A HUNDRED YEARS OF SAKI.

IT is a hundred years since 'Saki's' first story appeared in St Paul's Magazine. It is not one of his best, lacking his usual elegance and concision, and it was never reprinted in his lifetime, but it still bears all the hallmarks of a distinctive new talent. 'Dogged' centres on Artemius Gibbon, a nervous, middle-aged bachelor who comes into possession of 'a rakish looking fox-terrier' with a reputation for 'naked and unashamed depravity'. At first he wonders if he can tame it. Then it attacks his landlady, wrecks his flat and develops the habit of jumping into passing taxi cabs, forcing its owner to follow. Artemius' thralldom to the beast is reflected in the story's last lines. 'Does he belong to you?' a friend asks. 'No', Artemius replies, 'I belong to him. Body and soul'.

The reversal is typical of Saki. Owner becomes pet and vice versa. There is the familiar appetite for destruction, later to be found in hyenas, tigers, monkeys, mice, wolves and polecats, not to mention small children. Finally there is the sophisticated manipulation of genre as farce, fairy-tale, Gothic, the comedy of manners, melodrama and parable are all blended to chronicle the hounding down of Artemius.

It is the work of a genuine original. 'Saki' was the pseudonym of Hector Hugh Munro, who was born in 1870 and killed in the First World War. Among his contemporaries, Kenneth Grahame and Rudyard Kipling experimented with animal narrative. D. H. Lawrence had a similarly savage contempt for the ostensible resilience of European manhood. Joyce shared a gift for immaculate parody. But nobody can match Saki for wit, grace and energy, and nobody engages so readily with his audience.

In later stories he would hone this talent to perfection. The ingenuity of 'Sredni Vashtar', in which an only child turns a half-savage polecat into a pagan God, is attested to by its continual presence in short-story anthologies. The appeal of 'Tobermory', in which a talking cat develops an unsettling penchant for plain speaking, is confirmed by a recent Daily Telegraph poll in which it was named the Nation's favourite Saki story. The uniqueness of 'The Easter Egg', in which an attempt to foil an anarchist plot culminates in the spectacle of an exploding baby, perhaps speaks for itself.

Of course, not everyone has agreed with this. When Saki's stories first began to appear a century ago, they were universally regarded as 'harmless fun', rarely deemed worthy of a review in the literary columns. This view was tacitly encouraged by Saki, who seemed happy to pose as a 'gentleman amateur'. Although his stories regularly appeared in the Morning Post and Westminster Gazette, he did not seek to collect them himself, tending to wait for publishers to suggest an edition. Many of his early satires (The Not So Stories, The Quattrains of Uttar Al Ghibe) remain uncollected. When the stories were turned into books, he gave little or no time to revision, partly reflecting the unparalleled concision and control of the original versions, but partly too revealing a cavalier attitude to his stories once they were out of his hands. He hated highfalutin literary friends. It is hardly surprising that he was seen as a lightweight.

This has changed. Over the last 100 years, there has been persistent interest in Saki's distinctive kind of storytelling. This is primarily thanks to the public who have kept his stories in print and alerted more highbrow readers to the virtuoso craftsman they have overlooked. But other writers too have realised that he is indispensable to an understanding of the possibilities of fiction. For G. K. Chesterton, he is 'sparkling and impenetrable'. For Graham Greene, 'the absurdities fly back and forth, they dazzle and delight'. For Evelyn Waugh, he is the author of 'six or seven masterpieces'. Noel Coward called him 'my favourite writer'. Tom Sharpe confessed he was a Said 'addict'.

