Hello, true. Hello, true spies listeners. Welcome back to our new assignment, True Spies, debrief. If you were a child in the past 40 or 50 years, you likely read

books like the BFG or Matilda or James and the Giant Peach, or maybe you enjoyed Charlie and

the Chocolate Factory with Gene Wilder or Timothy Shalame, or the recent Wes Anderson films, such as

the wonderful story of Henry Sugar.

All of these stories emerged from the imagination of one man, one spy.

Writer Aaron Tracy tells the surprising tale in his podcast series, The Secret World of Roald

Dahl.

And this week, True Spies producer Morgan Childs chats with Aaron about the legendary author's life in espionage.

So, Aaron, in full transparency, for years I have known that Roald Dahl was a complicated person, and yet I have

put my hands over my ears and eyes because I know that there are skeletons in this man's closet,

and yet there's no book that I've loved in my life as much as Matilda, probably. So I bring this up

because I don't think I'm alone in that feeling. So I want to ask you,

knowing that you're doing kind of triggering work around a really beloved author, why dig up

the story of this writer? What were you trying to do with this series? Yeah. I mean, the anti-semitism

question concerning role dolls is very close to my heart, but it's not the reason that I wanted to tackle Dull.

There's a Broadway play, actually, that has just begun, that started in England and transferred to the West End, that won all the Olivier Awards last year,

specifically about Dahl's anti-Semitism.

And I think that work by Mark Rosenblatt does a really great job of diving into those

learning questions about, about Dahl's anti-Semitism.

For me, I was really interested in sort of getting a whole picture of the man.

He lived this really, really strange, interesting life. I think probably most people don't know.

He didn't write his first children's book until his late 40s. So he had all of these lives

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