I think that the true beauty of Someone Like You comes from the way in which the narrator draws the reader in, speaking to them confidentially, so often in the guise of the detached observer, so that we are moved to a kind of complicity even when an act of true repugnance is taking place. These stories may be generally fantastical, but we are encouraged to think of them as scenarios which could truly befall someone and in particular, someone like us. We feel genuine discomfort as the voyeur in Nude Dimittus chips away at the painting to reveal the lady’s undergarments beneath – I let out a gasp of sympathy at the closing lines of Galloping Foxley – a wince of disgust at the sight of the wife’s hand in Man from the South – Roald Dahl reveals himself time and again as a masterful storyteller, his adult fiction no less worthwhile than that which he produced for his younger audience.
There is a certain flavour to the tone in this work that reminds me of Ian Fleming, whose writing I recent suffered through in The Spectre Trilogy, yet despite a similar dismissive attitude towards women and a clear attraction towards the violent, there is greater depth to the motivations of Dahl’s characters, which means that they have weathered the decades far more successfully than the dinosaur James Bond. We sense Mary Maloney’s blank despair as her husband announces his plans to leave her and so we understand how she comes to wield a piece of frozen lamb against him. We are party to Mr Botibol’s frantic logic as he seeks to recoup his losses in A Dip in the Pool and can only shake our heads in rueful dismay as his plan is foiled. So often schemes fall apart in Someone Like You, Dahl seems determined to take us to humanity’s very darkest moments.

There is something very particularly powerful about short fiction – with less apparent ammunition, the writer has to draw events together in a much shorter window but the impact is often only the greater for it. Having read a fair bit of Roald Dahl’s shorter work, I would point out that it is rare to get to the end of a story without the words ‘Oh no’ crossing one’s mind, but that is in many ways merely a proof of Dahl’s precision as a writer. Other than perhaps Dickens, I can think of few others who can equal him as a story-teller. A friend recently expressed surprise when I offhandedly referred to Dahl as a cad but while Someone Like You is a world away from The BFG, it is nonetheless a must-read for connoisseurs of short fiction and a true classic of the genre