The Secret World Of Roald Dahl, Part One: A "Noisy" Life

Summary

Ridiculous History: "The Secret World Of Roald Dahl, Part One: A 'Noisy' Life"

Podcast: Ridiculous History (iHeartPodcasts)
Date: February 3, 2026
Hosts: Ben Bowlin, Max Williams (Noel Brown absent)
Guest: Aaron Tracy – writer, producer, Yale lecturer, and creator of The Secret World of Roald Dahl podcast

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Episode Overview

In the first installment of a two-part deep-dive, Ben Bowlin and Max Williams join guest Aaron Tracy to unpack the enigmatic, prolific, and deeply complicated life of Roald Dahl. The conversation explores Dahl's "noisy" existence — not only as the legendary author behind children's classics like Matilda and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but also as a fighter ace, screenwriter, and British spy. The hosts and Tracy interrogate the dialogue between the genius of Dahl’s creativity and the ethics of his personal failings, while tracing little-known facets of his career and the contradictions that shape his legacy.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Why Roald Dahl? The Origins of Obsession

• [04:20 – 06:07]
  • Ben asks what drew Aaron Tracy to Dahl as a subject.
    • “Roald Dahl is one of those figures… who has a really important place in the public consciousness. Everybody knows him… for a lot of people, he shaped their childhoods, but nobody knows anything about the guy. He had such a noisy life.” – Aaron Tracy [05:17]
  • Dahl didn't start writing children's stories until his late 40s, having led many other dramatic lives.

2. Favorite Dahl Books and the Thread of Darkness

• [06:07 – 08:17]
  • Tracy names Matilda and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory as his favorites.
  • Ben spotlights George’s Marvelous Medicine as a prime example of the grotesque in Dahl’s “whimsical” work.
    • “It is literally about an 8-year-old boy who tries to kill his grandmother and accidentally makes her a giant.” – Ben Bowlin [07:35]

3. Parenting, Ethics, and the Problem of Bigotry

• [08:17 – 10:03]
  • Tracy discusses the dilemma of letting his kids read Dahl, given Dahl's antisemitism.
    • “I can’t really locate the bigotry or the anti-Semitism on the page... Is it hypocritical for me to deprive my kids of Dahl’s work, when I don’t deprive myself of a lot of filmmakers and novelists who we now know were total monsters?” – Aaron Tracy [08:42]
  • Dahl’s range included adult fiction and short stories published in Playboy and The New Yorker, highlighting his appeal beyond children.

4. The Screenwriter Life: Hollywood’s Encouragement & Disappointments

• [11:05 – 14:22]
  • Dahl’s screenwriting ambitions: brought to Hollywood by Walt Disney to adapt The Gremlins (unrelated to Spielberg’s film).
    • “Here’s Dahl at 26… being feted by, unquestionably, the king of Hollywood… Disney brought Dahl out to Los Angeles because he wanted to turn The Gremlins into a movie.” – Aaron Tracy [12:08]
  • Dahl’s difficulty collaborating and desire for control ultimately led to failed projects, but he persisted until successes like writing for James Bond and Alfred Hitchcock.

5. Writer’s Heartbreak: Commonality of Failure in Hollywood

• [16:37 – 21:55]
  • Tracy recounts Pauline Kael’s Hollywood quote:
    • “It’s the only place where you can die of encouragement.” – via Aaron Tracy [18:30]
  • Historic writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner struggled similarly. Dahl transcended this, later finding synergy with Hitchcock.

6. The Disney-Hitchcock Connection & Gallows Humor

• [21:24 – 22:02]
  • “He’s got to be the only guy who’s ever written for both Walt Disney and Alfred Hitchcock... but that’s Dahl, he had an incredibly wide range.” – Aaron Tracy [21:29]
  • Both shared a taste for dark humor.

7. The Control Freak: Dahl’s Approach to Editing and Modern Censorship Controversy

• [22:02 – 26:26]
  • Dahl was militant about editors not altering his words.
    • Puffin Books’ 2023 attempt to censor terms like “fat” and “ugly” in Dahl’s works is discussed.
      • “I certainly come down on the side of hating censorship... The much better solution is to keep the work as is, but try to provide context...” – Aaron Tracy [23:28]
  • Compares to more severe cases (Agatha Christie’s racial epithets): sometimes changes are justified to preserve accessibility for readers.

