investigation everybody would be removed from the crime scene. Another example of when the police totally in the wrong was when Mrs Maloney offered a drink of whisky to one of the policeman. In this situation an officer would usually immediately decline, however Sergeant Jack Noonan replied with, "It's strictly not allowed, but I might take just a drop to keep me going." After this many of the other officers were persuaded by the 'sweet' Mrs Maloney to have a sip too. I thought this was completely inappropriate of the police officers as they were supposed to be investigating a murder. I was confused about the investigation protocol in this story which made it very hard for me to believe. The author manipulated the investigation procedure as he would have known that such actions would not have occurred in real life. In society police officers would not of acted in such manner as murder investigations are treated very

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