Can you identify the stories synopsized below
and also name the authors who wrote them?
A woman murders her philandering husband by
striking him over the head with a frozen leg of
lamb, then cooks the evidence and serves it to
the police who are investigating the crime.
A mysterious stranger bets a gambler that the
latter can’t ignite his cigarette lighter ten
consecutive times without a malfunction. If the
gambler wins, he claims the stranger’s Cadillac.
If he loses, the stranger takes his finger which
he’ll hack off with a knife.
A boy takes a tour of a chocolate factory owned
by the eccentric Willy Wonka where chewing gum
always retains its flavor and the ice cream is
cold even without refrigeration.
Agent 007, on assignment in Japan, prevents the
international crime syndicate SPECTRE from
igniting World War III by invading their volcano
hideaway accompanied by an army of
sword-wielding ninja warriors.
Fans of the macabre would likely recognize the
first two as “Lamb to the Slaughter” and “Man
From the South,” short stories memorably adapted
on Alfred Hitchcock Presents, the latter
in an episode featuring Peter Lorre and a
pre-stardom Steve McQueen. The third can only be
the classic children’s book, Charlie and the
Chocolate Factory, which inspired two
popular films. And James Bond fans know the last
as the British secret agent’s fifth big-screen
adventure, You Only Live Twice.
Even those who know the name of Roald Dahl and
are familiar with his work may be surprised to
discover that he was responsible for all of the
above.
More than two decades after his death, Roald
Dahl is best-known as a children’s author whose
books, such as James and the Giant Peach
and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,
can be found in almost any elementary school
classroom. But Roald Dahl was much more than
that. He was also a war hero, a spy, a
philanthropist, a husband and father, and a man
who liked to shock people. He once passed around
his femur, surgically removed during an
operation, at a dinner party, and talked about
circumcision at another, hugely enjoying the
startled reaction of the other guests.
“Razzing people up,” the 6' 5" writer called it,
and it was also a way to cut short the small
talk that bored him. “Dahl always seemed to stir
up some kind of controversy,” Kris Rasmussen,
author of WonkaMania observed. “He would
write or say outrageous, often hateful things,
and then insist he was misunderstood and never
meant any harm by his comments. For every nasty
story I could find about him, there was also an
anecdote about Dahl’s incredible kindness or
generosity.” To his biographer, Jeremy Treglown,
Dahl’s “behavior seems like that of someone who
had been faced with a premature but permanent,
and rather unconvincing, show of adulthood.” It
may be the secret to his success as a children’s
author. As he once said, “I laugh at exactly the
same jokes that children laugh at and that’s one
reason I’m able to do it.”
Roald Dahl was born September 13, 1916 in the
Welsh town of Llandaff to Norwegian parents. The
family was prosperous thanks to a ship-brokering
business that his father co-owned, but tragedy
struck Dahl at an early age. When he was four,
his seven-year-old sister died of appendicitis.
Only two months later, his grief-stricken father
succumbed to pneumonia. His mother was pregnant
at the time and would soon be left with the task
of raising four children and two step-children
on her own.
His school days brought back painful memories of
the cruel schoolmasters who disciplined students with a cane. “It wasn’t simply an
instrument for beating you. It was a weapon for
wounding.” In his memoir, Boy, Dahl
writes of Mrs. Pratchett, the stern matron who
oversaw the school: “We hated her and we had
good reason for doing so.” Of the sadistic
treatment he received, he said, “I couldn’t get
over it. I never have got over it.”
The experience did not make him eager to
continue his education at a university. “My
mother asked me if I wanted to go to Oxford or
Cambridge,” he told Justin Wintle, “but I said
‘No, I want to travel.’”
He was hired by the Shell Oil Company which sent
him to Tanzania in East Africa, “selling oil to
sisal planters and diamond miners, gold miners,
and learning Swahili. I was there until
September 1939 when war broke out.” Dahl decided
to do his part for the war effort by joining the
Royal Air Force where he became a fighter pilot.
After suffering a fractured skull, a smashed hip
and spinal injuries when making a forced landing
in Libya, he recuperated in a hospital where “I
was told I couldn’t fly anymore.”
Sent back to England, he was hoping to become a
flying instructor, but fate intervened. Invited
to dinner at an exclusive London club, he found
himself sitting next to Harold Balfour, the
second most important man in the RAF.