8. Max With the Facts: A Ray Bradbury Connection

• [26:39 – 27:29]
  • Max reveals Ray Bradbury also worked for both Walt Disney and Hitchcock, joining Dahl in this rare club.

9. Spycraft & The Irregulars: Dahl’s MI6 Adventures

• [28:31 – 36:39]
  • Dahl’s early adulthood was a search for identity: orphaned early, Shell Oil in Africa, RAF pilot, then recruited as a British spy (the “Irregulars”).
  • “So they sent him to D.C., where he was ostensibly working for the British Embassy. But in reality, he was recruited into a group called The Irregulars…” – Aaron Tracy [29:34]
  • Missions included:
    • Psychological operations (psychics “predicting” Allied victory)
    • Seducing wives of influential Americans (e.g., Clare Boothe Luce) to sway opinions in favor of Britain.
      • “So what the Irregulars were doing were a lot of propaganda, a lot of strange ideas you could imagine Dahl and his fellow 20-somethings coming up with out at a bar in Georgetown…” – Aaron Tracy [31:56]
  • Connections to Ian Fleming (James Bond creator), David Ogilvy (ad industry legend), and Noel Coward.
    • “So you gotta picture Noel Coward, Roald Dahl, James Bond, and Don Draper all just hanging out in DC in their mid-20s. All just incredibly gorgeous and dashing.” – Aaron Tracy [34:54]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Dahl’s Life:
  • “He had such a noisy life.” – Aaron Tracy [05:17]
• On Revisiting Matilda:
  • “Rereading it for this project—it’s just such a good story…there’s the typical Dahl gruesomeness that exists in all of his books…” – Aaron Tracy [06:42]
• On Hollywood Disappointment:
  • “It’s the only place where you can die of encouragement.” – Pauline Kael, quoted by Aaron Tracy [18:30]
• On Censorship:
  • “Just going in and taking out the word fat or changing the word ugly… It undermines the work.” – Aaron Tracy [24:41]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 04:20 – How Aaron Tracy became obsessed with Roald Dahl
• 06:29 – Tracy’s favorite Dahl books & the darkness in Dahl’s writing
• 08:17 – Discussing the ethics of kids reading Dahl; adult fiction output
• 10:03 – The problem of knowing so little about the real Dahl
• 11:05 – Dahl’s failed and partial Hollywood career; Gremlins with Disney
• 16:37 – Discussion about Hollywood projects that never get off the ground
• 21:24 – Writing for both Disney and Hitchcock: rare company
• 22:02 – Dahl’s control over his work & the 2023 Puffin censorship debate
• 26:39 – “Max with the facts” interlude (Ray Bradbury fun fact)
• 28:31 – Dahl’s transformation into a British spy in D.C.; the “Irregulars”
• 34:45 – The star-studded cast of the Irregulars

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Overall Tone & Style

The conversation is lively, nerdy, and self-aware, with Ben and Max often marvelling at Aaron's research and storytelling. Tracy’s answers are nuanced and generous, balancing Dahl’s genius and problematic legacy. The hosts inject humor (“Max with the facts,” sound cues, playful banter), often shifting from serious literary and ethical analysis to lighthearted Dahl trivia and personal reflections.

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Takeaways for Listeners

• This episode reframes Roald Dahl as far more than a quirky children’s author—he lived a wildly unconventional life full of risk and reinvention, both inspiring and troubling.
• Key themes include the burdens and benefits of separating art from artist, the dangers of sanitizing historical works, and the weird, “noisy” serendipity of 20th-century creative and wartime circles.
• The episode teases “Part Two,” promising more about Dahl’s spy adventures and literary legacies.

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Recommended for listeners curious about:

• The real people behind famous childhood books
• The ethics of confronting beloved artists’ fraught legacies
• The tangled histories of WWII, literature, and old Hollywood

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To Be Continued in Part Two.

Transcript

[Ben Bullen]

Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartradio. Welcome back to the show fellow Ridiculous historians. Thank you as always so much for tuning in. Let's hear it for the man, the myth, the legend, our very own Willy Wonka level super producer, Mr. Max Williams.

[Max Williams]

Yo ho ho. Hello.

