Sat 18 Apr 2009
A Review by MIKE TOONEY: P. G. WODEHOUSE – Wodehouse on Crime.
Posted by Steve under Authors , Reviews[9] Comments
P. G. WODEHOUSE – Wodehouse on Crime: A Dozen Tales of Fiendish Cunning.
Ticknor & Fields, 1981. International Polygonics Library, hardcover/trade paperback: 1991. Editor: D. R. Bensen, with a foreword by Isaac Asimov.
P(elham) G(renville) Wodehouse–“English literature’s performing flea” (Sean O’Casey) and “the funniest guy I ever read” (H & R Block)–was a master of comedy. Now, tastes vary as to what constitutes humor — the eruption of Krakatoa still provokes a laugh in some circles — but P.G. Wodehouse (“Plum”, or just “You, there”) is generally acknowledged as the best-of-the-best.
Wodehouse on Crime collects twelve stories from Wodehouse’s massive output of over six decades of writing. At first blush, you wouldn’t associate innocuous P.G.W. with criminal intent, would you (and why are you blushing)? As the late Isaac Asimov asks in his foreword: “Can there be crime in the never-never-land of P.G.W. idyllatry? Certainly! The tales are saturated with it, and even that does not weaken our love … when one stops to think of it, there is rarely a story in the entire Wodehouse opera which doesn’t feature crime.”
Editor D. R. Bensen adds that “… it would be impossible to present a full collection of those of P. G. Wodehouse’s stories which are concerned with crime. It would be a book of thousands of pages, with a spine about two and a half feet wide, which would make for awkward reading.” He also notes, tongue in cheek, the “baleful” influence that reading the Sherlock Holmes stories in the Strand had on the young and impressionable Plum.
However, be aware that if you’re seeking blood and gore and pick up Wodehouse on Crime, you’re in the wrong venue.
The first story in the collection, “Strychnine in the Soup,” is typically criminous Wodehouse. Plum’s Underwood portable here dispenses a lively story — a gentle spoof of Golden Age Mystery conventions — centering on Mr. Mulliner’s nephew Cyril, a diffident chap who encounters Miss Amelia Bassett at a play. After an awkward introduction — she grabs his leg — Cyril speaks first:
“You are evidently fond of mystery plays.”
“I love them.”
“So do I. And mystery novels?”
“Oh, yes!”
“Have you read Blood on the Bannisters?”
“Oh, YES! I thought it was much better than Severed Throats.”
“So did I,” said Cyril. “Much better. Brighter murders, subtler detectives, crisper clues … better in every way.”
Then, says the author, “The twin souls gazed into each other’s eyes. There is no surer foundation for a beautiful friendship than a mutual taste in literature.”
A little later, Amelia asks apropos of nothing: “Tell me … if you were a millionaire, would you rather be stabbed in the back with a paper-knife or found dead without a mark on you, staring with blank eyes at some appalling sight?” — a question we’ve all asked ourselves, I’m sure; but before Cyril can answer, in walks Amelia’s formidable mother …. but read “Strychnine in the Soup” for yourself, and the eleven other stories, too.
As with H. P. Lovecraft’s fiction, take P.G.W. in small doses for best results — you wouldn’t want to overdo it — in between, say, the disappearance of Mr. Davenheim’s moustache and the murder of Mrs. Twisby-Axleby’s trained albatross in that blood-drenched Golden Age mystery you’re currently reading. (Oh, and by the way, Mr. Mulliner’s solution to The Murglow Manor Mystery, mentioned in passing, is intricate … and completely loopy.)
To die an embittered misanthrope was the sad fate of too many of our great humorists — Mark Twain, S. J. Perelman, Soren Kierkegaard — but not so with P. G. Wodehouse: He reportedly kept a stiff upper lipper to the end, remaining at his post as the fort was being overrun by mutinous Sepoys and seditious Polyglots, a feather duster in one hand and his Underwood portable in the other.
That Plum: What a guy!
