The Landlady (short story)

"The Landlady"
Short story by Roald Dahl
Language	English
Publication
Publisher	The New Yorker
Publication date	28 November 1959

The Landlady is a short story by Roald Dahl.

Plot summary

The story focuses on a 17-year old boy named Billy Weaver who has just stepped into the world of work. Arriving in Bath for a business trip, he looks for a place to stay, and is entranced by a bed and breakfast sign which somehow hypnotizes him into checking out the boardinghouse. He presses the doorbell, and before he can lift his finger from the bell-button, the door opens and a middle-aged landlady appears. She treats him generously, giving him a floor of his own to stay on, and charging him much less than he expected. However, she also emits a sense of spookiness, which, though apparently Billy does not notice, appears quite evident to the reader. In the inn's guestbook, he sees that only two other guests have stayed there—one older, the other younger, and both having arrived earlier than 2 years prior. Billy finds the names vaguely familiar from the newspaper, and on further reflection recalls that they "were both famous for the same thing." Suspicion continues to generate in the reader when the landlady makes a comment about one of the two boys in past tense, to which Billy comments that he must have only left recently. The landlady replies that both of the guests are still residing at the inn. Billy then notices that the dog by the fireplace and the parrot he had noticed earlier were stuffed as he looks closer and touches the dog to examine it. The landlady says that she herself was the taxidermist, and he is impressed. She then tells him, "I stuff all my little pets myself when they pass away," and offers him more tea. Billy refuses because the tea "tasted faintly of bitter almonds". The author leaves us at the climax of the story. The reader is left to infer or wonder what happens to Billy Weaver.

The Aftermath

In many suspense and mystery stories, potassium cyanide is said to have a "bitter almond" taste, such as the one Billy described. Knowing this, the reader can infer that the landlady poisons Billy, and will proceed to stuff him as if he were a dead animal. There is also a comment that one of the other guests had perfect skin, with no marks at all, though, some suggest that the landlady suffers from necrophilia, as she stores dead bodies and preserves them with taxidermy, which may result as necrophilic actions.

The landlady's white hands can be understood as a result of contact with bleach, which is used in taxidermy and has a side effect of bleaching skin. In the story, when Billy sat close to his landlady, he noticed a smell "like pickled walnuts, new leather, or hospital halls", all places and things which would be associated with the scent of bleach. Billy naively proposes a possible motive for the landlady's actions - although he, unaware of her murders, thinks of it as a motive for her generosity - in that the landlady had lost her son in the war and is perhaps trying to find a substitute.