“Apparently he had liked me, and said he was
sending me to Washington to be Assistant Air
Attache.”
It wasn’t revealed until years after his death,
but one of Dahl’s assignments in Washington was
to spy on behalf of his homeland through the
British Security Coordination network. It
remains a mystery as to how valuable Dahl was as
an intelligence operative, but Jennet Conant,
author of The Irregulars, believes Dahl
picked up a taste for lavish living at this time
thanks to hobnobbing with important well-to-do
people, many of them older women with whom he
had affairs and showered him with gifts. Conant
writes that “all Dahl had to do was keep up a
cheerful front and eavesdrop his way through the
yawning Sunday breakfasts, hunt breakfasts,
luncheons, teas, tea dances, innumerable drinks
parties, banquets and not infrequent balls.”
More importantly, his time in the U.S. was
instrumental in his later career as a writer. As
he recalled, “I suppose if I hadn’t gone I might
never have written anything.”
It was pure chance that led Dahl to the career
for which he is now celebrated. A man from the
British Embassy who happened to be the English
novelist, C. S. Forester, was interviewing
fellow countrymen about their war experiences
for a series of articles in The Saturday
Evening Post. “I started to tell him, but
the story began to get a bit bogged down,” Dahl
recalled, “so I said, ‘Look, would it help if I
scribbled this out in the evening and posted it
on?’”
A week later, a check for $1000 arrived with a
letter from Forester explaining that the Post
liked the story just the way Dahl wrote it
and would publish it under his name. Surprised,
Dahl wrote another story, then another, all of
them finding acceptance by major American
periodicals. Once the war ended, Dahl began to
concentrate on writing fiction, selling numerous
stories, most of them to The New Yorker.
With the encouragement of friends, he moved to
New York to be closer to his editors. As his
byline became more familiar, he received a call
from Alfred A. Knopf, the publisher, who
expressed interest in collecting Dahl’s stories
into book form. Someone Like You appeared
under the prestigious Knopf imprint in 1953. By
then, Dahl had met actress Patricia Neal at a
dinner party. She was ten years younger, and had
fled a Hollywood career following a love affair
with the married Gary Cooper, her co-star in a
film version of Any Rand’s hefty novel, The
Fountainhead. She later admitted that she
wasn’t in love with him, but observed that Dahl
“knew exactly what he wanted and he quietly went
about getting it. I did not yet realize,
however, that he wanted me.” They were married
in 1953, and soon resettled in England where
they would start a family that would grow to
include five children.
However, the 30-year marriage would be marked by
tragedy. In 1950, their son, Theo, would suffer
a brain injury at the age of four months when
his carriage was struck by a taxi. Then, in
1962, they would lose their daughter, Olivia, to
a fatal case of measles. She was
seven-years-old, the same age at which Dahl’s
sister died. Shortly after winning an Oscar as
best actress for 1963's Hud, Neal
suffered a debilitating stroke. Dahl’s
tough-love approach to nursing her back to
health was unusual at the time but has since
been adopted by the medical profession. She also
benefitted from a device that Dahl invented with
neurosurgeon Kenneth Till and toy designer
Stanley Wade that drained fluid from the brain.
Known as the Wade-Dahl-Till valve, it was
created after the shunt used during Theo’s
operations kept clogging. Dall was “very
knowledgeable,“ Till said, and “had the coolness
- I think this perhaps is the word - to know the
pros and cons, the whys and wherefores.”
Exported throughout the world, the valve would
be used to treat as many as 3,000 children.
The real-life drama of Neal’s illness and
recovery became the basis for Barry Farrell’s
book, Pat and Roald, which in turn became
a 1983 television film with Glenda Jackson as
Neal and Dirk Bogarde as Dahl. Ironically, by
the time the film was in production, the
marriage was ending due to Dahl’s infidelity.
Through it all, he continued writing. To Noel
Coward, Dahl’s short stories were “brilliant and
his imagination is fabulous. Unfortunately there
is in all of them, an underlying streak of
cruelty and macabre unpleasantness, and a
curiously adolescent emphasis on sex.”
