The reputation of British writer H. H. Munro--more commonly known as Saki--rests primarily on his short stories conveying whimsical humor, fascination with the odd and eerie, and worldly disillusionment with hypocrisy and banality. Written between the end of Queen Victoria's reign and the beginning of World War I, Saki's works memorialize the comfortable Edwardian world of upper-class town houses, tea parties, and weekends in the country that his characters deride but never completely lose faith in. The stories present characters who, through capriciousness or eccentric behavior, get into odd situations from which they usually escape by means of their quick wits. Owing something to the witty paradoxes of Irish playwright and poet Oscar Wilde, the clever remarks and cynical views of Saki's characters expose the arbitrariness and artificiality of their society. Like the fiction of American short-story writer William Sydney Porter (O. Henry), Saki's narratives often employ surprise endings, but his stories featuring children battling adults and strangely human animals go beyond O.
