The Irregulars
by Jennet Conant
Simon & Schuster, HK$224
In the preface to his memoir, Boy (1983), Roald Dahl declares, 'This is not an autobiography.' The children's author said he refused to write such a thing because it would be 'full of all sorts of boring details'. In The Irregulars, Jennet Conant reveals that Dahl was afraid of divulging too much, but that he was never at risk of boring his readership in doing so. Her compelling book brings to light Dahl's secret past as an undercover agent at the British embassy in Washington, DC, from 1943 to 1946.
In 1940, an increasingly desperate British government under threat of German invasion began a secret propaganda campaign to draw the US into the war, and it was the launch of his writing career that brought Dahl into the intelligence community.
Dahl had been posted to Washington in 1941 as an RAF attache after being injured in a crash in the Sahara, but he first caught the spooks' attention with 'Shot Down Over Libya', a 1942 piece for the Saturday Evening Post. It was an overwrought fictionalisation of his crash, but the story won him high praise within the intelligence bureaucracy; it was exactly the kind of bluntly patriotic fare they wanted.