[Ben Bullen]

Hello. The enthusiasm is killing me, Max. They call me Ben Bullen. Our brother in arms, our brother in podcast crime, Noel, is on an adventure, but will be returning soon. In the meantime, ridiculous historians, we have something incredibly special for you today. As you may recall from some earlier episodes, we have long been fascinated and in no small way disturbed by the life and times of the legendary author Roald Dahl. He has written some of the most popular children's books in all of western canon. Excuse me. He was a strident anti semite. He's a fighter ace. He was a legitimate spy. We are not the only people who share this obsession with the larger than life character. Today folks, we are thrilled to be joined with none other than the bestselling writer, producer, podcaster, the founder of Parallax, none other than Aaron Tracy, also the creator of the new hit podcast, the Secret World of Roald Dahl.

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[Aaron Tracy]

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[Ben Bullen]

Eric, thank you so much for coming on the show man.

[Aaron Tracy]

Oh, thanks for having me. I appreciate the enthusiasm of that intro. Hope I can live up to it.

[Ben Bullen]

Well, we hope that we can live up to your accolades because in our Research for this. Now, I know it can always be maybe a little bit embarrassing, so we're not gonna fanboy too much, but you have quite a. You're quite prolific. You have a ton of work under your belt. We're gonna talk about some of your additional work as well. And I have to admit, when I'm looking through your CV and your bonafides, I thought, how does this guy do so much stuff? And then I learned. You also lecture at Yale.

[Aaron Tracy]

Yeah, yeah, I've been teaching at Yale for a while. I don't know. I mean, if you don't have a real job, like, I don't have a real job. Right. My job is to sit around and write all day. You can get a lot of writing done. I mean, it adds up over time. So it definitely does not feel like a lot to me. But you're sweet to say that I've got a lot done.

[Ben Bullen]

Oh, gosh. Well, one of the things that we've got to get right into it, man. But one of the things that amazes me so much about your latest project is the depth of research, the thoroughness, the objectivity. It's really like it's a cinematic audio documentary. And I've got to ask, given all your previous work and the amount of projects that you've done in the past across multiple genres, what drew you to Roald Dahl in particular, out of all the people that you could have done a deep dive on?

[Aaron Tracy]

I love writing true stories. I love writing about interesting historical figures. I wrote a TV show about Audrey hepburn in the 60s. I wrote a show about Jager Hoover. Roald Dahl is one of those figures kind of like Hepburn and J. Edgar Hoover, who has a really important place in the public consciousness. Everybody knows him. A lot of people have read him. To go even further, for a lot of people, he shaped their childhoods, but nobody knows anything about the guy. He had such a noisy life. And so as I started researching him and discovered all of these really strange chapters of his life that I didn't know about, I became totally obsessed. I mean, the guy is most famous for writing children's stories. Of course, he didn't start writing them until his late 40s. So he had all these different lives before then which all sort of informed his later books.

[Ben Bullen]

Yeah, that was something I learned from you. The idea of that sudden switch, that change in profession or vocation over time, and I can't wait to get into it. One question that all of our audience members are going to have for you directly, Aaron, is, do you Have a favorite Roald Dahl book.

[Aaron Tracy]

Yeah, I love Matilda. I probably came into this, came into the project with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory being my favorite. I love the 1971 Gene Wilder movie I used to watch on VHS as a kid. And I still do love that book. But Matilda, rereading it for this project, it's just such a good story. He's so good writing her. It's such a sweet story. I mean, there's the sort of typical doll gruesomeness that exists in all of his books, of course, but I just think it's such a winner.

[Ben Bullen]

I love the point you're making about the gruesomeness, how there seems to be a subtle thread of darkness and that a lot of kids don't necessarily clock on their first read. It reminds me of another one of his books, not his most famous, but a book called George's Marvelous Medicine, which is, I would argue, a quintessential example of that darkness through what is ostensibly whimsical work. Folks, if you haven't read it, go to your local bookstore and get ready for a weird afternoon. It's a short story or it's a, you know, it's a short work. It is literally about an 8 year old boy who tries to kill his grandmother and accidentally makes her a giant. Which I reread that one as, as an adult several years back. And I was kind of shocked that my parents allowed me to have a copy of that. You know, how do you feel about. Because you're a father, how do you feel about your kids reading Ruled Dahl?

