Saki (H.H. Munro)(1870–1916)

Hector Hugh Munro, who wrote as Saki, was born at Akyab on the Burmese coast on 18 December 1870, the son of Charles Augustus Munro, an Inspector-General of the Burma Police. The Munros were Highland gentry from Foulis on the Cromarty Firth. He was raised and schooled in Devon and at Bedford Grammar, and at twenty-three took a commission in the Burma Police on his father's example before turning to writing in London.

From 1896 he wrote for the Westminster Gazette and the Morning Post under the pen name Saki, taken from the cup-bearer of the Rubaiyat. The Westminster Alice (1902), Reginald (1904), Reginald in Russia (1910), The Chronicles of Clovis (1911) and Beasts and Super-Beasts (1914) made him the master of the very short, very polished Edwardian story, in which drawing-room complacency is upended by speaking ferrets, escaped wolves and quick-witted children.

His comic sentence became a model for the writers who came after him: P.G. Wodehouse said he had learned half of what he knew about it from Saki, and Roald Dahl said the same. Through the late 1900s and early 1910s he worked as a foreign correspondent for the Morning Post in the Balkans, Russia and Paris, reading the shifting European order with the same clear eye he turned on the Edwardian drawing room.

When the First World War came he enlisted as an ordinary trooper in the 2nd King Edward's Horse in September 1914, at the age of forty-three, declining on principle the staff commission his rank and reputation would have given him. He transferred to the 22nd Royal Fusiliers, again in the ranks, turned down a commission three times, and served on the Somme as the literary uncle of a platoon of men twenty years his junior.

He was killed on the Somme on 13 November 1916, and his name stands on the Thiepval Memorial. The Munro name carries his memory as the most polished short-story writer of the Edwardian decade, a stylist whose mischief in the drawing room has kept its edge for a century. The Chronicles of Clovis has not been out of print since 1911.