British O. Henry

SOMEONE LIKE You (359 pp.)--Roald Do/)/--Knopf ($3.50).

Mary Maloney was a tender, loving wife, but when her policeman husband tried to leave her, she crushed his skull with the nearest thing at hand: a leg of lamb fresh from the freezer. Without quite knowing it, Mary had committed a perfect crime. Before the commiserating police have finished their investigation at the Widow Maloney's house, the murder weapon has been cooked and eaten.

Mary's little leg of lamb is an unusual weapon, but no more unusual than Roald Dahl's plots. Someone Like You is a collection of 18 of the 37-year-old Briton's quietly savage tales. They are.often macabre and always bizarre, involving chicanery, murder, dismemberment or some more commonplace drawing-room horror.

In Taste, an unprincipled gourmet bets heavily on the perceptiveness of his nose and palate, puts on a superb demonstration of winetasting, but outsmarts himself. In Skin, a down-and-outer discovers that the portrait tattooed on his back is signed by a famous painter and is worth a fortune, so he places himself in the hands of a grafter who offers him a life of ease, only to lose the very skin off his back. In Mr. Feasey, two earnest cheats bet all their money on the ringer they enter in a greyhound race, but the 17 bookies who take their bets prove to be just as imaginative and crooked as they are.

Author Dahl is an adroit craftsman who knows how to make the unlikely seem probable. He builds long bridges of suspense, then skillfully carries his stories across to his predetermined points. It is not surprising, in view of his qualities, that he has been overpraised. Long on plot, short on character, his stories extract their effectiveness from anecdotal gimmicks and surprise endings. One test of a fine story is its rereadability, and this, naturally, is a test that few of these modern O. Henry tales can meet.

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