P. G. Wodehouse: Where to Start and the 12 Books to Read First

The first story here is the one where a valet turns up at Bertie Wooster's flat, hands him a drink that fixes his head instantly, and is hired before either of them thinks about it. The rest are self contained problems: an engagement to be broken, an aunt to be managed, a friend who has written something foolish and needs it back before it is read aloud. Each runs about twenty pages. That is the reason to start here, because you find out whether this writer works on you in one sitting, and if the first story leaves you cold you have lost half an hour and nothing else.

Bertie's friend Bingo Little falls in love once a chapter, with a waitress, then a revolutionary, then a popular novelist, and every time Bertie gets dragged in and Jeeves has to clear up what is left. The stories link into something close to a novel, so you get the satisfaction of a longer book while keeping the short story pace. Aunt Agatha arrives here in full terror, and this is where the Drones Club world is properly built, which matters because it is the setting for the next forty years of these books.

Bertie comes back from Cannes convinced he can run his own affairs, sidelines Jeeves, and starts ruining the lives of everyone at his aunt's house in Worcestershire. His friend Gussie Fink-Nottle, who studies newts and cannot say a word to the woman he loves, is booked to hand out prizes at a grammar school, and Bertie decides the fix is alcohol. What follows is the most famous comic sequence Wodehouse ever wrote and it is worth the price of the book by itself. Around it an engagement collapses, a cook resigns, and a grown man is sent off on a long bicycle ride in the dark for no good reason.

Bertie is sent to Totleigh Towers on a small errand about an antique jug shaped like a cow, and comes away having survived a stolen notebook, a blackmail attempt, an engagement he never asked for, and Roderick Spode, a would-be dictator who leads a group of men in black shorts. Every thread is planted in the first fifty pages and every one of them pays off. The Spode material is Wodehouse quietly laughing at the political movements around him in the nineteen thirties, and it has aged into the funniest thing in the book.

Steeple Bumpleigh holds everything Bertie is frightened of: Florence Craye, who once tried to improve his reading habits, her formidable father, a village policeman with a grudge, and a costume he cannot get out of wearing. Jeeves has engineered the entire trip because he wants to fish nearby. What makes this one worth knowing about is the biography behind it. Wodehouse worked on the book through the war years, interned by the Germans and then stranded in Europe, and not one shadow of that reaches the page, which is either a triumph of craft or a very odd sort of refusal.

After two novels this is a return to the twenty page format, and these are the best of the short Jeeves. Bertie and Bingo Little stranded on the roof of a hut in a lake while a swan works itself up below them, an aunt who wants a nephew detached from an unsuitable girl, a dinner that has to be rescued. The pattern never varies and that is the pleasure, watching a familiar machine assemble itself perfectly one more time. Save this collection for a stretch of days when fifteen minutes is all the reading time you get.

Deverill Hall is run by five aunts, a number Bertie regards as beyond what any man should be asked to face. Through the usual chain of favours owed he ends up there under Gussie's name while Gussie occupies his, and a village concert, a stolen helmet and a small blackmailing schoolboy complete the arrangement. This is the most complicated plot in the canon and Wodehouse keeps every strand in view without once losing you. Written a quarter of a century after the first Jeeves stories, it shows no fatigue whatsoever, which is the oddest fact about his career.

Psmith is unemployed, unbothered and permanently amused, and he places a newspaper advertisement offering to undertake any task at all, however criminal. He is promptly hired to steal a diamond necklace at Blandings Castle, where he arrives disguised as a Canadian poet. Also in the house: Lord Emsworth, who has lost interest in everything except his garden, his useless son Freddie, and Baxter, an efficient secretary who is one bad night away from throwing flowerpots through a bedroom window. It is the crossover book, half Psmith caper and half Blandings farce, and it is the easiest way into the castle.

The Empress of Blandings, Lord Emsworth's enormous prize pig, is stolen, an event he ranks somewhere above a death in the family. Meanwhile his brother Galahad is writing a memoir of his misspent youth that half the English aristocracy would pay to suppress, two couples are trying to get engaged against the wishes of their elders, and a secretary is investigating everyone in the house. Blandings runs on a different rhythm to Jeeves, slower and warmer and much more crowded, and the comedy comes from a large household in which nobody is listening to anybody else.

Ashe Marson writes cheap detective serials and Joan Valentine writes for a magazine, and both take positions in service at Blandings Castle to retrieve a valuable scarab that Lord Emsworth pocketed while not paying attention. The world below stairs is the real subject: Beach the butler, the strict hierarchy of the servants' hall, the rules about who dines where, all treated with the same gravity as the family upstairs. It is an early book, so the machinery is not yet perfect and the plotting sits closer to stage farce than to the clockwork of the nineteen thirties.

Lord Ickenham, known to everyone as Uncle Fred, is a cheerful old man who treats every social situation as an invitation to impersonate somebody, and his nephew spends the book trying to keep him on a leash. This time he installs himself at Blandings as a distinguished nerve specialist, with a scheme involving a pig, a duke and a great deal of money. He is the only Wodehouse character who is actively dangerous, because he enjoys chaos instead of stumbling into it, and the book moves faster than any other Blandings novel because of him.

Jimmy Crocker has appeared in the New York gossip columns often enough that his name works as a warning, so when he wants to impress a woman who has read all of it, the only route open is to pretend to be somebody else who is pretending to be Jimmy Crocker. Add a household of Americans transplanted to England, a boy who needs kidnapping for his own good, and an explosive substance that has no business in a kitchen. No series knowledge is needed for any of it, and the book moves like the stage farces he was writing at the same time.