Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life

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This collection first published by Michael Joseph 1989

Published in Penguin Books 1990

Copyright © Roald Dahl, 1953, 1958, 1959, 1989

Illustration copyright © John Lawrence, 1989

All rights reserved

‘The Ratcatcher’, ‘Rummins’, ‘Mr Hoddy’ and ‘Mr Feasey’ are from Someone Like You, originally published by Secker & Warburg Ltd in 1954 and republished by Michael Joseph Ltd in 1961 under the title Claud’s Dog ‘Parson’s Pleasure’, and ‘The Champion of the World’ are from Kiss Kiss first published by Michael Joseph Ltd in 1960

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 978-0-14-194161-5

Roald Dahl

Roald Dahl was born in Llandaff, Wales, on 13 September 1916. His parents were Norwegian and he was the only son of a second marriage. His father, Harald, and elder sister Astri died when Roald was just three years old, leaving his mother, Sofie, to raise her four children and two stepchildren.

At the age of nine, Roald was sent away to boarding school, first in Weston-super-Mare and later in Derbyshire (not far from Cadbury’s chocolate factory). He suffered acutely from homesickness and his unhappy schooling was to greatly influence his writing in later life. His childhood and schooldays became the subject of his autobiography Boy.

At eigthteen,

instead of going to university, he joined the Shell Petroleum Company and after two years training was sent to Dar es Salaam (in what is now Tanzania) to supply oil to customers. However, the outbreak of the Second World War saw him sign up as an aircraftman with the RAF in Nairobi: of the sixteen men who signed up, only Roald and two others were to survive the war.

He detailed his exploits in the war in a further volume of autobiography, Going Solo, which included crash-landing in no-man’s-land and surviving a direct hit during the Battle of Athens. Invalided out of active service, he was transferred to Washington in 1942 as an air attaché, where an opportune meeting with C. S. Forester, the writer of the Hornblower series, set him on a new path.

Roald’s first piece of published writing was used to help publicize the British war effort in America. Appearing anonymously in the Saturday Evening Post in 1942, ‘Shot Down Over Libya’ earned him $900. He published several more pieces for the paper, many of which were fictional tales, and these were eventually collected together and published as Over to You.

Later stories appeared in the New Yorker, Harpers and Atlantic Monthly. They were widely regarded and he won the prestigious Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America three times. In 1953 he married the Oscar-winning actor Patricia Neal and together they had five children.

It was not until the 1960s, after he had settled with his family in Great Missenden in Buckinghamshire, that Roald began seriously to writer children’s stories, publishing first James and the Giant Peach and, a few years later, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. It was not long before his stories were a worldwide success.

After he and Patricia Neal divorced, Roald married Felicity Crosland in 1983. Working to the end on new books, he died aged seventy-four on 23 November 1990.

Now, over twenty years later, Roald Dahl’s legacy as a storyteller and favourite of readers around the world remains unsurpassed.