BOOK REVIEW : ‘Ah, Sweet,’ Engaging, Quirky Tales From ‘40s : AH, SWEET MYSTERY OF LIFE: STORIES BY ROALD DAHL<i> Drawings by John Lawrence</i> Knopf$18.95, 132 pages

Written just after World War II, when Roald Dahl was a stripling of 30 living in a rural Buckinghamshire village, the stories in “Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life” show both the quaintness absent in latter-day Dahl and the beginnings of the macabre humor so marked in his mature work. While the quaintness is the inadvertent result of time and progress, the quirkiness seems deliberate, giving the pastoral incidents and settings a sawtooth ridge.

In several of these tales, the author is a gentleman observer, marking time by working in a filling station run by a resourceful country character, Claud. Different in every other respect, the men share a passion for betting on horses and greyhounds, as well as a delight in “the sporting type of stealing . . . poaching pheasants or tickling trout or nicking a few plums from a farmer’s orchard . . . practices condoned by the right people in the countryside. There is a delicious element of risk in them, especially in the poaching, and a good deal of skill is required.”

Though author and poacher are an odd couple, they’re an efficient team, devising elaborate scams, turning both failures and successes into equally engaging fiction. Much of the gambling is done at “flapping tracks,” clandestine dog races held in farmyards--analogous to that great American institution, the floating crap game. At the flapping tracks, six greyhounds chase a stuffed white rabbit pulled along the course by a man who turns with his hands the pedals of an inverted bicycle--a simple, portable device easily packed up at the first sign of a constable.

The flapping tracks are a far cry from Ascot, attracting an altogether different clientele. In place of Royal Enclosures and picnics catered by Fortnum and Mason are a gaggle of “gypsies and spivs and all manner of unsavory characters who bring their dogs to race. Shady bookmakers set up their stands along the side of the hedge,” drawing owners and breeders with even looser ethical standards or none whatever.

These meetings are battles of wits in which creative low trickery often counts for more than the swiftest or best-trained dog. The story “Mr. Feasey” deals with one such elaborate swindle, and it is a delight from slow start to flash finish, thoroughly involving the reader in the nefarious ways of the track and its special lore.

“The Ratcatcher” is, of course, about one such specialist, a peculiarly repellent member of a profession that hardly attracts the best and the brightest. Even so, this character is exceptional on several counts, not the least of which is his appearance, calculated to inspire rapport with his prey if not with his clients.

“Parson’s Pleasure” is one of the longer pieces, ironic in the O. Henry mode but comic in Dahl’s personal way. A cagey antique dealer outfits himself as a clergyman for buying tours through the countryside, confident that his disguise will inspire trust and confidence. He’s a dab hand at this game, chatting up the home owners about crops and weather as he casts a shrewd eye on their farmhouse furnishings.

Mr. Boggis has made dozens of splendid buys with this simple ruse, pretending that the spare side chair or the shabby parlor chest is just what he needs for the parsonage or the vestry, when in fact his acquisitions go directly into the shop in Chelsea, where they’re polished, marked up and sold for an enormous profit. “He could become grave and charming for the aged, obsequious for the rich, sober for the godly, masterful for the weak, mischievous for the widow, arch and saucy for the spinster”--a veritable man for all seasons. In this story, he is finally outwitted by a family of bumpkins, while the reader winces and rejoices.

“The Champion of the World” deals with a marvelously ingenious and incredibly tedious method of pheasant poaching invented by the versatile Claud and reluctantly agreed to by the author. The intricacies of pheasant poaching being a relatively novel subject for American readers, the story provides amusement and education.

Slight as they are, these tales will charm Dahl’s adult admirers, who may have wished he wrote as prolifically for grown-ups as he has for children. No need to envy children their “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” when Dahl has retrieved this collection especially for their elders.

Next: Carolyn See reviews “Finding Signs” by Sharlene Baker.