All this has meant that Saki has remained in continual circulation, even if he has not always been on University syllabuses and inside literary supplements. Indeed he is one of those writers who -- through good luck or acute prescience -- seems to suit the century that followed him. His emphasis on black comedy must have seemed peculiar alongside Wilde and Pinero, but in a century m which comic writers delight in the destructive and absurd (Waugh, Pynchon or even Tarantino), Saki's stories of ingenuous assassination and puerile immorality seem apt. Likewise, the supreme brevity of the stories, which responded to the fragmentation and anxiety of his own fin de siecle, has seemed enduringly apposite in a disorientating, breakneck century and especially in our own fin de siecle in which the collective attention span has never been shorter and soundbite culture never more prevalent (The extent of it is perhaps best reflected in Tony Blair's soundbite on the Northern Ireland peace process: 'Now is not the time fo r soundbites'). Moreover, Saki's stories are always about stories. In 'The Seventh Pullet', Blenkinthrope tells his tall tale to a crowded railway carriage to relieve the monotony of his existence. In 'The Story Teller' a bachelor spins a yam about a 'horribly good girl' to keep a group of hyperactive children quiet. In 'The Open Window', Mrs Sappleton's niece invents a ghost story about her aunt out of chronic boredom. Adapting the 'frame' narrative, Saki always makes us aware of who is telling the story, and how, and why. The twentieth century has also seen narrative becoming the subject of narrative. Modernists like Eliot and Pound remind us of the poems that have been written before. Postmodernists like Rushdie and Carter people their stories with compulsive tale-tellers, often as a way of suggesting that all cultural concepts (gender, race) are fictions.

So Saki has reason to celebrate his centenary. His has grown into the twentieth century -- or perhaps it has grown into him. His bad taste narratives are now marks of good taste. Certainly there are now an unprecedented number of editions. He is available in both Wordsworth and Penguin [pounds]1 classics. Penguin also publish full-price editions of the Complete Stories and The Chronicles of Clovis. Tobermory and Other Stories is published by Phoenix. Everyman have also produced a selection. The OUP edition of Short Stories and The Unbearable Bassington contains an invaluable introduction by John Carey. Considering the cult nature of his reputation in 1916, it is surely both surprising and significant that he now outsells archetypal 'Edwardians' like Beerbohm, Chesterton and J. M. Barrie.

Indeed there is perhaps only one reason for concern. While critics like Jacqueline Rose and Leonee Ormond have written about J. M. Barrie's legacy, there is nowhere to go for the Saki fan who wants to read about those other Boys Who Never Grew Up, Reginald and Clovis. True, there is a biography. Written by A. J. Langguth in 1981, this gives us invaluable information about the life behind the art. A miserable childhood, brought up by two vicious spinster aunts in a permanently locked-and-shuttered Devon cottage, finds its way into 'Sredni Vashtar' and 'The Lumber Room'. A job in the Burmese Imperial police, an experience repeated by Orwell in the 1920s, is drawn on for the last chapters of The Unbearable Bassington. Five years as a foreign correspondent in Macedonia and St. Petersburg give him the storylines for 'Cross Currents', 'The Name Day' and 'The Yarkand Manner'. A lifetime of closeted, but promiscuous, homosexual activity arguably drives the vengeful, joyous subversiveness of Reginald, Bertie Van Than , Comus, Gabriel-Ernest, Adrian and other protagonists.

Yet biography only allows us to speculate. Academics have always been wary of Saki, perhaps because he is too 'easy' or too funny. His fans have not helped out by saying things like: 'Fewer writers are less profitable to write about' (Christopher Morley). He is not to be ruined by explanation. But it is a shame because a critical work on Saki would fill in many of the gaps in his literary development and complete his rehabilitation. He was never just a humorist, he always, to quote Wilde on (naturally) Wilde: 'Stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of (his) age'. His representation of childhood owes much to his consciousness of the newly emergent Edwardian 'nuclear family' (fewer children, greater supervision) and can be closely compared with Freud's analysis of the psychological pressures on the child. His love of animals owes much to his reading of Darwin and his consequent interest in brief, fatal feuds. His valorization of folklore and paganism (especially Pan worship) and his disdain for org anized morality can be traced to his understanding of Nietzsche. This is without mentioning the complexity of his literary evolution -- how a series of newspaper parodies of Kipling, Wilde, Edward Fitzgerald and Lewis Carroll showed him patiently working through his stylistic influences.

Still, compared to the situation 100 years ago, Saki and his readers have reasons to be cheerful. In 1930, writing for the New York Times Book Review, Edith H. Walton called him an 'enchanting by-path'. Now he looks increasingly like a main road -- with popular appeal and contemporary relevance re-routing the canon. As was also the case with Wilde, Wells, Kipling, Waugh and Larkin, it would be surprising if academics did not eventually answer the call. In the meantime, the rest of us can lose ourselves in Saik's tales of mad dogs and wild cats. He only bites people he doesn't know. Sometimes it's almost as if he's human.

Adam Frost is a postgraduate student in English at Cambridge University.