H.H. Munro
Known British writer Hector Hugh Munro under pen name Saki published his witty and sometimes bitter short stories in collections, such as
The Chronicles of Clovis
(1911).
His sometimes macabre satirized Edwardian society and culture. People consider him a master and often compare him to William Sydney Porter and Dorothy Rothschild Parker. His tales feature delicately drawn characters and finely judged narratives. "The Open Window," perhaps his most famous, closes with the line, "Romance at short notice was her specialty," which thus entered the lexicon. Newspapers first and then several volumes published him as the custom of the time.
His works include
* a full-length play,
The Watched Pot
, in collaboration with Charles Maude;
* two one-act plays;
* a historical study,
The Rise of the Russian Empire
, the only book under his own name;
* a short novel,
The Unbearable Bassington
;
* the episodic
The Westminster Alice
, a parliamentary parody of
Alice in Wonderland
;
* and
When William Came: A Story of London under the Hohenzollerns
, an early alternate history.
Oscar Wilde, Lewis Carroll, and Joseph Rudyard Kipling, influenced Munro, who in turn influenced A. A. Milne, and Pelham Grenville Wodehouse.
“Mother, may I go and maffick,Tear around and hinder traffic?”
“And the vagueness of his alarm added to its terrors; when once you have taken the Impossible into your calculations its possibilities become practically limitless.”
“Miles away, down through an opening in the hills, he could catch glimpses of a road where motor-cars sometimes passed, and yet here, so removed from the arteries of the latest civilization, was a bat-haunted old homestead, where something unmistakably like witchcraft seemed to hold a very practical sway.”
“There was something alike terrifying and piteous in the spectacle of these frail old morsels of humanity consecrating their last flickering energies to the task of making each other wretched. Hatred seemed to be the one faculty which had survived in undiminished vigor where all else was dropping into ordered and symmetrical decay.”
“It was the happiest Christmas Eve he had ever spent. To quote his own words, he had a rotten Christmas.”
“A little inaccuracy sometimes saves a ton of explanation.”