P.G. Wodehouse Short Stories

by P.G. Wodehouse

Physical description; 371p. : ill. ; 23cm. Subjects; Short stories in English — 1900-1945 — Texts.

371 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1983

About the author

Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, KBE, was a comic writer who enjoyed enormous popular success during a career of more than seventy years and continues to be widely read over 40 years after his death. Despite the political and social upheavals that occurred during his life, much of which was spent in France and the United States, Wodehouse's main canvas remained that of prewar English upper-class society, reflecting his birth, education, and youthful writing career.

An acknowledged master of English prose, Wodehouse has been admired both by contemporaries such as Hilaire Belloc, Evelyn Waugh and Rudyard Kipling and by more recent writers such as Douglas Adams, Salman Rushdie and Terry Pratchett. Sean O'Casey famously called him "English literature's performing flea", a description that Wodehouse used as the title of a collection of his letters to a friend, Bill Townend.

Best known today for the Jeeves and Blandings Castle novels and short stories, Wodehouse was also a talented playwright and lyricist who was part author and writer of fifteen plays and of 250 lyrics for some thirty musical comedies. He worked with Cole Porter on the musical Anything Goes (1934) and frequently collaborated with Jerome Kern and Guy Bolton. He wrote the lyrics for the hit song Bill in Kern's Show Boat (1927), wrote the lyrics for the Gershwin/Romberg musical Rosalie (1928), and collaborated with Rudolf Friml on a musical version of The Three Musketeers (1928).

Reviews

[John Mccullough · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here we are plunging into the midst of the next COVID-19 phase – the D-Variant – and what would you do for a laugh to pick up the old spirits? How about a dash of Wodehouse? Editor Falkus has assembled a smattering of P. G’s. gems to make you go to bed with a smile on your face and a lark in your heart. Stories of Jeeves and Wooster, Lord Emsworth’s family of Blandings Castle, Messers Ukridge and Mulliner, Golf and a few others to tickle your funny bone into a better humour.

As usual, in each short story Wodehouse sets up a gag situation in which his formidable characters stumble through their gaffs and exit all the worse for wear, or the crowning monarchs of their trials. Stories like Jeeves in “The Great Sermon Handicap,” the Blandings bunglers in “The Custody of the Pumpkin,” and “Pig-hoo-o-o-o-ey,” and the golf mysteries such as “The Clicking of Cuthbert,” shine through the dark clouds of COVID. The last story, “The Amazing Hat Mystery” reminds me of the night my wife and I became very uncomfortable in our electric blanket, eventually discovering that we had mixed up the heat controls – as I became colder I increased “my” control to make it hotter and as she became hotter she adjusted “her” control to make it colder; by 3 AM we finally got it sorted. Wodehouse’s story is even funnier!

Wodehouse’s plots are further decorated with place names rivaling Dickens in ingenuity, like “Little Clickton-on-the-Wold,” “Gandle-by-the-Hill” and the pet-ridden manor of “Matcham Scratcham” served by the railroad station of “Lower Smattering-on-the-Wissel.” Some incidental characters are given attributes rather than names like “Egg,” “Crumpet,” “Bean,” club members derisively called “Sage” and “Oldest Member” or pub swillers like “Rum and Milk,” and “Whiskey and Splash.”

All in all, a good book in only one edition, this by the Folio Society of England, made superb by a wonderful binding, delightful illustrations by George Adamson, and unless my fingers deceive me, printed by using actual, physical type, not some less-readable electronic fol-de-rol.

Now, on to a real, whole book of Jeeves or the Threepwoods of Blandings Castle!!

[Yinzadi]

Table of Contents
The Great Sermon Handicap (from The Inimitable Jeeves)
Fixing It for Freddie (from Carry On, Jeeves)
Jeeves Makes an Omelette (from A Few Quick Ones)
The Aunt and the Sluggard (from Carry On, Jeeves)
Jeeves and the Impending Doom (from Very Good, Jeeves)
Jeeves and the Song of Songs (from Very Good, Jeeves)
The Custody of the Pumpkin (from Blandings Castle & Elsewhere)
Pig-hoo-o-o-ey! (from Blandings Castle & Elsewhere)
The Go-Getter (from Blandings Castle & Elsewhere)
Ukridge and the Home from Home (from Lord Emsworth & Others)
Ukridge's Accident Syndicate (from Ukridge)
The Story of Webster (from Mulliner Nights)
Archibald and the Masses (from Young Men in Spats)
The Nodder (from Blandings Castle & Elsewhere)
The Clicking of Cuthbert (from The Clicking of Cuthbert)
Scratch Man (from A Few Quick Ones)
The Coming of Gowf (from The Clicking of Cuthbert)
Goodbye to All Cats (from Young Men in Spats)
The Amazing Hat Mystery (from Young Men in Spats)

The works the stories are drawn from, in chronological order.
The Clicking of Cuthbert (1922)
The Inimitable Jeeves (1923)
Ukridge (1924)
Carry On, Jeeves (1925)
Very Good, Jeeves (1930)
Mulliner Nights (1933)
Blandings Castle & Elsewhere (1935)
Young Men in Spats (1936)
Lord Emsworth & Others (1937)
A Few Quick Ones (1959)