THE CANDY MAN.(Roald Dahl)

Roald Dahl, the British author of children's books, wrote in a tiny cottage at the end of a trellised pathway canopied with twisting linden trees. He called it the "writing hut," and, since Dahl was nearly six feet six, he must have inhabited it like a giant in an elf's house. Dahl died in 1990, at the age of seventy-four, but one day a year his widow, Felicity, invites children to the estate where he lived, in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, and local families swarm in like guests at Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory. There are games--Splat the Rat and Guess the Number of Sweeties in the Jar--and tea, cakes, and orange squash for sale. An R.A.F. band plays in the shade of the house. This year, I attended myself. The appointed day was hot and bright, with a clear sky that Dahl would have described as "milky blue." The girls wore sherbet-colored canvas hats; the boys, their pale legs poking out of shorts, looked destined for sunburns. Many of the kids peered inside the writing hut--they weren't allowed in--and seemed to discover there further evidence that Dahl was a strangely sympathetic adult who shared a preoccupation with candy, a clinical fascination with the body, and a love of ingenious, self-devised schemes.

The adults who looked into the hut were less impressed. The walls, lined with Styrofoam, were stained sepia from all the cigarettes Dahl smoked; there was a grotty wing chair; and wires for a jury-rigged heating system dangled from the ceiling. "You'd expect it to be grander," one woman said. But the kids saw more possibilities in a musty old hut of one's own. They liked the fact that Dahl, unsatisfied with desks, had designed a baize-covered writing board, to balance on his lap just so. And they loved that he kept, on a side table, a jar containing gristly bits of his own spine, which had been removed during an operation on his lower back. Next to the jar was a waxy-looking knob that turned out to be Dahl's hip bone, along with a titanium replacement.

"It makes a good letter opener," one little boy said of the prosthetic hip.

"Has it got blood on it?" another asked hopefully.

Several young visitors asked for permission to hold the ball of chocolate-bar wrappers that Dahl had made as a young man; he scrunched a new one into the ball each day, after eating his habitual lunchtime treat. (Now hard and surprisingly heavy, the wad resembles a small cannonball.) Still, what seemed to excite the children the most was the paperback collection of Dahl's own work. "Look!" several of them cried. "There are the books!"

Dahl, whose first book for children, "The Gremlins," was published in 1943, and whose last, "The Minpins," was published posthumously, in 1991, has been astonishingly popular for nearly half a century. In a 2000 survey, British readers named him their favorite author. Around the world, more than ten million copies of his books sold last year. This number is all the more striking because Dahl did not write an extended series, which is often the key to mega-success as a children's writer. Nor, in an era when many children's books are specifically marketed to either boys or girls, does his work appeal primarily to one gender. Six of his books have been made into movies, and a monster-budget version of "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" (1964), directed by Tim Burton and starring Johnny Depp as the daft, dangerous, and endlessly inventive confectioner, Willy Wonka, opens in July.

Dahl is also, however, a children's writer whom many adults over the years have disliked or distrusted, though they have not always found it easy to say why. It's not because his work is sexually explicit (a common complaint about, say, Judy Blume's). There is no hint of sex, or even romance, in Dahl's children's books, most of which are intended for preadolescent children. Nor are they disappointing as pieces of writing--quite the opposite. Dahl's books, which move along at a seductively brisk pace, are propelled by crisp verbs ("clambered," "chirruped," "rasped") and delightful made-up words ("swishfiggler," "snozzcumber," "Vermicious Knids"). He plays exuberantly with synonyms ("He's dotty!" they cried. "He's barmy!" "He's batty!" "He's nutty!" "He's screwy!" "He's wacky!"). The tone is conversational, confiding, and funny, with a liberal sprinkling of exclamation points and phrases written entirely in capital letters. It's as if the sentences came embedded with their own stage directions. (Like "Winnie the Pooh" and "Alice in Wonderland," Dahl's books originated as stories told aloud to children; he had five of his own.) In a Dahl book, you are never out of earshot of a sly authorial voice that ...