The Visitor (short story)

Plot

Oswald becomes stranded for a night near Cairo at the desert mansion of a wealthy businessman, Abdul Aziz, whose wife and adult daughter are both very beautiful. Oswald plots to seduce either the wife or daughter, and believes he has succeeded after a woman slips into his bedroom under cover of darkness and spends several passionate hours with him, although he cannot see her face and she refuses to converse with him. The next day, Oswald leaves the house none the wiser as to which of the two women he has slept with. The story ends with a twist as Mr Aziz reveals to Oswald that he has a second daughter who lives in seclusion in another part of the house – because she has incurable leprosy.

Publication history

"The Visitor" was first published in the May 1965 issue of Playboy. It was later included in the 1974 collection Switch Bitch.

Norton H Moses states that Dahl's story was likely expanded from an anecdote found in George "Dod" Orsborne's Master of the Girl Pat, published in 1949. Orsborne presented the anecdote as factual, involving a writer known to an editor who then told the story to Orsborne.

Additionally, this story was told at least once by Ian Fleming, from whom Dahl got the plot of "Lamb To The Slaughter". Dahl did not publish it until after Fleming's death.

However, David Ogilvy recalled that Dahl had told the basic story orally as early as 1941, during their association together through British intelligence activities during World War II, with Dahl half-seriously presenting the tale as a true incident that had happened to "a friend".

In other media

Television

In his later years, Alfred Hitchcock occasionally told this story as a black joke during his appearances on American talk shows, most notably during an appearance on The Tomorrow Show on 29 May 1973.

Akhbar's Daughter, a 1987 television pilot associated with Tales from the Darkside, bears many similarities to the Dahl and Orsborne stories.

Norm Macdonald tells a version of this story as a joke on his podcast Norm Macdonald Live, on season 2, episode 6.

References

References

1. (1999). "The Source of Roald Dahl's "The Visitor"". ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews.
2. Orsborne, George "Dod". (1949). "Master of the Girl Pat". Doubleday.
3. (16 February 2024). "The Mysterious Collaborations of Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming".
4. Treglown, Jeremy. (2016). "Roald Dahl: A Biography". Open Road Media.
5. (8 January 2013). "The Tomorrow Show (hosted by Tom Snyder)".
6. (2013). "Dark Energy: Hitchcock's Absolute Camera and the Physics of Cinematic Spacetime". Bloomsbury.
7. "Night Rose: Akhbar's Daughter (1987)".
8. (11 November 2010). "Tales from the Darkside: The Final Season".
9. (June 2014). "Norm Macdonald with Guest Todd Glass (Pt 1)".