Jeeves, Jeeves, Jeeves

Jeeves #12-14

by P.G. Wodehouse

Here, for the forst time in one volume, is a "triple treat"- three of the Old Master's superbly crafted, high-spirited tales of Bertie Wooster, the terribly hilarious scrapes he gets himself into, and the cool dispatch with which Heeves the mastermind steps in at the last moment to save the day.

Genres: Humor, Fiction, British Literature

585 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1976

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

[Rich · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've seen a lot of people talk about how funny P.G. Wodehouse is, and I've seen a couple episodes of the BBC Wooster and Jeeves show with Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie (both alumni from Rowan Atkinson's Black Adder series) and those were very funny, much in the vein of the screwball comedies of the 1930s and 1940s. But for me the storytelling just didn't pull me along the way I had expected. I mainly finished to see how all the situations would be resolved. I don't know if I'm going to read another. But I have an omnibus that a friend gave me for my birthday years ago. Eeek.

[Kathy England · Rating 5 out of 5]

Typical Jeeves and Wooster: Bertie goes to his Aunt Dahlia's, there's a couple getting engaged and un-engaged, Bertie's help is enlisted in several projects that go awry, Pop Glossop is masquerading as a butler...but this book wasn't used in the BBC Jeeves and Wooster TV series (although parts of it were), so it was new to me. It made me laugh out loud several times.

[John Senner · Rating 5 out of 5]

If Salman Rushdie thinks P.G. Wodehouse is one of the writers that influenced him, it is good enough for me. I am embarrassed to say that it took me 70 years to get around to reading about Jeeves. My loss.

[Tinquerbelle]

1) How Right You Are, Jeeves
2) Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves
3) Jeeves and the Tie That Binds