Remembering Saki on the Centenary of his Death

Hector Hugh Munro died 100 years ago tomorrow. I'm pleased to say that I'm far from the only one marking Saki's centenary.

The BBC put together an excellent 3-hour celebration of stories and new documentary material on Radio 4 Extra. It's available on iPlayer for the next month, and, as is the way of Radio 4 Extra, will probably pop up again and again in the months to come.

You can listen to it here.

Since 2007, Richard Crowest has been uploading his readings of Saki's stories to the web. They're also available as free podcasts, and from a quick sampling, they are very good indeed. They are available on iTunes, or via his website here. Mr Crowest is doing a live show of Saki stories on the centenary itself, at the Leicester Square Theatre:

A Century of Saki, Leicester Square Theatre, Monday 14 November 2016, 7pm

You can book tickets here, and read the press release here. (I've only just found out about this event, otherwise I would have been plugging it for a while! I wish I could be there...)

The Guardian noted the centenary in their Week in Books column on the 12th, and made this laudable comment:

"If only Saki were still alive. The age of Trump needs his brutal dismantling of human stupidities."

The Guardian's piece also has quotes from two famous fans, worth repeating here:

"In all literature, he was the first to employ successfully a wildly outrageous premise in order to make a serious point. I love that. And today the best of his stories are still better than the best of just about every other writer around." – Roald Dahl

"Saki's stories are highly relevant to any society in which convention is confused with morality, and all societies confuse convention with morality, so he'll always be relevant." – Will Self

Kirkus Reviews remembers Saki here.

The Saki Centenary Facebook page is here.

Details of a 'lost' Saki story now reprinted as a limited edition are here.

The blissfully perfect combination of Tom Baker reading Sredni Vashtar can be enjoyed here.

A 270 Year-Old Book, With A 100 Year-Old WW1 Story...

Here's a very, very special book. It fairly reeks of history. It's a breviary, Breviarium Sanctae Ambianensis Ecclesiae to be precise, dated 1746.

A lovely book then, not in particularly good nick to be sure, but pretty good considering it's over a quarter of a millennium old. It's also very rare: no copies are currently for sale anywhere online (that I could find).

What really sets it part though is the inscription at the front...

The inscription reads (with thanks to the commenter below who corrected my initial transcription):

Picked up at Martinsorte on Somme Front in a ruined home, in 1916, by Captain H. J. Robson R.A.M.C (T.F)*

Just hope the advance of the tanks is before the fall of Theepvalle** and Beaumont Hamel.

* Royal Army Medical Corps (Territorial Force). The Territorial Force was a forerunner of the Territorial Army.

** Thiepval.

I'm afraid it will take someone with better knowledge of the events of The Battle of the Somme than me to work out when this apparently contemporary battlefield inscription was written, but if Captain Robson is talking about the potential fall of Beaumont Hamel, then I *think* that puts it towards the end, in mid-November 1916. (This has particular significance for me, as it was on November 14th 1916, during the Beaumont Hamel offensive, that my favourite writer, Hector Hugh Munro, aka Saki, was shot and killed.)

The book is now quite worn, and moulded as if it was stuck in a pocket, or perhaps a kitbag, for a goodly while.

According to this record in the London Gazette of 19th October, 1917, Captain Robson survived the Somme, but retired from The Royal Army Medical Corps due to ill-health...

All in all a fascinating object, especially in this centenary year. I don't own this book, and though I can put interested parties in touch with the dealer who does own it, I'm not sure he'd ever be able to bring himself to part with it...

From Bollywood to Michael Sheen: Saki (H. H. Munro) adaptations on the YouTube

He's not been mentioned here for a little while, but longtime readers of this blog will know of the enthusiasm round these parts for the work of H. H. Munro, better known by his pen name Saki, who wrote brilliantly comic short stories where genteel society collided with often chaotic, sometimes even supernatural elements.

That admiring forewords to collections of his work have been written by everyone from A.A. Milne and Noel Coward to Will Self and The League of Gentlemen's Jeremy Dyson is proof enough of his influence on a wide selection of British writers since his untimely death on a WW1 battlefield in 1916.

He's not exactly a household name though, due in part perhaps to his stories never having made a successful jump to the great populariser of the 20th century, television. (Would P.G. Wodehouse still be quite as popular today without the efforts of Fry and Laurie? Discuss.)

That's not to say Saki has never been adapted for the screen though, far from it. Below is quick romp through some YouTube links which will prove of great interest to Saki Fanciers.

First up is a programme which has only recently (February 2015) been posted online, and what a treat it is. In 1962, Granada broadcast an 8-part series called Saki: The Improper Stories of H. H. Munro. I knew of this production's existence, but had long given up hope of seeing any of it. It's a no-frills, studio-based affair, which would have been performed pretty much as live (if not *actually* live), but with cast members including the great Richard Vernon and Fenella Fielding at the top of their game, it's a pleasure to watch.

Fast-forwarding several decades and spinning to the other side of the Earth, here are two Indian adaptations of the same short story, 'Dusk'. Perhaps there was an 'Adapt Dusk' competition, or it was set as homework at film school or something...

Here's another pair of takes on a story, this time 'The Interlopers', one of Saki's bleakest tales. The second is somewhat more polished than the first...

... and for good measure, here's a puppet version...

'The Open Window' is deservedly one of Saki's best-known and most anthologised tales, so to finish off, two versions of it: the first is a 1980s version from Alfred Hitchcock Presents, the second a quite wonderful short film adaptation (retitled 'The Open Doors') from 2004, starring a pitch-perfect Michael Sheen. (Has Sheen ever not been pitch perfect in anything?) If you only watch one link on this post, watch this one. It's brilliant.