[Aaron Tracy]

Yeah, I mean, I'm a little bit torn on the podcast. I bring on a bunch of incredibly smart people to have a discussion about whether or not it's okay to allow kids, impressionable kids, to read work by someone that we now know is a bigot, is an anti Semite. I think it's a complicated thing. I can't really locate the bigotry or the anti Semitism on the page. I think if I could, there'd be no question. I just absolutely would not give him to my kids, because I can. And some people say that they can see some anti Semitic tropes in the witches. I'm not sure I agree with that. But because I can't see it on the page, is it hypocritical for me to. To sort of deprive my kids of Dahl's work when I don't deprive myself of a lot of filmmakers and novelists who we now know were total monsters? It's something I'm grappling with. And I'll also say, I mean, you asked me my favorite book. I immediately went to the children's books Charlie and Chocolate Factory and Matilda. But Dahl also wrote a ton of stuff for adults. He wrote a novel called My Uncle Oswald, which is hard R rated. He wrote a bunch of short stories for places like Playboy. He wrote lots of short stories for the New Yorker. One of my favorites of his is the Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, which was adapted by Netflix recently, which is absolutely for adults. So the guy absolutely wrote things that even if you're not a parent or you're looking for something that you can just enjoy on your own, you can find something in Dahl.

[Ben Bullen]

Yeah, that's amazing, because I love the point you've made in the podcast and in several other interviews where you kind of establish that for the majority of people who are aware of Roald Dahl, it's really just two words on the COVID of one of their favorite childhood books. We don't know very much about the creator himself. And I have to applaud you for not shying away from some of that deeply, personally, I believe deeply and profoundly disturbing stuff. Those aspects of his character that are inseparable from his identity as a person and a writer. I also, on the point of writing, I was astonished to learn from your research that Roald Dahl had this entire other life as a screenwriter.

[Aaron Tracy]

Yeah, I mean, I think, like you, I'm a big movie buff and fascinated by Hollywood in the 60s and 70s and earlier. And so I didn't know this either. I mean, Dahl. After his time in the war, Dahl went out to Los Angeles. He was flown out by Walt Disney himself and put up at a fancy Beverly Hills hotel and given a driver and given a place to stay, all by Walt Disney. Because Disney loved this story that Dahl had written called the Gremlins. It was one of Dahl's first stories. And it was. People don't really read it today. It feels kind of like the reason Dahl wrote it is it's a bit of propaganda to show American and British forces working together against Germany. And it's very creative. It has nothing whatsoever to do, by the way, with the Steven Spielberg produced classic the Gremlins.

[Ben Bullen]

You knew we were gonna ask.

[Aaron Tracy]

That was my first question, too, when I first stumbled on it. But Disney brought Dahl out to Los Angeles because he wanted to turn the Gremlins into a movie. And this is when Disney was absolutely on top. I mean, Disney had just come off Snow White and Dumbo and Bambi and so many of his classics. So here's Dahl at 26 years old, being feted by, unquestionably the king of Hollywood. And it didn't quite work out for Dahl. Disney sort of started a writer's room. He brought in animators and he brought in a director and all these different people and started a writer's room with Dahl. But Dahl was just not someone, at least at 26. But you could certainly argue as he got older, too, he was not someone who wanted to collaborate. He had a very personal vision. He wanted to control the work. And so eventually Disney dropped the project and Dahl wasn't able to get it set up anywhere else. But Dahl still had the bug. He wanted to make movies, so he continued to write. He wasn't always living in Hollywood, but he went back to New York. He made lots of trips to Los Angeles, and he just wrote screenplay after screenplay, many of them just not working. He had one with the director, Robert Altman, called O Death, where is Thy Sting a lingaling, which is a sting a lingaling. Yeah, It's a crazy title, but it came closest to. To actually getting made, to becoming Dahl's first credit. And they started filming, in fact, and Gregory Peck was in the lead role, but as sometimes happens, the head of the studio looked at the dailies and just said, this is not working, and shut down production. And so after all that, it was another sort of failed credit for Dahl. But he didn't give up and he kept working. And eventually he found the perfect vehicle for himself, which is the fourth James Bond movie. Dahl was a spy for MI6, which we can talk about. You have to.

[Ben Bullen]

Yeah, at some point.

[Aaron Tracy]

Yeah. That James Bond movie was very much informed by his experiences in Washington.

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[Aaron Tracy]

If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have?

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[Aaron Tracy]

When you look at your car, you're.

