His own short story

This is an academic monograph on Saki’s literary work, which does not pretend to add much to the work of his biographers, but summarises and quotes lavishly from the evidence available about his short and rather secret life. It begins with the miserable childhood and the odious aunts and ends with his death aged 44 at the hands of a German sniper at Beaumont Hamel in 1916. Its ten chapters include four which focus mainly on the fiction, but the other chapters, which are mainly biographical and arranged more or less chronologically, also include copious references to his writings.

Like most of Saki’s fans, Professor Byrne is curious about his life, which is badly documented and enigmatic. His mother died when he was a baby, and his father was in the Burma police, so he was brought up by two unspeakable aunts in Devon. As a child he was regarded as delicate. He went to two different boarding-schools, and left rather early to spend a few years travelling with his sister and father in Switzerland and Germany, during which period he met and made friends with an elderly John Addington Symonds.

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Aged 22 he followed his father into the Burma police, but was invalided home after little more than a year. On recovering he researched and wrote a history of Russia and then began contributing a successful series of political parodies to the Westminster Gazette, which had considerable success. This helped him to get more work as a journalist and humorist: his newspaper work included the stories which were later collected in volume form. He also became foreign correspondent of the Morning Post in Russia and the Balkans.

The few witnesses to this period describe a buttoned-up man-about-town; though there is little surviving evidence about his sex life, the stories certainly seem to indicate an interest in boys in late adolescence, and his most assiduous biographer, A.