Contents:
“Strychnine in the Soup” (1932)
“The Crime Wave at Blandings” (1937)
“Ukridge Starts a Bank Account” (1967; reprinted in EQMM in 1982)
“The Purity of the Turf” (1923)
“The Smile That Wins” (1931)
“The Purification of Rodney Spelvin” (1927)
“Without the Option” (1927)
“The Romance of a Bulb-Squeezer” (1928)
“Aunt Agatha Takes the Count” (1923)
“The Fiery Wooing of Mordred” (1936)
“Ukridge’s Accident Syndicate” (1926)
“Indiscretions of Archie” (1921)
Addendum:
“I seem to keep finding, or I keep seeming to find, trace elements of Doyle in the Wodehouse formulations. I sense a distinct similarity, in patterns and rhythms, between the adventures of Jeeves as recorded by Bertie Wooster and the adventures of Sherlock Holmes as recorded by Dr. Watson ….”
So states Richard Usborne in his Plum Sauce: A P. G. Wodehouse Companion (2002). He goes on: “The high incidence of crime in the Wodehouse farces, especially the Bertie/Jeeves ones, may be an echo of the Sherlock Holmes stories, too — blackmail, theft, revolver shots in the night (Something Fresh), airgun shots by day (‘The Crime Wave at Blandings’), butlers in dressing-gowns, people climbing in at bedroom windows, people dropping out of bedroom windows, people hiding in bedroom cupboards, the searching of bedrooms for missing manuscripts, cow-creamers and pigs. I am not accusing Wodehouse of having concocted his stories deliberately on Doyle’s lines; I am saying that, of all the authors to whom Wodehouse’s debt shows itself, Doyle is second only to W. S. Gilbert. And Wodehouse would gladly have acknowledged both debts.”
That bears repeating: “… Doyle is second only to W. S. Gilbert” as an influence on the foremost humorist of the twentieth century.
Wodehouse admitted as much to a biographer: he “recalled the excitement of waiting for new issues of The Strand Magazine on Dulwich station” containing the latest Holmes adventures.
Another of Wodehouse’s characters was Psmith (pronounced “smith”). Usborne writes that one of the “strongest influences in the rhythms and locutions of the Psmith language was Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories … Wodehouse’s first major conversational parodist, Psmith, is constantly echoing Sherlock Holmes (indeed, the Holmes Valley of Fear influence probably to some extent suggested the plot of Psmith Journalist). Psmith has verbal ‘lifts’ from Sherlock Holmes, with direct quotations of words and copying of manner”; and Usborne produces several examples from the Psmiths and the Jeeves and Woosters.
April 18th, 2009 at 4:01 pm
Wow. You manage to combine two unlikely writers in a single sentence: “As with H. P. Lovecraft’s fiction, take P.G.W. in small doses for best results — you wouldn’t want to overdo it [ . . . ]”
Notwithstanding the startling juxtaposition, you are, I believe (IMHO), exactly correct. That is why writers like Wodehouse, Lovecraft, Doyle, and hundreds of others were so perfectly suited for the periodicals of their era: Small doses of singular entertainments were wonderful escapes from the “modern” world.
In any event, thank you for your posting on Wodehouse. Now, you’ve provoked me into a trip to the library (first thing Monday morning) where I can sample–in small doses–some Wodehouse. In the meantime, since you brought up the subject, I will entertain myself instead with a couple Lovecraft tales (from the Library of America volume). No, Lovecraft and Wodehouse aren’t at all similar, but what the heck. Wodehouse can wait until Monday. Now, it’s on to Lovecraft. Er, on the other hand, I might instead dive into Doyle’s Holmes again for a while.
Thanks!
April 18th, 2009 at 9:45 pm
Wodehouse has yet another connection to mystery (or at least thriller) fiction. His best friend was Arthur Sarsfield Ward, aka Sax Rohmer, the creator of Fu Manchu. The two had been clerks in a British bank in Alexandria, Egypt. The two remained friends throughout their lives.
The two Jeeves films with Arthur Treacher as Jeeves and David Niven as Bertie Wooster have some comedic mystery elements if I remember them correctly, but then aside from Conan Doyle, Raffles had a bit of an influence on Wodehouse too.
