Saturday, August 23, 2008

Charlie and the Spy Factory

Add to this to the Things I Didn’t Know Before file: It seems that Raold Dahl wasn’t always a children’s book author. Newsweek magazine’s synopsis of The Irregulars: Raold Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington, due out in September, notes:
The Irregulars
BOOK: Before author Roald Dahl wrote “James and the Giant Peach,” he spied for Britain during World War II. ...
PRO: With Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond, and future ad man David Ogilvy, Dahl hobnobbed in Washington, chatting up Eleanor Roosevelt and bedding Clare Booth Luce at Churchill's behest.
CON: Light on 007-style cloak-and-dagger capers. Author Jennet Conant chronicles lots of cocktails, few cyanide pills.
Here’s another thing I didn’t know about Dahl: He was married to American actress Patricia Neal for almost two decades. Amazing what you can learn just by surfing across the Web for a few minutes.

1 comment:

Corey Wilde said...

Dahl's stories for adults are just as entertaining, if not more so, than his marvelous creations for younger minds. The novel called 'My Uncle Oswald' contains a description of a breakfast at a hotel in Greece that makes me laugh just to remember it. And Dahl also wrote some very twisty short stories, such as 'Lamb To the Slaughter,' which you can read in its entirety here:
http://www.classicshorts.com/stories/lamb.html