Lamb to the Slaughter (Characters)

Characters

Mary Moloney

Mary Maloney, the story’s protagonist, is six months pregnant and satisfied with her (from an external perspective) rather banal life with her policeman-husband Patrick, whom she adores. She had “a slow smiling air about her” and was “curiously tranquil.” Mary keeps a neat home, and busies herself with preparations for the baby. When Patrick unexpectedly announces that he is ending their marriage, Mary enters a state of shock. She automatically goes to the basement to remove something from the freezer for supper. She takes the first thing she finds — a leg of lamb — carries it back up the stairs, approaches her husband from behind, and strikes him on the head with the frozen leg of lamb. He falls to the floor dead. “The violence of the crash, the noise, the small table overturning, helped bring her out of the shock.” Concern for the well-being of her coming child leads her to act quickly and efficiently to establish an alibi. She starts cooking the leg of lamb, rehearses a normal conversation with the grocer, and then goes to the store to buy vegetables. She hurries home, thinking that if “she happened to find anything unusual, or tragic, or terrible, then naturally it would be a shock and she’d become frantic with grief and horror.” In fact, when she sees her husband’s lifeless body again, she remembers her “love and longing for him” and cries over him quite sincerely. She then telephones her husband’s police colleagues and collapses in a chair while they search the house for the “heavy blunt instrument, almost certainly a large piece of metal,” that is believed to be the missing murder weapon. When a sergeant points out that the oven is still on and the leg of lamb is done, Mary urges the policemen — “good friends of dear Patrick’s . . . helping to catch the man who killed him” — to eat it bercause she knows they have missed their own suppers. The policemen consume the murder weap-on on while speculating about the case. “And in the other room, Mary Maloney began to giggle.”

Patrick Maloney

Patrick Maloney is a policeman still walking a beat. The reader learns that it is unusual for him to drain most of his evening cocktail in one swallow, as he does when he first comes home. He replies in short sentences or monosyllables as Mary watches him intently, trying to anticipate and fulfil his desires by offering to fix him another drink, bring his slippers, fix him a snack. He does not answer at all when Mary expresses her displeasure that “a policeman as senior as you” is still walking a beat — a suggestion that Patrick may not be especially successful at his job. On the evening of the story, Patrick abruptly announces that he is leaving Mary, although he will continue to provide for her financially. His only acknowlegement of her pregnancy is that he says he knows “it’s kind of a bad time to be telling you.” He hopes that there will be no fuss about it. Although the reader is told little outright about Patrick’s character, the narrative implicitly indicates that he dislikes her worshipful adoration of him, her constant catering, and her tactless reminder about his lack of advancement in his profession.

Sergeant Jack Noonan

Noonan is one of the policemen at Patrick Maloney’s precinct who responds to her frantic telephone call that she found her husband lying on the floor, apparently dead. He and Mary know one another, and he helps the weeping woman gently into a chair before joining another policeman in examining the body and scene and calling for other investigators. He is solicitous of Mary’s well-being, asking if she would like to go and stay with a relative or with his own wife, or be helped up to bed. At one point she asks him to bring her a drink. He, and the remaining officers and detectives, also help themselves to whisky at her urging. It is the sergeant who notices that the oven is still on and the leg of lamb done cooking. Mary begs him and the others to eat the meal that she cannot bring herself to touch, and after some demurral, all the policemen sit down in the kitchen and completely devour the murder weapon.

O’malley

O’Malley is Sergeant Noonan’s partner. Dahl is having fun with stereotypes, for O’Malley, like Maloney and Noonan, is an Irish name, and “the Irish cop” was a sociological phenomenon in American big cities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. O’Malley’s words and actions are not specified in the story: he is just one of the policemen on the scene, discussing the case and, eventually, unwittingly consuming a portion of the tasty murder weapon.

Sam

Sam, the grocer, appears in the middle of the story. After Mary has killed Patrick, she constructs an alibi by making a hasty visit to the grocery store to buy vegetables to go with the meal she tells Sam she is cooking because Patrick does not want to eat out, as they usually do on Thursday nights. Mary later overhears a policeman reporting that Sam found her behavior at the store “quite normal.”