Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches

Saki deployed his scalpel wit against Edwardian England's soft underbelly in these fifteen stories of murder, matrimony, and monstrous manners. The title piece sends the young dandy Reginald to Russia, where his carelessly English sensibility collides with genuine revolutionary danger, setting the tone for a collection that finds horror lurking beneath the tea roses. Other sketches skewer everything from blood-feuds in provincial backwaters to the shopping habits of a certain 'sex that doesn't shop,' each tale delivered with the kind of dry precision that makes a reader feel simultaneously amused and endangered. Saki's characters speak in epigrams while the world burns around them, and his narrators maintain a gentlemanly detachment that somehow makes murder funnier. These are stories for readers who enjoy watching society devour itself.