The Open Window
About this story
A twist of the knife delivered with a smile: Saki's most anthologised story sends the nervous Framton Nuttel to a placid country house, where a self-possessed fifteen-year-old niece regales him with a family tragedy — three men who walked out through the open French window one October afternoon and were swallowed by the bog, never to return. The grieving aunt keeps the window open still, waiting for them. Then, at dusk, three figures come padding back across the lawn. In barely a thousand words, Saki springs one of literature's most perfect surprise endings. Ranked beside Maupassant and O. Henry, this master of the mischievous, macabre Edwardian tale will leave you grinning at your own fright.
By the numbers
About the author
Hector Hugh Munro (1870–1916), who wrote under the pen name Saki, was a British author widely regarded as one of the acknowledged masters of the English short story, prized for the witty, mischievous and often macabre tales with which he satirised Edwardian society. His major collections include The Chronicles of Clovis (1911) and Beasts and Super-Beasts (1914), while his best-known individual stories are «Sredni Vashtar», «The Interlopers» and «The Open Window». Critics have ranked him alongside Guy de Maupassant and O. Henry as a craftsman of the surprise ending, and his influence runs on through P. G. Wodehouse, Noël Coward and Roald Dahl. «The Open Window» first appeared in the Westminster Gazette in 1911 and was collected in Beasts and Super-Beasts; it is his most frequently anthologised story and a textbook model of the twist-ending form. Munro was killed by a sniper at the Battle of the Ancre in France in November 1916.
Recognition
Perhaps the best instance of this is to be found in that extraordinary fantasia, 'The Open Window'... after an almost intolerable situation has been suddenly converted into comedy with a jerk like that of a cinematograph, the strange conduct of the young lady is summed up in seven words: 'romance at short notice was her specialty.'
Saki writes like an enemy. Society has bored him to the point of murder. Our laughter is only a note or two short of a scream of fear.
Unhappiness wonderfully aids the memory, and the best stories of Munro are all of childhood, its humour and its comedy as well as its cruelty and unhappiness.
Delicate, airy, lucid, precise... he can pass into the uncanny, the tragic, into mocking fairy-tales grimmer than Grimm.
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