Saki has been known for decades as a master of the short story form. In his "Introduction" to The Penguin Complete Saki, Noel Coward finds that Saki's tales "are dated only by the fact that they evoke an atmosphere and describe a society which vanished in the baleful summer of 1914." Saki may belong to a particular time, and his pen may have been stopped in the trenches of World War I, but his stories have a broad appeal that continues to this day. His story "The Open Window" is one of the most frequently anthologized stones in the English language. Biographies and critical assessments of Saki's stories often treat "The Open Window" very succinctly. One reason for the comparative lack of critical attention paid to this tale, as compared to that paid to other stories whose influence has extended so far, may be its brevity. That...