Wodehouse’s greatest rival in the comedic stakes was Dornford Yates (Major William Cecil Mercer) whose light hearted tales of Berry, Boy Pleydel, Jonah Mansel and their family and friends still have their followers (including Wodehouse biographer and student Richard Usborne who wrote The Clubland Heroes about Yates, Sapper, and John Buchan’s heroes).
I’ll admit to a slight preference for Yates, but then Yates also wrote wonderfully melodramatic ‘shockers’ full of colorful villains (with names like Rose Noble and Saul of Varvic), narrow mountain roads, sleek roadsters (Ian Fleming borrowed James Bond’s tricked out Aston Martin from Jonah Mansel’s), virtuous heroines, manly heroes, loyal servants, hidden fortunes, brief forrest idyls, and blatant snobbery. Not as serious minded as John Buchan (or as exhausting) or as blathering as Bulldog Drummond, and written in a style that is unique to Yates (and perhaps Anthony Hope of The Prisoner of Zenda, the Yates books are fun in the right mood.
Still Wodehouse is great fun, though as stated, best taken in small doses (which is true of most literary humor) and the right stte of mind. Several of the episodes of Jeeves and Wooster with Stephen Frye and Hugh Laurie (yes, House) have criminous plots usually involving getting Bertie out of some jam, and one of the paperback covers of the teams adventures has Jeeves and Bertie sporting domino masks like well dressed second story men. This was also the era of the gentleman outlaws like the Saint, and it shows in both Wodehouse and Yates somewhat casual approach to certain forms of lawbreaking such as outwitting the excise man or a bit of second story work.
April 18th, 2009 at 10:12 pm
Dornford Yates is an author I’ve managed to ignore (not deliberately, mind you) all these years. I’ll start to track down some of his work.
I have a good deal of Wodehouse to read and re-read though, and as soon as I can make a path to my upstairs closet where I have a long shelf of his novels and stories in paperback, I will.
I’m sorry to hear that the Bulldog Drummond stories are blather, though, as I just bought a nice trade paperback collection of four or five of his early novels — another character I know only through his radio shows and not the Sapper novels, and come to think of it, not even his movies.
My tastes were different, it must be, when I was younger.
— Steve
April 19th, 2009 at 1:48 am
The Drummond books have some things to recommend them, and Carl Peterson is a magnificent villain, but you’d never recognise the Drummond of the books as the fellow played by Ronald Colman, Walter Pidgeon, or Ray Milland on film or Santos Ortega, Ned Land, and Sir Cedric Hardwicke on radio.
By blathering I’m refering to the endless silly ass talk that is indemic to the novels of the 1920’s, and which Drummond is sadly prone to (Reggie Fortune, Lord Peter, Albert Campion, and Philo Vance all suffered the same ailment to varying degrees). Still there are good moments like his fight with a full grown ape in the first novel or his final confrontation with Carl Peterson in an airship over London, the giant spider that finds its way into his bed,a battle royal to the death with the strangler known as Le Bossu Masque, and a midnight gunfight at Stonehenge.
You are likely prepared for the jingoism, snobbery, racism, and classism of the books knowing their period, but you may be taken aback when in the second novel The Black Gang, Drummond and his pals don black shirts, hoods, and kidnap assorted “unwashed” and “foreign” types and hold them in a little private “concentration camp.” Of course, this is 1922, and “concentration camp” was a term from the Boer War that didn’t have the same conotation as it does in the post Hitler world, but it’s still disconcerting.
Of the Drummond series I’d suggest the first, The Final Count, Female of the Species (Peterson’s mistress Irma Peterson kidnaps Drummond’s wife), and Temple Tower, though all of them have good moments if you can stomach Hugh’s tendecy to good fellowship and silly ass talk, endless pints of beer, and unpleasant references to anyone not an upper class Englishman. Though the point when Drummond annoys Carl so much the super criminal suffers from mal de mer is unique in the genre. I don’t think Holmes ever made Moriarity throw up no matter how much of a problem he was.
