NB: This is a re-post from two years ago because I have a soft spot for Saki.

It’s the birthday of Scottish writer Hector Hugh Munro or H.H. Munro (1870-1916, #diedtooyoung), better known as Saki. Though he was born in Burma where his father was an officer with the police, Saki was mostly raised in England by strict, unsympathetic aunts who provided a lot of material for his short stories that satirized strict, unsympathetic aunts.

Saki started his writing life as a journalist and even wrote a serious work, the history The Rise of the Russian Empire, but soon became known for his short stories. One of his most famous, “The Open Window,” is a brilliant example of Saki’s macabre sense of humor. My personal favorite is “The Storyteller,” which showcases one of Saki’s stern and unlovable aunt characters. The aunt is traveling with her nieces and nephew by train and is unable to keep them content with her moralistic, dull storytelling, so a bachelor traveling in the same compartment steps in. He tells a very different story, in which a well-behaved little girl is eaten by a wolf. The children are delighted, the aunt scandalized, and the bachelor well-satisfied to think that in the future, the children will beg the aunt for “improper stories” in public.

When World War I began, Saki was 43 and not expected to join up, but he did so anyway. He was killed in France by a German sniper after supposedly uttering his final words: “Put that bloody cigarette out!”

Influenced by such writers as Rudyard Kipling and Oscar Wilde, Saki himself influenced Noel Coward and P.G. Wodehouse. His commonality with Wodehouse can readily be seen in Wodehouse’s famous remark, “It is no use telling me there are bad aunts and good aunts. At the core, they are all alike. Sooner or later, out pops the cloven hoof.”

Fun idea: for Christmas, buy The Complete Saki for your favorite aunt. Or treat yourself.

Have a fine and freezing Wednesday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.