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St. Petersburg Times (15/Apr/1990) - Stories with a twist: Roald Dahl's tales intrigue and delight

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Stories with a twist: Roald Dahl's tales intrigue and delight

Picking a favorite Roald Dahl story is a bit like lingering over a box of assorted candies. They are all different, and each is delicious.

One of my favorites is "Lamb to the Slaughter" (mentioned below by Peter Meinke as an Alfred Hitchcock episode), in which Mary Maloney, the pregnant wife of a policeman, goes a bit mad when her husband announces the demise of their marriage. She bonks him on the head with a frozen leg of lamb, then roasts the murder weapon and serves it to the officers investigating her husband's death.

In a less macabre mood I would prefer "The Great Switcheroo," in which two men decide to swap wives without letting the women in on the secret. Impossible, you say? Not when treated with the Roald Dahl touch (the ending will surprise you).

Dahl's stories are the kind you could actually tell around the campfire. They have intriguing plots, realistic situations, believable characters and twist endings. Dahl brings all of these elements together with such apparent ease that he makes short-story writing seem simple enough for anyone to do, like driving a car. It's the mark of a master.

I wish I could report that Dahl's new collection, Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life (Alfred A. Knopf, $18.95), is really new, but it is merely a rearrangement of works from the 1940s, published together for the first time, with a new introduction by Dahl.

You won't find "Lamb to the Slaughter" or "The Great Switcheroo" in this slender, 180-page volume. (Both are in The Roald Dahl Omnibus, published in 1986 by Dorset Press.) But you will find another classic, "Parson's Pleasure," which could serve as a model for expressing a moral without mentioning morality.

The central character is a door-to-door con man whose card announces him as "The Reverend Cyril Winnington Boggis, President of the Society for the Preservation of Rare Furniture, in association with The Victoria and Albert Museum." Of course, Boggis is neither a clergyman nor the president of any worthy society. He is a London antique dealer who prowls the countryside searching for valuable old furniture that can be "bought cheap, very very cheap, and sold very very dear."

His card and his clerical garb get him through the doors of even the most suspicious bumpkins, and once inside their houses he preys on their avarice and gullibility. If he finds a treasure masquerading as an ordinary hearthside chair or kitchen table, he feigns disinterest, magnifies the object's faults and offers to buy it for a small fraction of the price he knows it will bring on the London market.

His composure fails him one day when he drops in on three loutish fellows occupying a dirty farmhouse and finds, under a recent coat of paint, a commode made by Thomas Chippendale himself, with the original bill of sale to prove it. Recovering himself quickly, Boggis explains the symptoms of his astonishment as twinges of heart trouble, then proceeds to talk the three men into selling the piece for about a thousandth of its value. He wants it, Boggis tells them, merely for its legs, which will go well with another piece he owns.

I'm not going to give away the ending, but you can probably guess that Boggis is made to pay for his greedy exploitation of his fellow man. Ingeniously, Dahl leaves unwritten, for the reader to imagine, the most explosive part of the story, Boggis' realization that his scheme has backfired.

Not only scoundrels get their comeuppance in Dahl's world. All cheaters, even sympathetic ones, are stung. Other stories in Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life tell how:

The owner of two identical racing greyhounds, one fast and one slow, tries to take advantage of the system.

A foolproof method of poaching pheasants comes to grief.

In the introduction, Dahl describes the background of these stories. They were written after the war, when he lived in his mother's house amid "rolling hills and beechwoods and small green fields." He and his friend Claud, he writes, "both had a passion for gambling."

He goes on: "As well as that, we shared a love of trying to acquire something by stealth without paying for it. By this I don't mean common or garden thievery. We would never have robbed a house or stolen a bicycle. Ours was the sporting type of stealing. It was poaching pheasants or tickling trout or nicking a few plums from a farmer's orchard. These are practices that are condoned by the right people in the countryside. There is a delicious element of risk in them, especially in the poaching, and a good deal of skill is required."

The taste for risk and all the skill come through in Dahl's timeless stories. Daryl Frazell is book editor of the St. Petersburg Times.