Book Alert / The Irregulars

The Irregulars -- Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington by Jennet Conant, Simon & Schuster '08, $27.95, 390 pages, ISBN #0743294580. Index, bibliography, source notes, grouping of glossy b&w images.

One of the advantages of growing older is to watch, in amazement, as young ordinaries of our youth rocket to fame and/or fortune while the wunderkinds we all admired die on the vine. There's more than a touch of the positive side of this dynamic in an engaging new book from Jennet Conant, who came to deserved prominence with Tuxedo Park, reviewed in these pages a couple of years ago.

Conant's narrative pushes to the front and center, at the onset of World War II, a dashing RAF pilot named Raold Dahl, who served as a British spy in the service of Winston Churchill's determination to condition isolationist Americans to commit themselves to defeat Hitler. Under the command of William Stephenson, Churchill's spy chief, Dahl found himself linked to two other aspiring and charismatic leaders named Ian Fleming and David Ogilvy.

One or more of these three names will be familiar to those who haven't lived under a rock for the past half-century. Many have read to your children Dahl's books, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and James and the Giant Peach, or read of his marriage to actress Patricia Neal. Ian Fleming wrote the series of James Bond novels, which saga continues on the Hollywood screen to the present day. And David Ogilvy may have been the most prominent figure in the New York advertising industry during the middle years of the 20th century, for having dreamed up such characters as "the man in the Hathaway shirt." 

Journalist Conant can be counted on to turn in a thoroughly-researched hell-of-a-read. In the process, she sheds light on those nailbiting days leading up to America's entry into the Second World War, adding valuable shading to the conventional wisdom that the decision was simply the result of a personal struggle between FDR and Churchill.