Who Killed Mrs De Ropp?

H.H.Munro used the pen-name ‘Saki’, and earned a considerable reputation as writer of elegant, often gleefully cruel short stories prior to his death while serving in the First World War. BBC 4 recently put together three of his best tales under the title ‘Who Killed Mrs De Ropp?’ in an hour-long programme that I thought beautifully done.

The stories are ‘The Storyteller’, ‘The Lumber Room’ (which I was introduced to as a schoolboy one English lesson long ago) and, best of all, ‘Sredni Vashtar’, in which the killer of Mrs De Ropp is revealed.

Saki was not, in any meaningful sense, a crime writer, but ‘Sredni Vashtar’ is a story about a sort of crime. I first came across it as a result of a reference in a classic crime novel, Verdict of Twelve, by Raymond Postgate. Postgate’s book is, arguably, the best novel ever written about the workings of juries, and is one of my favourites. Postgate’s other crime novels were, by comparison, a disappointment, although some people rate them more highly than I do. He became much better known through his Good Food Guide, and he also had a family connection to those crime-writing Fabians of the Golden Age, GDH and Margaret Cole.

As for Saki, he was clearly a complex character (his mother was the aunt of Dornford Yates, another popular yet enigmatic writer.) It’s suggested by some who have studied his life that he was gay, but unable to come to terms with, or at least publicly acknowledge, his sexual orientation. These days his name is, if not forgotten, far from well-known. But to my mind he is one of the best short story writers.