All posts tagged Dr Watson

The Code of the Woosters by P.G. Wodehouse (1938)

The sinister affair of Gussie Fink-Nottle, Madeline Bassett, old Pop Bassett, Stiffy Byng, the
Rev HP (‘Stinker’) Pinker, the eighteenth-century cow-creamer and the small brown leather-covered notebook.
(Bertie summarises the plot at the beginning)

‘Man and boy, Jeeves,’ I said, breaking a thoughtful silence which had lasted for about eighty-seven
miles, ‘I have been in some tough spots in my time, but this one wins the mottled oyster.’
(and the plot hasn’t really kicked in yet)

‘Travel is highly educational, sir.’
‘I can’t do with any more education. I was full up years ago.’
(Servant and Master repartee)

‘Good old blackmail ! You can’t beat it. I’ve always said so and I always shall. It works like magic in an emergency.’
(Aunt Dahlia proving what a good egg she is)

‘Didn’t you tell me once that the Code of the Woosters was “Never let a pal down”?’
(Stiffy explaining the title of the book)

‘The Code of the Woosters’ is the third full-length novel to feature Bertie Wooster and his valet Jeeves.

The Jeeves and Wooster narratives come in two forms: in the 1920s Wodehouse published about 35 J&W short stories; thereafter he switched to novels and wrote 11 novels (from 1934 to the last one, in 1974). What’s interesting is the way the novels refer back to events in the short stories. It’s as if the short stories defined a sort of palette of colours, which he then invoked in the larger canvases of the novels. To be less pretentious, the novels regularly refer back to incidents featured in the stories, say something like ‘Remember old so-and-so; it was him I was involved with in the adventure of the so-and-so’. Thus at various points Bertie, the posh dim narrator, reminds us:

that his Aunt Dahlia edits a lady’s magazine to which he once contributed an article (as told in ‘Clustering Round Young Bingo’)
that Madeline Bassett’s father is a judge who once fined him £5 for disorderly conduct (as told in ‘Without The Option’)
of the occasion when Gussie Fink-Nottle gave a speech at a school prize-giving while very drunk (in the previous novel in the series, ‘Right Ho, Jeeves”))
(twice) of the time Roberta Wickham persuaded him to sneak into the bedroom of a fellow guest at a country house and puncture his hot-water bottle with a darning-needle on the end of a stick (‘Jeeves and the Yule-Tide Spirit’)
of the time when the American millionaire J. Washburn Stoker kidnapped Bertie who escaped by blacking up with boot polish to pretend to be part of a minstrel party (‘Thank You, Jeeves’)
the time a temporary replacement for Jeeves named Brinkley, tried to attack Bertie with a carving knife then set fire to his cottage (‘Thank You, Jeeves’)
the time Bertie had to look after his Aunt Agatha’s dog (‘Jeeves and the Dog McIntosh’)
the time Bertie saved the Cabinet Minister A.B. Filmer from a wild swan (‘Jeeves and the Impending Doom’)

The effect is very much to create a world of its own, full of references to a fairly small number of characters in its orbit. Bertie himself is made to notice the fact:

It bore out what I often say—viz, that it’s a small world.

Except that it is very much not a small world. It is a very big world with over 8 billion people in it who mostly speak languages you and I can’t speak, and hold values and beliefs we can’t relate to. Which is why it’s so comfy and reassuring to retreat to a small, hermetically sealed and safe place like WoosterWorld.

The cup of tea on arrival at a country house is a thing which, as a rule, I particularly enjoy. I like the crackling logs, the shaded lights, the scent of buttered toast, the general atmosphere of leisured cosiness.

Nothing wrong with that. Highfalutin’ critics like to claim that fiction engages with the world, subverts this or that power structure etc, missing the obvious point that sitting in a quiet room or train or plane, quietly reading a novel is more or less the opposite of engaging with the world.

The Mixture as Before

When Somerset Maugham published a volume of short stories in 1936 The Times rather rudely described it as ‘the mixture as before’. This nettled Maugham so much that he titled his next short story The Mixture As Before. The same could be said of Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster novels. He had established a set of comic conventions for the series, including:

Bertie struggles to find the right word

There was a brief and—if that’s the word I want—pregnant silence.
A confirmed recluse you would have called him, if you had happened to know the word.
She made what I believe is known as a moue…. Is it moue?.. Shoving out the lips, I mean, and drawing them quickly back again.
‘What? Incredulous!’
‘Incredible, sir.’
‘Thank you, Jeeves. Incredible!’
‘Spode, qua menace… is it qua?’
‘Yes, sir. Quite correct.’
‘I thought so.’