[Ben Bullen]

Going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings.

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[Aaron Tracy]

Welcome to the A Building. I'm Hans Charles. I'm Menelik Lumumba. It's 1969. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr have both been assassinated and black America was out of breaking point. Rioting and protest broke out on an unprecedented scale in Atlanta, Georgia. At Martin's alma mater, Morehouse College, the students had their own protest. It featured two prominent figures in black history, Martin Luther King Sr. And a young student, Samuel L. Jackson. To be in what we really thought was a revolution. I mean, people were dying. 1968, the murder of Dr. King, which traumatized everyone. The FBI had a role in the murder of a Black Panther leader in Chicago. This story is about protest. It echoes in today's world far more than it should and it will blow your mind. Listen to the A building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Ben Bullen]

As we're moving through this, I would like, if it's okay with you, Aaron, to emulate some of the formula of your podcast because one thing you do that I think is superb is, is avoiding the straight up linear recounting of born such and such, time lives and dies. And I love how you're jumping around in time and theme in. Oh, thank you.

[Aaron Tracy]

It's like, who needs another Cradle to the Grave, right? Like, what's more boring than that? I was just watching a documentary the other day that that was just Cradle to the Grave and it's like, yeah, there's. Even when you have a fantastic story, there's just no surprises.

[Ben Bullen]

Yeah. And I think that is a great advantage in the structure of your creation here because it keeps going to sort of hook after hook with plot twist after plot twist. And you have quite a well established past and present as a screenwriter yourself. Now, Max and Noel and yours truly here. We are not screenwriters by trade, but we know a lot of people in the business. And it just seems incredibly challenging, right, to have so many projects that end up for variables beyond our control kind of languishing, even if it's a really great story. I'm saying this mainly to ask if Dahl's experience in Hollywood when he was just 26 or so, is that something that is common to a lot of screenwriters or did he get the especially dirty end of the stick there?

[Aaron Tracy]

No, it's incredibly common. My favorite Quote about Hollywood is by the great New Yorker critic Pauline Kael. She said, it's the only place where you can die of encouragement. And that's just so true. People go out there, everybody tells you how talented you are, everybody wants to meet with you, and it's like your next project is going to go forward, and this is a done deal. And this movie star is super interesting, and there's something obviously kind of nice about a town that is that optimistic and hopeful, but it's incredibly hard when you're struggling in your career and you keep getting your hopes up and then they just get dashed. So this happens all the time. And I think what's most interesting about Dahl is that many of his heroes, the novelists who he was trying to emulate, did the exact same thing. They went to Hollywood and. And they struggled, and they completely fell apart. So there are these great stories about people like F. Scott Fitzgerald, who Dahl loved, the great novelist who actually loved movies. Unlike some of the other novelists who went out there for the money, F. Scott Fitzgerald loved movies and just couldn't make it happen. Screenwriting didn't come naturally to him. He started drinking more and more. He ended up really not getting his name on scripts that he put work into because he was completely rewritten over and over again, and he eventually drank himself to death. And the same thing is true of the failures of other great novelists. Aldous Huxley had a lot of trouble. Faulkner went out there and had a lot of trouble. You could go on and on, and it's easy to imagine that Dahl could have sort of fallen into the same hole after all the years of struggle that he had trying to break into Hollywood, but he refused. He had something inside of him that allowed him to keep going and push past all the failures and all the disappointments, which eventually led to the James Bond screenplay and then finding his perfect spiritual brother in Hollywood, who was Alfred Hitchcock. They're just so similar in tone and sensibility. And Dahl eventually wrote a bunch of stories for Hitchcock that Hitchcock turned into episodes of his TV show.

[Ben Bullen]

Oh, wow. That's fascinating, because we're often tempted in the modern era to think of historical figures as existing somehow separate from the world in which they live. It's always surprising to learn that folks like Alfred Hitchcock and Roald Dahl not just got along, but actually worked together. That's something that I did not clock at all.

[Aaron Tracy]

Yeah, I mean, Dahl has got to be. I think it's an extraordinary thing. He's got to be the only guy who's ever written for both Walt Disney and Alfred Hitchcock. I mean, two opposite dudes, but that's Dahlia. He had an incredibly wide range. And Hitchcock was just so natural to everything that worked about Dahl. All the gruesomeness, all the darkness, all the surprising twist endings. It all was sort of perfect for Hitchcock. And Hitchcock just fell in love with his work.