Far superior to the Drummond books on all counts is Sapper’s set of connected short stories about monocled world traveller and adventurer Jim Maitland. Maitland only figures in the one eponymous collection of short stories and one novel (Island of Terror), but he is a more entertaining adventurer than Drummond.
You’ll probably want to avoid Sapper’s other heroes Ronald Standish (obvious swipes from Conan Doyle in his own book and showing up in some of the Drummond and the only book featuring Tiny Carteret) and Tiny Carteret, an even more annoying boob than Drummond, a rugby player who can’t play ball and chew gum. The best I can say of Carteret is he isn’t as awful as Sydney Horler’s Drummond ripoff Tiger Standish.
Dornford Yates is an acquired taste, but the writing is second only to Buchan, and the adventures have considerable charm somewhere between Robert Louis Stevenson, Anthony Hope, and Buchan himself. Most feature Jonah Mansel (the bossiest hero since Sherlock Holmes) and William Chandos loose on the Continent and encountering a variety of dastardly villains. No real detection to speak of though a bit of problem solving, but adventure, spendid evocations of locales, and deadly traps and melodrama of the sturm und drang school are on hand. If you like low slung cars speeding though the night on misty narrow mountain roads, bottomless dungeons in dank castles, and modern swashbuckling Yates is quite appealing.
The lighter Berry books feature a large group of upper middle class Brits who spend their leisure time in mildly criminous adventures on the Continent involving, romance, a bit of smuggling, and a cad or bounder or two. Mansel is the tie between the two types of books, though a few of the shockers feature neither Mansel nor Chandos. Yates has a gift for naming characters and places, and his English construction unique but perfect for his tales.
I’m probably being too hard on Sapper and Drummond and too effusive regarding Yates, so judge for yourself. Sapper’s not a bad storyteller, and I like Drummond more than I let on here, but Drummond does have a tendency to blather, bluster, and otherwise bully that may leave you questioning why millions of readers followed his exploits so breathlessly. I’m interested to hear your eventual take on him. Fleming was a huge Sapper fan as is Clive Cussler, and Sapper could spin a tale, though you wouldn’t look for much subtlty. The five Drummond shorts are available in a collection of some of Sapper’s better shorts editied by Jack Adrian (The Best Short Stories of Sapper, 1984).
Incidentlally if you can find it on the gray market get a copy of the second Colman Drummond film Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back with Loretta Young, Warner Oland, C. Aubrey Smith, Charles Butterworth, Ona Munson, and Misha Auer. It is one of the best comedy mysteries of the period, fast paced, clever, and still thrilling. Most of the John Howard Drummonds are solid B’s with some of the best villains of the era (Porter Hall, Leo G. Carroll, Anthony Quinn, George Zucco, Eduardo Cianelli …).
Bulldog Drummond at Bay with John Lodge is the closest to the books and not bad despite being done on the cheap (ironic that American Lodge is closest to the Drummond of the books). 1951’s Calling Bulldog Drummond with Walter Pidgeon is a slick little mystery written by Drummond successor Gerard Fairlie based on his novel (Fairlie was also the model for Drummond according to Sapper though a far more complex and interesting character than Drummond) and of interest for the villain being future television Drummond Robert Beatty and the presence of Bernard Lee, M of the James Bond films.
Finally, Deadlier Than the Male, a sixties retread of the character with Richard Johnson, Elke Sommer, Sylvia Kosinca, and Nigel Green as Carl Peterson is a surprisingly well done film with some nice touches of action and humor. The sequel Some Girls Do isn’t quite as good, but still worth seeing. There is also a wonderful screwy comedy called Bulldog Jack with Jack Buchanan written by Sapper and Fairlie in which a wounded Drummond calls on Buchanan to take his place and Jack finds himself up to his neck in the surreal criminal plans of master criminal Ralph Richardson (who played Drummond in The Return of BD based on The Black Gang) ending in a sustained slapstick robbery in the British Museum. The Drummond films are all fairly easy to find with only the two silents and 1930’s Temple Tower lost to us so far.