Bertie struggles with classic quotes

‘You remember that fellow you’ve mentioned to me once or twice, who let something wait upon something? You know who I mean the cat chap.’
‘Macbeth, sir, a character in a play of that name by the late William Shakespeare. He was described as letting ‘I dare not’ wait upon ‘I would, ‘like the poor cat i’ th’ adage.’
‘Well, that’s how it is with me. I wabble, and I vacillate—if that’s the word?’
‘Perfectly correct, sir.’

The joke in this one is you have to know that ‘The Sensitive Plant’ is the name of a poem by the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, the kind of thing soppy Madeline knows and Bertie is clueless about.

‘I remembered something Jeeves had once called Gussie–’A sensitive plant, what?’
‘Exactly. You know your Shelley, Bertie.’
‘Oh, am I?’

Shelley crops up again later on:

After what Gussie had said, I ought to have been expecting Stiffy, of course. Seeing an Aberdeen terrier, I should have gathered that it belonged to her. I might have said to myself : If Scotties come, can Stiffy be far behind?

Which is a reference to Shelley’s well-known poem, ‘Ode to the West Wind’, the line being ‘If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?’ Mind you, Bertie can pull off the big quotes when he wants to; in a previous novel he referred to Keats’s sonnet ‘On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer and he goes to town on the key lines here.

Pop Bassett, like the chap in the poem which I had to write out fifty times at school for introducing a white mouse into the English Literature hour, was plainly feeling like some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his ken, while Aunt Dahlia and Constable Oates resembled respectively stout Cortez staring at the Pacific and all his men looking at each other with a wild surmise, silent upon a peak in Darien.

And it’s not just Bertie who struggles with classic quotes and has to be put right by Jeeves. Here’s Stiffy struggling to remember the right name of a literary character:

You remind me of Carter Patterson… no, that’s not it… Nick Carter… no, not Nick Carter… Who does Mr Wooster remind me of, Jeeves?’
‘Sidney Carton, miss.’
‘That’s right. Sidney Carton.’

That would be the Sidney Carton who ends up being the hero of Charles Dickens’ novel ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ by offering to lay down his life to be executed by the French revolutionaries so that the male lead of the story, Charles Darnay, can escape. Not that Bertie sees him as the hero. Later on he reflects:

I drew no consolation from the fact that Stiffy Byng thought me like Sidney Carton. I had never met the chap, but I gathered that he was somebody who had taken it on the chin to oblige a girl, and to my mind this was enough to stamp him as a priceless ass.

Jeeves’s literary quotes

It feels slightly new that Jeeves recites famous literary quotations in their entirety, not prompted by Bertie, with the comic intention of showing that Bertie hasn’t a clue what he’s on about. Mostly from Shakespeare because it’s a fair bet that Wodehouse’s original audience should have known their Shakespeare:

‘I quite understand, sir. And thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, and enterprises of great pitch and moment in this regard their currents turn awry and lose the name of action.’
‘Exactly. You take the words out of my mouth.’
(Shakespeare: Hamlet)

‘Childe Roland to the dark tower came, sir,’ said Jeeves, as we alighted, though what he meant I hadn’t an earthly.
(Shakespeare: King Lear)

I remember Jeeves saying to me once, apropos of how you can never tell what the weather’s going to do, that full many a glorious morning had he seen flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye and then turn into a rather nasty afternoon.
(The italicised phrase is from Shakespeare, Sonnet 33)

Jeeves and clothes

In almost all the stories, right at the start Jeeves and Bertie have a falling out over an item of clothing, there follows the long complicated narrative, and by the end of the story Bertie is so grateful to him for solving everything that he gives in. Not in this one. But there are still some choice ‘clothes moments’. Bertie is getting dressed for dinner when Jeeves advises a quarter inch adjustment in the trousers, prompting Bertie to say:

‘There are moments, Jeeves, when one asks oneself “Do trousers matter?”‘
‘The mood will pass, sir.’

In this case, the plan which starts the story, Jeeves’s wish which Bertie categorically refuses but then, by the end of the complex series of events, finds himself exhaustedly acquiescing in, is the idea of going on a cruise.

