Hector Hugh Munro was born in Akyab, in Burma, where his father was an officer in the colonial police. When he was two, his mother was charged by a cow and died of the shock. His father sent the children back to England, to be raised in Devon by their grandmother and two aunts, who were strict, quarrelsome and, as he remembered them, cruel. Those aunts would appear, thinly disguised, in story after story.

As a young man Munro tried the Burmese police himself, caught malaria and went home. He became a journalist in London, writing political satire, and then a foreign correspondent in the Balkans, Warsaw, St Petersburg and Paris. He took his pen name, Saki, from the cupbearer in the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.

His short stories, collected in books like Reginald, The Chronicles of Clovis and Beasts and Super-Beasts, are elegant, cruel and very funny. Their heroes are often witty young men or clever, ruthless children; their victims are pompous adults. In “Sredni Vashtar,” a sickly boy worships a polecat-ferret he keeps in a hutch, and prays to it to deal with the guardian who torments him. It does.

“The Open Window” is perhaps his most famous. A nervous man named Framton Nuttel, sent to the country for a rest cure, pays a call at a house where he is entertained by the owner’s fifteen-year-old niece. She tells him a tragic story about the French window that is left open every evening, for the uncle and cousins who went out shooting three years ago and never came back. Then, as dusk falls, figures appear walking across the lawn toward the window. The last line of the story is one of the best in the form: “Romance at short notice was her speciality.”

When the First World War began, Munro was forty-three, well over the age for service. He enlisted anyway, as a private, and refused a commission. He was killed by a sniper in France on November 14, 1916, while sheltering in a shell crater. His last words were reportedly a command to another soldier to put out his cigarette.