Psmith in the City & Psmith, Journalist

by P.G. Wodehouse

"Psmith in the City" follows the adventures of cricket-loving Mike Jackson and his immaculately-dressed friend Psmith. Playing cricket for a team run by Psmith's father, Mike meets John Bickersdyke for the first time when he walks behind the bowler's arm, causing Mike to get out on ninety-eight. "Psmith, Journalist" continues the adventures of the silver-tongued Psmith and his friend Mike Jackson. The story begins with Psmith accompanying his fellow Cambridge student Mike to New York on a cricketing tour. Through high spirits and force of personality, Psmith takes charge of a minor periodical, and becomes imboiled in a scandal involving slum landlords, boxing and gangsters – the story displays a strong social conscience, rare in Wodehouse's generally light-hearted works.

210 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 2, 2018

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

[Charles van Buren · Rating 4 out of 5]

Charles van Buren

TOP 1000 REVIEWER

4.0 out of 5 stars

Not your usual Wodehouse

February 25, 2019

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

If you are new to Wodehouse, I would not recommend starting with either of these novels. They are part of his early work and are quite different from what became his more common style of plotting. These two novels are not the same type of zany adventure as found in LEAVE IT TO PSMITH, the fourth, final and more popular Psmith offering.

SMITH IN THE CITY was originally serialized in 1908 - 1909 in the English magazine, THE CAPTAIN. It is a very English story in which the incomprehensible game of cricket plays a large part. Cricket, incomprehensible to many of us not a part of the British Empire or Commonwealth, appears to be an acquired taste if not born to it. Despite the emphasis on cricket I enjoyed the book but I really like Wodehouse. The other main setting for the novel is the world of British banking. Early in life, Wodehouse himself was employed by a bank with little better result than that obtained by Mike and Psmith. I believe that Wodehouse's explanation was that the bank found itself with a surfeit of Wodehouses.

PSMITH, JOURNALIST is a very atypical Wodehouse. The story was originally serialized in The Captain magazine, 1909 - 1910. It has about as much in common with Leslie Charteris' The Saint stories as anything else to which I can compare it. Consider it The Saint with even more humor than that with which Charteris endowed his stories.

[Melissa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reread again. Excellent