Although he dashed off many of his war time
reminiscences, and later admitted that he “was
making them up in the end,” he meticulously
crafted his short stories, taking as long as six
months on a single tale, “working every morning,
six or seven days a week, from ten until
lunchtime, and again in the afternoon from four
until six.” It was an unusually long time to
spend on a story, but he insisted it was “the
only way I can get them halfway decent.” It was
a lucrative profession, but a stressful one. “A
writer of fiction lives in fear. Each new day
demands new ideas and he can never be sure
whether he is going to come up with them or
not.”
In 1961, he did what Alfred Hitchcock and Rod
Serling had done so successfully, and turned to
television with an anthology series focusing on
the weird and eerie. Way Out ran for a
half-hour on CBS from March through July,
preceding Twilight Zone on Friday
evenings. “The host is Roald Dahl,” reported The Plain Dealer. “He is pretty spooky,
too.”
It was around this time that he began the most
successful phase of his career, as the author of
children’s books.
“What the hell am I writing this nonsense for?”
he wondered as he was working on James and
the Giant Peach.
“I believe Dahl used his children’s stories as a
means to attempt to reconcile his own pain,”
Kris Rasmussen said. “In his stories he could do
what he could not do in real life – create a
happy-ever-after ending.” Dahl himself never
suggested his personal pain inspired his work,
only saying that the apple trees around his home
gave him the idea for his first children’s book.
“(T)here are a lot of apple trees around here,”
he said in an interview published in Revolting Rhymes, “and you can watch them
through the summer getting bigger and bigger
from a tiny little apple to bigger and bigger
ones, and it seemed to me an obvious thought -
what would happen if it didn’t stop growing?” He
decided on a peach for his story because “it’s
pretty and it’s big and it’s squishy and you can
go into it and it’s got a big seed in the middle
that you can play with.”
By the time he was creating his children’s
stories, Dahl was retreating to a hut in the
back of the house where he would write while
seated in an armchair. He never had a desk.
“Roald had invented his own writing board
covered in green felt,” Neal wrote in her
autobiography, “which he put on his lap as a
writing surface.” Before turning Dahl’s The
Fantastic Mr. Fox into a 2009 movie,
director Wes Anderson asked the author’s widow
for a tour of the location.
“There is a gigantic beech tree at the end of a
fox run, which I immediately recognized from The Fantastic Mr. Fox” Anderson wrote in
The New York Times. Allowed to browse
through Dahl’s archive of original manuscripts,
Anderson “felt as if I were in his presence.”
The most popular of Dahl’s stories may be 1964’s
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,
inspired by the author’s fondness for chocolate,
a subject on which he was an expert. In the
1930s, he noted, “all the great classic
chocolates were invented: the Crunchie, the
Whole Nut bar, the Mars bar, the Black Magic
assortment, Tiffin, Caramello, Aero, Malteser,
the Quality Street assortment, Kit Kat, Rolo,
and Smarties. In music, the equivalent would be
the golden age when compositions by Bach and
Mozart and Beethoven were given to us.”
Reviewing
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
in The New York Times, Aileen Pippett
described Dahl’s strengths as a children’s
author: “Fertile in invention, rich in humor,
acutely observant, he depicts fantastic
characters who are recognizable as exaggerations
of real types, and situations only slightly more
absurd than those that happen daily, and he lets
his imagination rip in fairy-land.”
Although his children’s books were often as
macabre as his short stories, Dahl tried to
avoid frightening his young readers by
refraining from vivid descriptions and
sprinkling the horror with humor. “Children who
got crunched up in Willy Wonka’s chocolate
machine were carried away and that was the end
of it. When the parents screamed, ‘Where has he
gone?’ and Wonka said, ‘Well, he’s gone to be
made into fudge,’ that’s where you laugh,
because you don’t see it happening, you don’t
hear the child screaming or anything like that
ever, ever, ever.”
He also believed subtlety was a hindrance to
writing effective fiction for children. “I find
that the only way to make my characters really
interesting to children is to exaggerate all
their good or bad qualities, and so if a person
is nasty or bad or cruel, you make them very
nasty, very bad, very cruel.”
Reflecting on his contributions to the genre a
year before his death, Dahl said his books “are
not going to teach them anything at all, except
to grip them by the throat and make them love to
read. To me, that’s very important.”
