Roald Dahl
The Collected Stories of Roald Dahl.
Everyman’s Library, 888 pages, $30.
I was surprised to learn, from Jeremy Treglown’s 1994 biography of Roald Dahl, that the British short-story writer and now-beloved children’s author was in his younger days a fan of Damon Runyon. I shouldn’t have been. Dahl and Runyon both belong to a grand transatlantic brotherhood of writers (which also includes P. G. Wodehouse) who contributed to the literature of gambling. Many Dahl stories literally concern a bet, whether it be a man placing his life savings on the time his ship will arrive in port (“A Dip in the Pool”) or one chopping off fingers based on how many times a lighter can be struck successfully (“Man From the South”). In satires like “My Lady Love, My Dove,” and “Neck,” the idle moneyed are cuttthroat bridge-players. The lower-class characters of “Claud’s Dog” fix greyhound races. “Taste” entirely concerns a dinner-table wager over the identity of a bottle of wine.
Indeed, the very structure of a successful Dahl story might be said to resemble a wager. Dahl’s stories are justly famous for their often shocking endings. But these so-called surprises have been intricately prepared for. He begins with a premise, more than usually an outlandish one. A man has a work by Chaim Soutine tattooed onto his body (“Skin”). A fashionable painter creates portraits of society women by painting them nude, then adding the clothes over them (“Nunc Dimittis”). But then Dahl ups the ante.