[Ben Bullen]

And they share a similar kind of gallows humor.

[Aaron Tracy]

Absolutely.

[Ben Bullen]

Nod and a wink. And there's something we should also get back to just to thread in while we're talking about his time in Hollywood and working in these established systems that can be quite brutal at times. I remember you and several other sources have mentioned a specific issue he had about control in general. Not just his scripts in Hollywood, but his published works. He apparently mandated that publishers treat his material as sacrosanct. Something like, don't even touch a comma or you'll get the crocodile, whatever that means. This leads us to a fairly recent controversy that might be unfamiliar to some people. After Dahl passed away, his publisher, Puffin Books in 2023, started making a lot of changes to his work. Like I think censorship based on sensitivity. Readers who said, hey, this is discriminatory, this is racist, this is insensitive, so on and so forth are offensive. Just straight up offensive. I think we'd all be interested in your take on that. Did Puffin do the right thing or should they have left it as is?

[Aaron Tracy]

Yeah, I certainly come down on the side of hating censorship. Right. Puffin should not have done this. And just to be sort of clear about what they were doing, they were removing words like fat and ugly. There were even instances where they took out the words black and white, regardless of what context they were in. Because you're right, they were being overly sensitive. We were going through this period in culture where everyone was being just incredibly sensitive. And so lots of other writers came to. Dahl, of course, had passed away, but a lot of writers came to his defense and said, no, no, no, you cannot touch the work. He would not have wanted these changes. We see this a lot with writers and filmmakers too. I mean, I think of someone like George Lucas going back in and changing things that happened in Star wars to sort of work with modern day sensibilities. And it's kind of always a bad idea. I think the much better solution is to keep the work as is, but try to provide context, try to have a conversation with people about why some of these words might be triggering or offensive. But just going in and taking out the word fat or changing the word ugly. To something else. It undermines the work.

[Ben Bullen]

Yeah, yeah. I think as a writer as well, I'm severely tempted to come down on the same side as you or be on the same page there, because when we hear things like a censorship controversy, we assume it may be similar to the old Agatha Christie use of racial epithets or something. Very serious stuff. But Fat and Ugly seems like they might be fighting the wrong battle.

[Aaron Tracy]

You know what I mean? And you bring up a good point. I mean, I think that's one of the reasons that this issue, which I explore in the podcast, is just so meaty and so interesting, because the Agatha Christie story that you brought up, she has a racial epithet in her title. And I do think that it was a good idea to get rid of that. They did that after her death, and so she wasn't able to approve it. But if they had not done that, if her state had not done that, that book would absolutely be unreadable. You couldn't sell it. You couldn't put it on shelves, which I agree with. We should not be selling it with that title. And getting rid of the title, changing it does allow that extraordinary story to be. You know, I think it's still her most popular story. It allows people to continue reading it, which is a great thing.

[Ben Bullen]

Yeah, yeah. Well said. Well said. And with that in mind, I have a little bit of an anecdote to share with you that may be familiar to a lot of our audience members.

[Max Williams]

And before we do that, Ben, can I jump in with a weird fact I got for us? Aaron, you said that Dahl might have been the only person you know of that wrote for Disney and Hitchcock, which.

[Aaron Tracy]

I was a director. Are you going to bust me? Is there someone else?

[Max Williams]

So I found somebody else. It's Mr. 451 himself. Ray Bradbury worked with Walt Disney and also wrote for Hitchcock Presents. And it's funny because I used Google AI to help me start with the thread. And they also said Robert cheated, in other words. Yeah, exactly. We also said Robert Stevenson, which is funny because that's not true. Robert Stevenson worked with Disney and a guy named Robert Stevens worked with Hitchcock. But to the best of my knowledge, or at least Google AI's knowledge, only Ray Bradbury can join Dahl in that distinction.

[Aaron Tracy]

Wow, that's cool. I mean, that's good company.

[Ben Bullen]

Yeah. And, Max, I think you've earned it. Max with the facts.

[Aaron Tracy]

Who's that sneaking in the phone? It's Max, and he's full of knowledge. Just for you right now. Here it comes. It's Max with the facts.

