The Complete Saki

For years, I have been aware of H.H. Munro, known as Saki.  An English Edwardian author known for his witty short stories.  Plenty of authors whom I read and admire reference or quote him.  

Yet, for whatever reasons, I have never read him.  Its sort of like Oscar Wilde's plays.  I am pretty certain that I will eventually read them and enjoy them but there are always other things to read first.

For some years I have had the Penguin The Complete Saki floating around on my shelves and in my stacks.  After I moved downstairs for my feet and leg surgeries, The Complete Saki was one of the books that brought down, anticipating the mobility constraints of three sequential surgeries might nudge Saki out of the stacks and into the reading queue.  

And indeed, last night, I pulled out The Complete Saki and read a couple of the stories.  And another this morning.  And probably more to follow.  

Light, witty, full of bon mots and acid insight.  Probably more of a dip-into collection rather than a read-right-through book, but we'll see. 

From the introduction.

Hector Hugh Munro was born in 1870 in Burma, the son of a senior official in the Burma police. He was brought up in Devonshire and went to school in Exmouth and at Bedford Grammar School; later his father retired and took over his education by travelling with him widely in Europe. He joined the Burma police, but resigned because of ill health after a year’s service. He began his writing career with political sketches for the Westminster Gazette and then worked as a foreign correspondent for the Morning Post in the Balkans, Russia and Paris. During this time he brought out his first collection of short stories, Reginald (1904). This was followed by Reginald in Russia (1910), The Chronicles of Clovis (1911), The Unbearable Bassington (1912) and Beasts and Superbeasts (1914). In 1914 he published When William Came, a pro-war fantasy of England under German occupation; his ‘patriotic’ sketches from the Western Front were collected as The Square Egg (1924). He enlisted as a private in 1914, refused a commission, went to France and was killed in 1916 at Beaumont Hamel. His pseudonym ‘Saki’ is taken from the last stanza of The Ruba’iyat of Omar Khayyam.