The comic strategy of stating the obvious

I call her a ghastly girl because she was a ghastly girl. The Woosters are chivalrous, but they can speak their minds.

The antique shop in the Brompton Road proved, as foreshadowed, to be an antique shop in the Brompton Road.

I spoke with satirical bitterness, and I should have thought that anyone could have seen that satirical bitterness was what I was speaking with.

He had been looking like a man who had missed the finer shades, and he still looked like a man who had missed the finer shades.

Clash of registers

It’s a tried and tested comic trope to have two characters who speak in different registers – the straight man who expresses things in a high-falutin pretentious style, and then the comic who puts it in the crudest demotic. Jeeves and Wooster embody a variation on this comic trope. Bertie expresses something in his poshboy slang and then Jeeves repeats the same idea but expressed in his refined, restrained, verbosely intellectual manner. The result = comic contrast.

‘You agree with me that the situation is a lulu?’
‘Certainly a somewhat sharp crisis in your affairs would appear to have been precipitated, sir.’

The village constable

Speaking of registers, Wodehouse briefly gives the village constable a comic accent, the tone of the officious provincial copper.

‘I was proceeding along the public highway,’ he began, in a slow, measured tone, as if he were giving evidence in court, ‘and the dorg leaped at me in a verlent manner. I was zurled from my bersicle.’

Abbreviations

Either a) trimming a word of a few syllables or b) paring it right back to the first letter. Sometimes a little hard to follow.

Trimmed

And now it was plain that he was hep.

I uttered an exclamash.

That is the posish, I fear.

I had managed to put in two or three hours’ sleep in my cubicle, and that, taken in conjunction with the healing flow of persp. in the hot room and the plunge into the icy tank, had brought the roses back to my cheeks to no little extent.

The gravity of the situash had at last impressed itself upon her.

It was entirely owing to Stiffy that I found myself in my present predic.

One letter

I told the man to take me to the nearest Turkish bath. It is always my practice to linger over a Turkish b.

That sojourn of mine in the T. bath had done much to re-establish the mens sana in corpore
what-not.

I sank into a c. and passed an agitated h. over the b.

‘Let me explain, aged r.’

I sank into the chair which she had vacated, and mopped the b.

The sight of Gussie and Madeline Bassett sitting side by side at the other end of the table turned the food to ashes in my m.

‘You’re talking absolute rot,’ she said, but it was with a quaver in the v.

I turned on the h. again.

Kipling was right. D. than the m. No getting round it.

I proceeded to work off the pent-up f’s.

I let out a mirthless l.

Formulaic phraseology

Homer is famous for coining poetic phrases or formulas to describe common objects (rosy-fingered dawn, wine-coloured sea) and Wodehouse does something similar by devising humorous phrases for common elements in Bertie’s life. They’re a sort of Metonymy which is ‘a figure of speech where a word or phrase is replaced by another’, in this instance by related adjectives but shorn of the expected noun – so in that respect also a kind of abbreviation.

I was able to imbibe about a fluid ounce of the hot and strengthening before he spoke. [tea]

Her eyes were misty with the unshed, and about the size of soup plates. [tears]

Inappropriate

Related to which is using inappropriate terminology, often using phrases normally used to describe inanimate objects to people, as if from sales brochures advertising houses or cars.

I looked round. Those parted lips… Those saucerlike eyes… That slender figure, drooping slightly at the hinges…

For Madeline Bassett was undeniably of attractive exterior—slim, svelte, if that’s the word, and bountifully equipped with golden hair and all the fixings.

Slang phrases

Sometimes Bertie uses phrases which may reflect the slang of his class but are obscure to us.

In that shop, on the other hand, he had given the impression of a man who has found the blue bird. [?]

After that exhibition of his at the prizegiving, she handed Gussie the mitten. [dumped him]

The news of the betrothal was, therefore, conveyed to him by letter, and I imagine that the dear girl must have hauled up her slacks about me in a way that led him to suppose that what he was getting was a sort of cross between Robert Taylor and Einstein. [boasted]

‘Suppose old Bassett does find that book, what do you think will ensue?’ I could answer that one. ‘He would immediately put the bee on the wedding.’ [cancel]

‘Consult Jeeves, you mean?’ I shook the lemon. [head]

Stiffy’s map, as a rule, tends to be rather grave and dreamy. [face]

I can testify that when you are riding [a bicycle] without your hands, privacy and a complete freedom from interruption are of the essence. The merest suggestion of an unexpected Scottie connecting with the ankle-bone, at such a time, and you swoop into a sudden swerve. And, as everybody knows, if the hands are not firmly on the handlebars, a sudden swerve spells a smeller.

