Saki

Saki was the pen name of Hector Hugh Munro, born on 18 December 1870 in Akyab, Burma, where his father was an officer in the Burma police. His mother died when he was a baby, after she was charged by a cow during a visit to England, and Hector and his brother and sister were sent to be raised by their grandmother and two aunts in Devon. By his sister’s account the aunts were domineering and the household was joyless. Readers have long seen them in the tyrannical guardians of his fiction, above all the cousin in Sredni Vashtar, whose small charge worships a polecat-ferret in the toolshed.

After a short spell in the Burma police, which ended in malaria, he moved to London to write. He worked as a political satirist for the Westminster Gazette and spent six years as a foreign correspondent for the Morning Post in the Balkans, Warsaw, St Petersburg and Paris. His stories appeared in newspapers and were gathered into collections: Reginald (1904), Reginald in Russia (1910), The Chronicles of Clovis (1911) and Beasts and Super-Beasts (1914). The pen name is usually traced to the cupbearer in the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, though Munro never fully explained it.

When war broke out in 1914 he was forty-three, over the age limit, but he enlisted as a private anyway and turned down offers of a commission. He was killed by a German sniper near Beaumont-Hamel, on the Somme, in November 1916. According to the men with him, his last words were “Put that bloody cigarette out!”

A Saki story is a drawing-room comedy with a trapdoor in it. The tone is light, the dialogue epigrammatic, the adults pompous and the children and animals much cleverer than anyone gives them credit for. Then something wild comes through. It might be a hyena, a werewolf, the god Pan, or just a teenage girl with a talent for lying, as in The Open Window. Saki’s sympathies usually lie with the wild thing.

All six Saki stories here are short, and most can be read in under ten minutes. The Open Window is the obvious place to start. The Interlopers is his bleakest ending. The Music on the Hill and Gabriel-Ernest are his two stories of the old gods turning up in the English countryside.