My lovely assistant shows off my Overlook Press editions.
Perhaps I haven’t read enough of Wodehouse to be able to claim a favourite — but I will anyway. It’s probably Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves. It’s true that What Ho, Jeeves is excellent (all that wonderful discussion of newts), and Pigs Have Wings is lovely, despite being a non-Jeeves-and-Wooster story. But the Lord Emsworth & Blandings Castle tales are very much in the style of the Wooster stories, unlike earlier works by Wodehouse, which read to me more like apprentice efforts, even though they were part of his early — and ongoing — success. If the Psmith character is of his time, it’s the subsequent characters that seem both endlessly Edwardian and timeless. And of course what we all love, apart from the fabulous metaphors and narrative absurdities, is the characters’ names. Stilton Cheesewright, for one. The Reverend ‘Stinker’ Pinker, for another. And Plank, of the empire, who was bitten by a crocodile on the Zambesi river — or was that his departed friend? Plank, as in ‘thick as two planks’. Plank, who like most of the characters except the hilariously diabolical Spode, we end up feeling a sort of daffy affection for. There is no humour quite like Wodehouse’s — even though I did enjoy Sebastian Faulks’s 2013 pastiche, Jeeves And The Wedding Bells.