Roald Dahl - Master of Suspense

Roald Dahl may be well known for his quirky, sometimes rebellious children's novels, yet many are uninformed about his darker tales for adults. In these short stories, Roald Dahl makes his stories very suspenseful and interesting to the reader, keeping them hooked. He does this using a variety of literary devices. Above all, foreshadowing and situational irony stand out as the most important of these.

Dahl uses foreshadowing to build suspense in his short stories “Lamb to the Slaughter” and “The Landlady” by making the reader infer what will happen next, yet not specifying it so that the audience is kept interested, essentially taunting them with information. For instance, this is shown in “Lamb to the Slaughter” when Patrick Maloney has come home from his job as a police detective and meets his wife, Mary. Generally, Patrick has a very specific routine that he follows at this time every day. It is said that “as he spoke, he did an unusual thing. He lifted his glass and drained it in one swallow although there was still half of it left. He got up and went slowly over to fetch himself another… When he came back, [Mary] noticed that the new drink was dark amber with the quantity of whiskey in it” (Dahl) As given by his abnormal behavior, Patrick is evidently uneasy and nervous about something. This makes the reader think that Patrick has something sad or important to tell Mary, like the fact that he is having an affair or that he wants a divorce. Dahl never says this, though, but he suggests it, employing foreshadowing. The readers catch on to this immediately and think they know what Patrick will say. However, they do not know for certain, because Dahl has not made it completely obvious. This makes the reader hooked, wanting to know what comes next, which guarantees Dahl that his audience will not stop reading here. As a matter of fact, Patrick never explicitly says he will divorce Mary in the whole story, even though it is strongly implied a few paragraphs later by Patrick saying that Mary will be looked after. Even after this is revealed, the audience is engaged, anticipating the coming events but still unsure, as Mary has been established as a character who lives for this man, and her reaction to this decision by Patrick is unforeseeable. In addition to creating suspense with foreshadowing in “Lamb to the Slaughter”, he does it again in “The Landlady”. In the story, Billy Weaver is a young man on a business trip when he decides not to stay at the hotel he had been told to stay at, and instead decides to stay at a house with a sign in the window that says “Bed and Breakfast”. He enters, and a landlady takes him in and tells him to sign a guest book, on which there are two names: Christopher Mulholland and Gregory Temple. When Weaver signs the guest book, he says “‘Now wait a minute, wait just a minute. Mulholland ... Christopher Mulholland... wasn’t that the name of the Eton schoolboy who was on a walking-tour through the West Country, and then all of a sudden …’” (Dahl 67). Clearly, Billy has remembered something significant and profound about the name, and by the connotation of Billy’s words, it does not sound like things ended well for Mulholland. We do not hear the rest of what Billy was going to say, because the landlady interrupts him and says “‘Eton schoolboy? Oh no, my dear, that can’t possibly be right because my Mr. Mulholland was certainly not an Eton schoolboy when he came to me’” (Dahl 67). There are a couple of unsettling things in this quote that makes the reader skeptical about the landlady. For one, she refers to Mr. Mulholland as her Mr. Mulholland, as if she owns him, which slightly disturbs the readers. Then, when Billy brings up whether the two men, who had arrived years before, had ever left, the landlady says “‘“Left?... But my dear boy, he never left. He’s still here. Mr. Temple is also here. They’re on the third floor, both of them together’” (Dahl 68). This is the point where the reader begins to have some serious doubts about the landlady and her intentions with Billy. For one, she says that Temple and Mulholland are both there, in the house, but on page 67, she refers to them in the past tense, like one would when speaking of those who have left or died. The readers begin to think that both men might be deceased, with their bodies hidden on the third floor. However, just like in “Lamb to the Slaughter”, Dahl never tells us whether this is true. Still, it leaves the reader hanging, wanting to know what happened to Temple and Mulholland and what Billy’s fate will be, and secures Dahl their attention for the rest of the story. Through this use of foreshadowing in “Lamb to the Slaughter” and “The Landlady”, Dahl is able to make his stories hugely suspenseful and exciting for the reader. Foreshadowing is just one of the techniques that he uses to create suspense, though.

In addition to foreshadowing, Dahl also uses irony to hook his readers in the very same short stories as before. In “The Landlady”, the only real reason that Billy decides to stay at the landlady’s place and not the hotel where he was supposed to stay was because “[o]n the carpet in front of the fire, a pretty little dachshund was curled up asleep with its nose tucked into its belly… in one corner he spotted a large parrot in a cage. Animals were usually a good sign in a place like this, Billy told himself” (Dahl 63). Unknown to Billy, however, these animals are not animals at all. As the landlady herself said, “‘I stuff all my little pets myself when they pass away’” (Dahl 69). When Billy is looking through the window, this is situational irony because he and the reader assume that the creatures are alive, but they are not. This builds more suspense because when the lady reveals that the animals are dead, Billy has lost his only reason for being there and trusting the place he is at. The house and its sole inhabitant are beginning to reveal their true colors, and it makes the reader want to find out what happened next. This also implies that Mulholland and Temple have also been stuffed, hidden away on the third floor of the house. One can only assume what this lady means to do with Billy. At this point, the audience is so hooked that they will not want to stop reading and figure out what happens to Billy, which Dahl never reveals, ensuring their attention for the rest of the story through the use of situational irony. In “Lamb to the Slaughter”, on the other hand, dramatic irony is used to keep the reader hooked until the very end of the story. After Patrick tells Mary that they must separate, Mary becomes enraged and takes the frozen leg of lamb that she intended to serve for dinner and kills Patrick with it. After this, the detectives come over to her house to investigate, and they immediately begin to comb the house for the murder weapon. The detectives “kept asking her a lot of questions. They always treated her kindly… They searched the house… [They] told her that her husband had been killed by a blow to the back of the head. They were looking for the weapon” (Dahl). Dramatic irony is obvious here because the cops do not know who killed Patrick and the object used to kill him, while the readers know that Mary killed him with the leg of lamb. In fact, the detectives immediately dismiss her as a suspect. During this portion of the story, the meat is in the oven, but the detectives also dismiss that as a possible murder weapon. However, the audience does not know whether the detectives will figure out that Mary committed the crime and how she did it later on. That possibility still exists, and the dramatic irony only builds the tension. The readers are at the edge of their seats, waiting to see what will happen next and whether Mary will walk free. This section of the story is dripping with suspense, so the audience cannot stop reading.

Dahl is able to create suspense in his adult short stories by using foreshadowing and irony in two of his short stories, “The Landlady” and “Lamb to the Slaughter”. In the former, Dahl hints the reader at the fate of Billy and tricks them by making them assume that the animals in the house are real. In “Lamb to the Slaughter”, he makes the readers know that Patrick wants a divorce without ever explicitly saying it, and keeps the audience on their toes by letting Mary barely walk free from her crime. Dahl was an extremely talented writer who could use dark thoughts and masterful writing to make his stories scary and suspenseful for adults, or colorful words and a fun imagination to make them whimsy and playful for young boys and girls.

Works Cited

Dahl, Roald. “Lamb to the Slaughter.” 4.files.edl.io,

https://4.files.edl.io/4a65/10/23/18/235824-cd055462-e062-467c-a8ae-492f46d8caad.pdf. Accessed 9 October, 2019.

Dahl, Roald. “The Landlady.” Holt Literature and Language Arts, Second Course, pg. 62.