Children, encouraged by their teachers, sent
Dahl thousands of letters, and Dahl wrote them
back, often including the following poem:
“Dear children from across the sea,
How nice of you to write to me.
I love to hear the things you say
when you are miles and miles away.
All children, and I think I’m right,
Are nicer when they’re out of sight.”
Children’s writer Anthony Horowitz told the BBC
that Dahl’s books were unique because “Dahl was
perhaps the first author to take the children’s
side and collude against the smelly, ugly,
stupid creatures that inhabit the adult world.”
Dahl himself said, “It’s the path to their
affections. Parents and school teachers are the
enemy. The adult is the enemy of the child
because of the awful process of civilizing this
thing that when it is born is an animal with no
manners, no moral sense at all.” His books did
not delight everyone, however. Some found them
anti-social, anti-feminist, and violent. But as
he observed, “I never get any protests from
children. All you get are giggles of mirth and
squirms of delight. I know what children like.”
The audience that made the James Bond movies as
much of a phenomenon in the 1960s as the Beatles
also liked to giggle and squirm, and the films
gave them plenty of opportunities to do so with
mind-boggling gadgets, violence leavened with
humor, and hair-raising escapes from danger.
Although Dahl once said that “if you’ve got
enough money to live comfortably, there’s no
reason in the world to do a screenplay,” he
accepted an offer from Albert R. Broccoli,
co-producer of the Bond films, to write the
screenplay for the fifth entry in the series, You Only Live Twice.
“It was Ian Fleming’s worst book,” Dahl said,
“with no plot in it which would even make a
movie.” The producers agreed with Dahl’s
judgment, and instructed him to craft a
completely new story while retaining the
Japanese locale and the formula they had
perfected in the four previous entries.
“Bond has three women through the film: If I
remember rightly, the first gets killed, the
second gets killed and the third gets a fond
embrace during the closing sequence. And that’s
the formula.”
Dahl enjoyed the experience, saying “You Only
Live Twice was fun to do. It was the only
screenplay I’ve ever done which was fun.”
By the time the Bond film was released to great
success in 1967, Dahl was writing another script
for Broccoli, this time based on Ian Fleming’s
children’s story about a flying car, Chitty,
Chitty, Bang, Bang. “I did the first draft
after which they paid me off, to make way for
the director, Ken Hughes, to do what he liked
with it,” Dahl complained. “It was a disaster.”
Next, he was hired to adapt his own
Charlie
and the Chocolate Factory, an experience he
came to regret. “I did the screenplay, but it
doesn’t matter. They changed it.” Another writer
was brought in for revisions, one of his
contributions being a shift in focus from one
character to another, hence the change in title
to Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.
There was a great demand for a sequel to
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and in
1972, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator
appeared. “I was a bit lucky in my timing
with the second Charlie,” Dahl said. “One
of the characters was an idiot President of the
United States. Soon after the book came out, old
Nixon started going off the rails.”
Dahl’s stories were increasingly popular with
filmmakers, though the results did not always
please him. He approved of a film based on Danny, the Champion of the World, but
thought The Witches was merely a “stupid
horror film” that was much too adult for
children. The BFG (Big Friendly Giant),
published in 1982, became an animated film seven
years later, and was eventually followed by film
versions of The Fabulous Mr. Fox, James and the Giant Peach, and Tim Burton’s
take on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with Johnny Depp as Willy Wonka.
Matilda was also adapted as a film, and in 2010 inspired
a musical commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare
Company.
At the time of his death on November 23, 1990,
Dahl had sold over 100 million books worldwide,
and they continue to sell and be read by
children and adults alike.
The appeal his stories have for young readers
was best summarized by his daughter, Lucy. “He
understood children and identified with them.”
His widow, Felicity, whom he married in 1983,
said of his young audience, “They were his
equals.”
Today, children and fans of all ages frequently
stop by Dahl’s home in Buckinghamshire where his
widow still lives. They excitedly ask if it’s
true that Roald Dahl lived there, and she tells
them, “Well, he did.” “Oh, has he moved?” they
ask, and she tells them, “‘No, he died’ and it
shatters them.”
But true to the title of that James Bond film he
wrote, Dahl did live twice, maybe even more than
that, and lives still in the hearts and
imaginations of readers everywhere.