Soon he took material similar to that of "An African Story" - an encounter with a poisonous snake (this time a krait) - and gave it a nice, climactic twist. But one, "An African Story," combines two qualities that became Dahl trademarks: malevolence and esoteric knowledge (in this case, the virulent poisonousness of a snake, the mamba).Īfter the war, he began writing about civilian life, shrewdly playing up the new consumer products and savoir faire in which English and American magazine readers longed to immerse themselves. For the most part, they are taut, smoothly written, sprinkled with attar of Hemingway - and rather unexceptional. The first 10 stories, originally gathered in a volume called Over to You (1946), stem from Dahl's experience as a fighter pilot for the Royal Air Force in World War II. Now, all 51 of his short stories for grownups have been assembled in a single volume of the prestigious Everyman's Library.
But the Switch Bitch quartet was the fruit of nearly a decade, and Dahl managed to eke out only five more before his death in 1990. Someone Like You (1953) contained 19 tales, and Kiss, Kiss (1960) had 11.
In the late 1940s and throughout the '50s, before inspiration flagged, he'd sold stories of malice and vengeance and the law of unintended consequences to the New Yorker, Esquire, Collier's, Harper's and the Ladies' Home Journal, then resold several to perhaps the classiest anthology series ever shown on American TV, "Alfred Hitchcock Presents." (Peter Lorre was Dahl's memorable "Man from the South," a gambler who liked to wager his Cadillac against his opponents' fingers, and Barbara Bel Geddes played the housewife who clubbed her husband to death with a frozen leg of lamb, which she then calmly roasted and served to the cops sent over to investigate.)Īs time went on, Dahl's rate of production fell from two or three stories per year to three or four years per story. Indeed, as Jeremy Treglown points out in his introduction to these Collected Stories, Dahl tried writing for kids because he'd run out of ideas for the kind of work that first made his name. This was a far cry from the Roald Dahl of Willy Wonka and Giant Peach fame - his lucrative children's franchise was still just warming up. It became a selection of the Book of the Month Club and went into a second American printing.Īll of those stories had first appeared in Playboy. This will give you an idea of how rare and highly valued stories by Roald Dahl once were: In 1974 he published Switch Bitch, a mere four tales collected in a volume that barely exceeded 200 pages. Thereafter his children's books brought him increasing popularity, and when he died children mourned the world over, particularly in Britain where he had lived for many years. His first major success as a writer for children was in 1964. When World War II began in 1939 he became a fighter pilot and in 1942 was made assistant air attaché in Washington, where he started to write short stories. In 1933 he joined the Shell Company, which sent him to Mombasa in East Africa. As he explains in Boy, he turned down the idea of university in favor of a job that would take him to 'a wonderful faraway place'.
His parents were Norwegian, so holidays were spent in Norway. Note: If you want to own the most complete collection of all of Dahl’s short stories, you need to get The Complete Short Stories: Volume One and Volume Two.Roald Dahl (1916-1990) was born in Llandaff, South Wales, and went to Repton School in England.
Please send through any questions, comments, and corrections. You can also see a timeline of these stories arranged chronologically. They are listed alphabetically and link to pages of information. This is a list of all the short stories that Roald Dahl wrote.