Tales of the unexpected

TALES OF THE UNEXPECTED

INTRODUCTION

This book is a very strange one. All the stories, infact, were extremely gripping. The biggest ability of the author is that he incorporates an element of surprise in each story usually on the unexpected conclusion.

Roald Dahl was born in Galles; when the second world war exploded he joined up at the Royal Air Force of Nairobi and he fought in  Libia, Greek and Syria.

TASTE

That evening there were six people at Mike Schofield's house and one of them was Richard Pratt who was a very famouse gourmet.

In each occasion that Pratt had went to Schofield's house they had decided to do a little betting game over the claret and he had always won.

That evening they did the betting game as the same but this time Mr Schofield was very quiet and sure to win because he had chosen a rare claret which wasn't known all over the world

When they began to bet there was a strange athmosphere on the dining room like a silence of suspence which exploded after some minutes  when R. Pratt said what he wanted to bet: the hand of Mr. Schoffield's daughter in marriage.

Mr. Schofield decided to accept because he was sure to won and also because if Pratt lost the betting game, as he tought, he  would win his country house.

Unfortunatly, with the surprise of all the presents, R. Pratt won the betting game.

Everyone was worry and Mr. Schoffield didn't know what to do but suddenly happened a strange thing which changed the tragic situation: the maid come in to the dining room showing something.

She showed Richard Pratt's thin horn rinned spectacles that she had found in the Mr. Schoffield 's study where he went by himself before dinner to look the name of the claret.

LAMB TO THE SLAUGHTER

The room was warm and clean and Mary Maloney was waiting for her husband. When he arrived she felt happy and she went to kiss him as he came in. He looked very upset and he didn't want to eat anything neither the piece of lamb she had decided to prepare.

After some minutes he told Mary to seat down because he had to tell her an important thing which would be bad. It didn't take him long, four or five minutes at most, and when he finished Mary looked him with a kind of dazed horror in her eyes.

At first she decided to think that nothing had never happened but after some minutes she become crazy, she decided to kill her husband, she took the frozen leg of lamb from the refrigerator, she swang it higth in the air and she bought it down as hard as she could, killing him.

After that she decided to go to the groucer to make herself an alibi, there she bought some potatoes and, arrived home,  she phoned to the police to told them that his husband had died.

They immediatly arrived but, even if they had a careful inspection, they couldn't understand what would be the arm of the murder.

They were thinking about it when, after a while, they could discover that when Mary invited them to stay for the supper.