April 19th, 2009 at 5:33 am
I can take a huge amount of Wodehouse! The Jeeves and Wooster stories are fascinating for anyone who loves GA fiction as, structurally, they’re inversions of the classic Holmes and Watson stories. Jeeves, of course, is Holmes and Bertie is Watson, and the trick is to not solve the mystery – which means starting at the end of the story – but to provide a solution to Bertie’s mishaps that we see unfold before us.
Wodehouse, as it’s clear from his many references to detective stories, loved the genre and I’d particularly recommend his essay “Thrillers” which can be found in the collection “Louder and Funnier.”
Oh, and don’t diss Sapper; anyone who can provide such a rich source of Nameless Things and Lurking Fiends has to be good value for money!
Cheers,
Dolores
(author of a few crime stories which, in my dreams, PG Wodehouse would have loved!)
April 19th, 2009 at 10:13 am
David
Aargh. You’re starting to depress me — in a good way, of course! All of the books and authors you mention and discuss are now on my Must Have list, as well as the movies, though I did buy the pair of 1960s films a while ago after they were featured in CINEMA RETRO. Elke Summer was the main attraction, of course.
Dolores
You make some good points concerning Holmes & Watson vis a vis Jeeves & Wooster, ones that never occurred to me back when I was a steady Wodehouse reader. Time to take another look at them — J&W, Psmith and all the others — that’s for sure!
— Steve
April 19th, 2009 at 10:48 am
To R.T.:
Like Richard Usborne, I think it’s important to recognize how much Golden Age detective fiction influenced a major author like Wodehouse. As you might already know, Plum tried his hand at writing a couple of somewhat more serious mysteries before settling into humor fiction, one of which is “Death at the Excelsior”:
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/8176
I went to your weblog, which seems relatively new on the Net: excellent reviews, concise and literate. Keep up the good work.
To Dolores:
I think your structural analysis of the Jeeves and Wooster stories is correct. Since it seems to come naturally to humorists to turn everything on its head, it’s no surprise Wodehouse would invert the Holmes/Watson stories for comic effect.
I went to your website, as well. Every title is appealing: They’re mysteries, they have period settings, and they’re not too “heavy.” I plan to acquire them ASAP.
–Mike
April 20th, 2009 at 12:15 am
To Dolores:
You are probably right that I am dissing Sapper and ignoring some of the fun. But mainly I’m trying to warn the unsuspecting who might venture into Drummond’s world expecting something along the lines of the films or the radio series. Sapper is a born storyteller, but he’s also very much a man of his time, and from what I know of his personality every bit as blustery, loud, and full of annoying cheer as Drummond.
Yes, the Jeeves tales owe a lot to Doyle in general construction and they are problem stories. Psmith is more of an adventurer though his adventures end up in laughs instead of gunfire. Still, it would be hard to say whether the thiller influenced Wodehouse or Wodehouse the thriller more. Comedy and mystery have always been a good mix.
Steve:
Just be glad I haven’t started on the French yet. Most of San Antonio, Bob Moraine, OSS 117, and the Nyctalope aren’t even available in English, though thanks to Black Coats Press and Brian Stableford some of Paul Feval’s early crime fiction is available in attrative modern translations, and at least a couple of outings of the Nyctalope. Somewhere down the line I may write a bit on Arsene Lupin and the 2004 film about him.
December 4th, 2020 at 4:37 pm
Due to our municipal libraries having been ‘closed for the duration’. i’ve Had to te-read some of my Sci-Fi, Mary Stewart and Dornford Yates books.
DY’s “Berry†ones often make me laugh out loud.
I’ve just finished “Fire Below†and that’s the only “Derring Do†one where his ‘class consciousness’ annoyed and even appalled me.
🙂 the reason for my being here is that I did a ‘search’ for whoever it was that referred to DY as “that cad Yates†– an unsuccessful search I might add – but reading this was fun, and, wrt PG Wodehouse took me back to my High School years – I devoured them