[Ben Bullen]

Eric, we have a sound cue that plays. Max, the part where I said, okay, don't worry, we have a sound cue. So this is. Okay, so here's, here's this anecdote that may be familiar to a lot of us. We have coworkers who are never stressed about anything really. And it's because they were actual veterans and saw war and saw combat. And so after you've lived through events like that, you're a lot less likely to worry too much about sending an email late.

[Aaron Tracy]

Right.

[Ben Bullen]

You've got a perspective. And I'm wondering if Dahl's earlier experiences informed his perspective and his creative approach to writing, which is just my long winded way of saying, please share the spy story. Just a little bit of the spy story. People can't wait to hear this.

[Aaron Tracy]

I mean, I think like all writers, his experiences growing up and his formative experiences as a 20 something unquestionably inform the writing. It just has to. For anyone that's not just writing sort of genre fiction or writing completely removed from themselves, and even people who think they are doing that, I think the life experiences always get onto the page. So for Dahl, yeah, his, his twenties and his thirties, before he ever wrote for children, were really about a search for identity. He was trying to figure out who he was. He was trying to figure out what kind of man he was. And I think you could even argue he was trying to figure out what it meant to be a man in his part of the century. He grew up without a father. His father died when he was 3. And so that was the first sort of formative experience of his life. When he was just three years old, his father and his sister died within three weeks of each other. So just gruesome, just so incredibly sad. And then he got older and he became a businessman. That was his first sort of attempt to figure out who he was. He worked for Shell Oil and they sent him to Africa. And so it was this incredible adventure, but he sort of grew tired of it after a little while. And so he decided to volunteer for the raf, the Air force during the war. And he flew some harrowing combat missions. And that was a incredible adventure for him. But he kept getting shot down, including one time that was a really devastating crash in the Libyan desert that he barely walked away from. And so it's time to figure out what's next, his next sort of search for identity. And the powers that be noticed that he was incredibly tall. He was 6 foot 6, incredibly handsome and dashing. A great storyteller incredibly charming. So they had a job for him. They decided he should go work for British Intelligence. So they sent him to D.C. where he was ostensibly working for the British Embassy. But in reality he was recruited into a group called the Irregulars, which is this group headed up by William Stevenson, who's sort of a legendary figure in spy circles. They worked out of 30 Rockefeller center in New York, where Saturday Night Live is taped now, which is a really strange place for, you know, a top secret spy organization, but that's where they were. And they had agents in New York and DC. Dahl started off in D.C. like I said, and he was working as a spy, doing whatever needed to be done. This was a time before America got into the war. And so Churchill and Britain, they're in their darkest hour. Things are going horribly, of course, in the war. And they would do anything, anything to get America to come to their side. So they were using outside the box ideas to try to get America to come to their aid. And so one of those ideas was start the Irregulars. And so what the Irregulars were doing were a lot of propaganda, a lot of sort of really strange ideas that you could imagine Dahl and his fellow 20 somethings coming up with out at a bar in Georgetown late at night. One of them was, they came up with this idea to hire a psychic named Louis de Waal to go around the country and tell everyone that he has looked at the stars and the Third Reich, he has determined, is going to fall. And so it made Americans feel more comfortable about getting into the war because it was written in the stars that they were going to win, stuff like that. And then sort of the most salacious, arguably most interesting thing that Dahl did for the Irregulars was he was tasked with seducing the wives of powerful Americans who were not yet on the Allied side. So one of them was the wife of Henry Luce. Henry Luce was the most powerful man in media. He owned Time magazine and Life magazine and Sports Illustrated and on and on. And these magazines were printing a lot of anti British stuff, which Churchill sort of could not allow because it was not helping their cause of getting the Americans into the war. And they couldn't really get through to Henry Luce. But his wife was a different story. His wife was a woman named Clare Boothe Luce, which I love that sort of whimsical name. It sounds like a name that Dahl invented. And she was incredibly formidable and influential in her own right. Besides being married to Henry, she was also a Broadway playwright. She wrote a play called the Women, which was adapted twice for the movies. She was a war correspondent for Vanity Fair and she worked for other magazines. She was a great journalist. And then she ran for Congress and won and became one of the few women in Congress. And this is who Dahl targeted. And Dahl was successful. They had a long term affair, with Dahl's goal being to sort of turn down the anti British rhetoric. Wow.

