While Hector Hugh Munro (Saki) has not been considered as important a writer as contemporaries Wilde, Kipling, and Shaw, his stories remain fresh and readable after a full century. This attribute boosts Saki's importance in the Edwardian canon. Sandie Byrne's work of biography/criticism is the first since A. J. Langguth's 1981 Saki: A Life of H. H. Munro to explore Saki's life and works. Byrne's treatment is more aloof and restrained than those of Langguth and the earlier Charles H. Gillen, in eschewing details and speculation about the more personal aspects of Munro's family and sexuality. However, her work fills a valuable scholarly function in addressing and synthesizing virtually all that has been written about Saki to date. It also liberally points up literary comparisons and influences on his work, and challenges the reader to explore similarities between the society Saki's stories deconstruct and that of America today.

Munro's writings insist upon biographical examinations and contextual readings. Acknowledging this, Byrne has structured her book chronologically, first presenting biographical information along with possible literary connections and influences, then following with analysis and criticism of the Saki stories and novels. To frame the work, the introduction presents three violent Munro family deaths: that of an ancestor killed by a tiger near India in 1792; Hector's mother's sudden death due to a runaway cow during his third year; and the 1916 sniper killing of Hector himself during World War I. Byrne traces in these incidents the themes of savagery, anomaly, and Empire that permeate Munro's life and works.

The first sections sympathetically discuss Munro's uniquely hellish childhood, raised as he was by cold and disturbed aunts, and attribute the misogyny of the Saki stories to his early experiences. Although quoting from his sister Ethel Munro's 1924 memoir, Byrne questions Ethel's rosy characterizations and glorification of the childishness and pranks that neither sibling ever outgrew, as well as Ethel's prettified descriptions. She finds similarities in Hector's early environment to motifs appearing in his later stories and finds parallels in Lewis Carroll's Alice novels. She also uses incidents in the Saki stories of school punishments, reprisals, and the pecking order to conjecture about Hector's experience at school. Byrne acknowledges the delayed development displayed by Hector's and Ethel's pranks and vandalism while touring Europe in their late teens and early twenties.

At 22, Hector became a colonial policeman in Burma, where he suffered from homesickness for urban England. Byrne finds in Saki's novel The Unbearable Bassington remembrances of this period of Hector's life. While his letters to Ethel remained upbeat during this time, Byrne suggests that these letters reflect his awareness of audience, rather than his personal truth. Commenting sardonically on people and issues, they also show Munro's upper-class English snobbery and cynicism. Back in London, as a coolly sophisticated society clubman, Munro wrote a Russian history book and began writing political satires using the name Saki. Byrne again finds Alice in these parodies, some of which use Carroll's characters. Munro's subsequent assignment as a foreign correspondent in the Balkans for a High Tory newspaper revealed his monarchist philosophy and conviction of English superiority. Ethel, visiting Hector in Russia, savored the riots and carnage they saw, while disparaging Russians and continuing to perpetrate juvenile hoaxes, a practice the two continued into their forties. Back in London again, Hector became a popular wit, writer, and man-about-town, in some sense replacing Wilde. Slim, languid, ironic, and well-mannered, he was a true conservative. Journalism paid the bills; Byrne details his financial problems with his novel publishers.

In “The Stories,” Byrne summarizes the Saki stories, tracing elements of style in each to possible literary antecedents. She explains the anti-Semitic movement in England as a way to understand the bigotry in Saki's stories, and agrees with Cheikin that their criticism of the upper class is not mockery but comedy. Saki's stories, like Wilde's plays, feature idle, witty, ornamental young men interested in food, wine, and clothing, but there is no aestheticism in them. Byrne disagrees with Gillen's comparison of Saki's youths with Wodehouse’s, observing the lack in Wodehouse characters of the feral vengefulness of Saki's young men. Byrne wonders if the cruelty in the Saki stories is attributable to Hector's Balkan experiences, but concludes that he is not a sadist, merely a purveyor of the “biter bit” plot device.

Byrne finds affinity in the Saki “ephebes” (149) with Romantic worldviews: the “wild sublime” (163), rebellion against authority, and the noble savage. There are also hints of the Gothic in the presence of retribution and the supernatural. However, Nature in Saki is dangerous, not nurturing: excitement in the stories is generated by “a whiff of the feral” (162). Despite Ethel’s, Waugh’s, and Gillen's assertions, Byrne sees the presence of eroticism but leaves the analysis of homosexual desire to Christopher Lane. Byrne disagrees with Drake's psychological analysis of Saki, quotes Gibson's insights as “useful” (193), and argues that Saki subverts and mocks Shaw.

When William Came is anomalous in the Saki oeuvre in being an influential novel designed to awaken England from political vapidity. Byrne quotes Lane's psychoanalytic study relating Saki's preaching of masculine values in William to his effete homosexuality. The book shows Saki's development toward the war-loving patriotism that guided his enlistment and embrace of militant conformity and obedience: a sharp turnaround from previous derision of scouting, defiance of authority, and languid selfishness. Byrne finds other writings from Hector's Balkan period that hint of militarism as well. The last section details Munro's enlistment and sense of “fun and adventure” (271) during the war. The predator fantasy common to his stories appears in his letters to Ethel during this time. While not for readers unfamiliar with Saki's writings, Byrne's book is a highly valuable critical contribution to Saki studies that updates previous readings and inspires the reader to new consideration of his work.