Dahl introduces the story by commenting on the cruel practice of American woman been grotesque, murderous and immoral. The story of Mrs. Bixby and the Colonel’s Coat, is about a hard-working dentist and his two-faced wife. Mrs. Bixby leaves home once a month apparently to visit her aunt in Baltimore, but really she spends the time with her lover, the Colonel. On this particular occasion she receives a goodbye gift from the Colonel, and when she opens it on the way to home she was amazed to find an extremely beautiful and valuable mink coat. In a note the Colonel explains that their relationship has ended.
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The writer shows that Mrs. Bixby is a quick thinker where she immediately begins to think of a lie she can tell her husband where she got the coat from. She decides to visit a pawnbroker and borrow $50 for the coat, receiving a blank pawn ticket in return. When she gets home she tells her husband that she found the ticket in a taxicab and he excitedly explains how they go about claiming it.
Since she doesn’t want to be recognised by the pawnbroker, she lets him go to claim the item after he promises that he’ll give whatever the ticket is hiding. After her husband collects the item, Mrs. Bixby go to her husbands office to get her coat but instead he places a mangy mink stole around her neck! She fakes her happiness for his sake, while secretly planning to return to the pawnbroker and accuse him of switching the coat for this worthless item.
The writer shows us the consequences of her lie on her way out of the office when she is passed by her husband’s young assistant secretary, Miss Pulteney wearing the “beautiful black mink coat that the Colonel had given to Mrs. Bixby.”
Lamb to the slaughter story is based on Mary Maloney, the pregnant, loving wife of a policeman waiting for her husband to come home from work. When he does so, he makes a sudden but vague statement to Mary, which is that he intends to leave her. Out of anger, Mary crushes her husband’s skull with a frozen leg of lamb and then arranges an alibi.
The author Roald Dahl has developed the character of Mary Maloney in a dreadful quick way. This reveals her character as being quick-thinking through her words and personality. In the first scene Mary is shown to be one of a typical house wife waiting for her husband to return from work. Everything appears to be too perfect and it was almost as if she was expecting something odd to happen. After her husband Patrick reveals his statement to her, Mary’s behaviour changes from being wife-pleasing-husband to a sharp-eyed woman who was quite aggressive. It was almost as if she hits her husband over the head with the leg of lamb naturally, and without hesitation.
She makes intelligent conversation with Sam, the grocery shop owner. She explains to him that Patrick was at home and didn’t want to go out that night, leaving her with no vegetables in the house for supper. Her method was to keep on asking her questions, asking what he would suggest for dessert, so later when the police would arrive, Sam would remember quite clearly remember Mrs. Maloney’s visit. He would tell the police that she was perfectly normal like she is everyday.
We see even more deceitfulness through her words when she gets rid of all of the evidence. When the police arrive and are searching for a weapon, she asks for her husband’s whiskey. ‘Would you mind giving me a drink? Sure, I’ll get you a drink. You mean this whiskey? Yes please’ all the detectives end up having a drink and stop searching for the evidence. When the lamb is ate by the officers, the reader further realizes that Mary Maloney gets away easily by using deceitful lies and a concrete set of plausible words. But there was one more extraordinary act to follow. And in the other room, Mary Maloney began to giggle. By doing so she was stating that she was now independent and not entirely obedient and able to make her own decisions with her own thoughts. She was no more the loving and faithful wife as described at the beginning of the story.
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The story, The Landlady, is about a young man, named Bill Weaver who steps in to the world of work he comes in to small town called Bath. Billy was planning to stay at a hotel, called The Bell and Dragon, but on his way there he sees this little “Bed and breakfast” poster on a window the place was nothing big, just a normal, old house, owned by an old lady. In the beginning he wants to leave and go to the hotel, but something strange is driving him to go press the doorbell, and even before he had moved his finger, a middle-aged lady opened the door. She asks him to come inside, and he feels very comfortable to go in, and so he does. The lady is very kind, but a little weird. There are no gests other then him, in the house, and it seams like it has been a long time sins there were. She tells him that his bed already is made, and that he has the third floor all to himself. Later on we find out that he actually hasn’t. Billy just wanted to pack out his things and go to bed, but the nice lady insisted that he had to go downstairs and sign the guest-book. So only a few minutes later he was entering the living room, a nice fire were burning in the fireplace.
In the guestbook, he sees that only two other guests have stayed there one older, the other younger, and both having arrived earlier than two years ago. Billy finds the names somehow familiar from the newspaper, and on further signs he remembers that they were both famous for the same thing. They went missing. The landlady makes a comment about one of the two boys, to which Billy comments that he must have only left recently. The landlady replies that both of the guests are still living at the inn. Billy then notices that the dog by the fireplace and the parrot he had noticed earlier were stuffed as he looks closer and touches the dog to examine it. She then tells him, “I stuff all my pets myself,” and offers him more tea. Billy refuses because the tea “tasted faintly of bitter almonds”. When the author ends the story the reader is left to assume what happens to Billy Weaver from the clues in the story.
The Landlady first appeared as a kind and generous lady but then we realize her obsession of destroying everything that she sees beautiful such as the dog, the parrot and the three handsome young men that are unlucky enough to fall into her trap this shows that she is insane and very immoral. She is a ruthless murderer and she is extremely cruel to human and non-humans. This means that she is heartless and has no feelings. The way she welcomed Billy at the start of the story made and how we found out about her evilness made her look a dishonest and two faced lady.
In conclusion I found out that in all the stories of Roald Dahl, The Landlady, Lamb to the Slaughter and Mrs Bixby and the Colonel’s coat all the women appear harmless, very pleasant and truthful at the start of the stories. But the Landlady has killed several times with arsenic as she is insane, and Mary Maloney had and ‘snap’ instinct to kill her husband and is not insane as the Landlady is and Mrs Bixby cheats on her husband but at the end she gets hit in the face with a shock of the way her husband was doing the same thing as her. All the women however seem to be clever and somehow seem to cover their bad doings from others, this means that they are all liars, immoral and two faced. In these three stories Dahl shows that all these ladies can be deceiving and all have a dark-side in their lives.
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