Roald Dahl is today best known as a children's writer. Books like "James and the Giant Peach" and "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" were part of my childhood when I was growing up in the sixties, just as they were part of the childhoods of many people of my generation. From what I understand, he is even more popular with modern children. This book, however, presents us with the other side of Dahl's work, his stories for adults which are perhaps less well known today, although they did go though a spell of popularity in the seventies and eighties when they formed the basis of the Anglia Television series "Tales of the Unexpected".
Writers are often advised to write about the things they know best from personal experience, but unless he was lucky enough to enjoy a far greater variety of experiences than most other people, Dahl appears to have ignored this advice. Strangely, perhaps the part of this volume that I enjoyed least was the most personal, his first collection of stories "Over to You" which was based upon his wartime experiences in the RAF. Although deeply heartfelt, these generally lacked the wit and energy of his later work.
Dahl's other collections, "Someone Like You", "Kiss Kiss" and "Switch Bitch", and the uncollected stories published here as "Eight Further Tales of the Unexpected" contain a much greater variety of subject-matter, and suggest that the author was very knowledgeable about many different subjects- wine-tasting, the game of bridge, the art world, greyhound racing and the antiques business, to name only a few. As the title of the television series suggests, a feature of many of his stories is a sudden, unexpected twist at the end, a device which has been successfully used by many other short-story writers, perhaps most famously by O. Henry.
A frequent Dahl theme is that of the person who concocts an elaborate and supposedly foolproof scheme to achieve some disreputable end, only to be thwarted by events. A bookseller sends out invoices for pornographic books supposedly purchased by their late husbands to grieving widows. An antique dealer poses as a clergyman in order to acquire valuable furniture at knock-down prices. An unfaithful wife pretends to have found a pawn ticket in order to conceal from her husband the fact that her lover has given her a mink coat. In each case an unexpected turn of events brings about their downfall. Of course, in some cases the twist- as in "The Umbrella Man"- is that the villain succeeds in his scheme.
Sometimes the twist is less important than what has preceded it. In "Galloping Foxley", for example, a middle-aged commuter believes that the man sitting opposite him is the bully who made his life miserable at school. The twist- that he has, in fact, misidentified the man- is not particularly startling- what makes this story memorable is Dahl's description of the man's schooldays and his experiences of vicious schoolboy sadism. Not all the stories succeed; I felt that at times Dahl gave too much rein to his appetite for the bizarre and gruesome, with the result that some stories such as "William and Mary" or "Pig" tended to descend out of the real world and into a sort of grotesque Grand Guignol. Nevertheless, for every story that fails there are several that succeed. And when one of Dahl's stories succeeds, the result can be a delight. Among my favourites are "Lamb to the Slaughter", in which a woman who has killed her husband finds a neat way of disposing of the evidence, "Taste" which features the ultimate wine snob, "The Great Switcheroo" with its curious wife-swapping session and "The Surgeon" in which a stolen diamond is returned to its rightful owner by a most curious route. I suspect that most readers will find as much to enjoy in this collection as I did.