[Ben Bullen]

Okay, so that in itself already feels like a subplot in an amazing film, right? Startup spycraft with 20 year olds who come up with their best ideas. Three beers in or something.

[Aaron Tracy]

I haven't even told you who was in this group. I mean, William Stevenson had an incredible eye for talent, so he had Roald Dahl. He also had Ian Fleming, who would go on to create James Bond. He had David Ogilvy, who would become the father of modern advertising. And the inspiration for Don Draper. He had Noel Coward, the great playwright. So you got to picture Noel Coward, Roald Dahl, James Bond and Don Draper all just hanging out in D.C. in their mid-20s. All just incredibly gorgeous and dashing. That's what it was like.

[Ben Bullen]

I'm struck by the psychic pitch.

[Aaron Tracy]

Is that great?

[Ben Bullen]

Yeah, I think it would probably. It feels like something like that might even work to a degree here in the modern day, in 2026, which is both astonish and in no small way, kind of frightening. I've got to ask you this though, Aaron. So our spy mechanism, the juiciest part of this part of his noisy life, and again, I love that turn of phrase of yours, is him attempting to garner us support by seducing the spouses of VIPs. Does that not seem like it could backfire in a pretty powerful way? Like if the affair is exposed?

[Aaron Tracy]

Yeah, yeah, I think you're absolutely right. It absolutely could have. But Churchill's back was against the wall. I mean, we've all seen the movies and listened to the podcast and read the books. This was their darkest hour. They were not going to survive the onslaught by the Nazis. And so he was doing anything he possibly could to try to get America into the war. And so you're absolutely right that this was a gamble, but luckily it's one that paid off.

[Ben Bullen]

Ah, folks, hold the phone. Get your everlasting gobstoppers ready. We made an audible call as we were having our conversation with Aaron Tracy, the creator of the Secret World of Roald Dahl. We realized this is a two parter max, because we just have so much more stuff we want to get to.

[Max Williams]

Right. I mean, this is just a great interview and, you know, eren, is just a font of knowledge, and he's just so great at telling the story that, you know, both you and me, big Roald Dahl fans. So we can't get enough of this stuff, especially the spy stuff.

[Ben Bullen]

I had to. Yeah, I forgot to ask you. What is your favorite Roald Dahl book? Obviously, you can tell I love George's Marvelous Medicine.

[Max Williams]

Yeah, I mean, I actually looked up the list because I had to remember all of them. There's so many on there. I'm going to go with the bfg. The Big Friendly Giant. I love that one. As a kid, that's one of that. I had my dad read me multiple times because it was just like, this one's great, but so many. Obviously, James and the Giant Peach. The. What is the glass elevator one?

[Ben Bullen]

Oh, yeah.

[Max Williams]

Second Charlie, that. That one's under. Underrated. Underrated.

[Aaron Tracy]

Sleeper hit.

[Max Williams]

Yes.

[Ben Bullen]

And. And again, Aaron and Max and I are not joking. What did Aaron call it? That somewhat gruesome nature called it a subtle darkness in the works of Dahl. With that in mind, folks, we can confirm to you that whatever age you are at, honestly, those books still slap. I'm just gonna say a lot of them are great on a reread, even as an adult. Thank you for tuning in. Please check in with us this coming Thursday when we will have part two of the Secret World of Roald Dahl with Aaron Tracy. Thanks to our super producer, none other than the Willy Wonka podcasting Mr. Max Williams. Max, thanks to your brother Alex Williams for composing the track. Noel will be returning from his adventures very soon. In the meantime, you know the score, my friend. Who else? Who else? Who else do we think?

[Max Williams]

Let's see. Let's thank Christopher Haciotes and Eve's Jeffcoat here in spirit. The people over at Ridiculous Crime. They're amazing. Check them out.

[Ben Bullen]

AJ Bahamas Jacobs. We were talking about him. A little bit off air. His ears might be tingling. Dr. Rachel, Big Spinach Lance. And of course, a 2.3 out of 5 reluctant acknowledgments. Not quite a thank you to the one and only Max. You gotta give him the shout out.

[Max Williams]

Oh, the child getting sucked up the tube or floating to the spinning ceiling. Fans of our podcast, Jonathan Strickland, AKA the Quizzer.

[Ben Bullen]

Thanks so much, folks. As Noel always likes to say, we'll see you next time.

[Aaron Tracy]

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