Reginald

Reginald - published in 1904 - was the first of Saki's collections of short stories. The eponymous Reginald is an effete, cynical young man-about-town, whose character is a vehicle for Saki's delicicous biting wit satirizing Edwardian high society.

Hector Hugh Munro, better known by his pen name “Saki”, was born in Burma in 1870 where his father was a senior official in the Burma Police. From the age of two he lived with two maiden aunts and his grandmother in Devon and was educated in Exmouth and at the Bedford Grammar School. Later he traveled in Europe with his father. He joined the Burma police but resigned after a year because of ill health and returned to England where he began his writing career as a journalist and short story writer for magazines and newspapers such as The Westminster Gazette, in which the Reginald stories first appeared. Saki is regarded as a master of the short story.

At the start of the First World War he refused a commission, enlisted as a private, and went to France where, in November 1916, he was killed by a shot to the head, his last words being “Put that bloody cigarette out.”

Public Domain (P)2014 Spiders' House Audio