The nibs [higher-ups, those in authority, clever ones, superiors]

‘Ha!’ said Spode, and biffed off with a short, sharp laugh. [left, walked away]

I got into the full soup and fish, and was immediately conscious of a marked improvement. [evening dress]

Brass rags had been parted by the young couple… [they’d broken up]

I racked the bean. [head, brain, mind]

‘Who do you think you are, coming strolling into a girl’s bedroom, sticking on dog about the right way and the wrong way of pinching helmets?’

I lit a cigarette and proceeded to stress the moral lesson to be learned from all this rannygazoo.

Aunt Dahlia’s insults

In the second novel it became noticeable how Aunt Dahlia lost no opportunity to cheerfully insult Bertie and the pattern continues here. She calls him:

‘Hello, ugly’
my little chickadee
young hound

What feels new is that Bertie feels confident enough to bandy friendly nicknames right back at her, to her face calling her:

aged relative
my fluttering old aspen
my dear old mysterious hinter
old ancestor
old flesh and blood
old thicker than water
My dear old faulty reasoner
my misguided old object

Jeeves’s wisdom

‘We are as little children, frightened of the dark, and Jeeves is the wise nurse who takes us by the hand and–’,
‘Switches the light on?’
‘Precisely.’

Sir Roderick Spode

Rather surprisingly, this Sir Roderick Spode turns out to be leader of a Fascist party i.e. is a satire on the real-world English fascist leader, Oswald Mosely.

‘Don’t you ever read the papers ? Roderick Spode is the founder and head of the Saviours of Britain, a Fascist organization better known as the Black Shorts. His general idea, if he doesn’t get knocked on the head with a bottle in one of the frequent brawls in which he and his followers indulge, is to make himself a Dictator.’

Bertie clarifies an important element:

‘By the way, when you say ‘ shorts,’ you mean ‘ shirts,’ of course.’
‘No. By the time Spode formed his association, there were no shirts left. He and his adherents wear black shorts.’
‘Footer bags, you mean?’
‘Yes.’
‘How perfectly foul.’
‘Yes.’
‘Bare knees?’
‘Bare knees.’
‘Golly!’
‘Yes.’

Spode is a huge, threatening bully right up to the moment when Bertie discovers he has a dark secret and threatens to reveal it – at which point he becomes oilily sycophantic i.e. like all bullies, can be instantly deflated. When pressed, right at the end of the novel, Jeeves reveals Spode’s guilty secret: it is that he moonlights as a designer of women’s underclothing and is the uncredited owner of the emporium in Bond Street known as Eulalie Soeurs. Would ruin his reputation as a manly Fascist if that ever came out. A ludicrous puncture of his sub-Mussolinian braggadocio.

Plot

This third Jeeves and Wooster novel feels longer and even more insanely complicated than its predecessors. Wodehouse has this reputation for comedy and I start off loving the tone and characters but do rather find that halfway through the novels they begin to seem quite long, and the blizzard of farcically improbable twists and turns does, eventually, become quite wearing. I’m always very relieved as I enter the final furlongs.

As briefly as I can:

Uncle Tom Travers is a collector of silverware and has his eye on a fine silver cow creamer at an antique shop on the Brompton Road. His wife, Bertie Wooster’s Aunt Dahlia, wants Tom not to buy it, as she needs to touch him for money to fund her magazine, Milady’s Boudoir, particularly as she has just signed up an expensive lady novelist to write some articles for it.

In the event the cow creamer is purchased by Sir Watkyn Bassett, the odious magistrate who fined Bertie £5 for drunkenly stealing a policeman’s helmet a few years earlier, and who has now retired to his country estate, Totleigh Towers. This Bassett has a daughter, soppy Madeline Bassett, who’s still in love with the hopeless newt-fancier, Bertie’s friend Gussie Fink-Nottle, who Sir Watkyn thoroughly disapproves of. At the same time, Bassett’s niece, Stephanie ‘Stiffy’ Byng, who lives at the Towers, is in love with the local curate, another old college pal of Bertie’s, one Harold ‘Stinker’ Pinker. Another guest of Sir Watkyns is a giant of a man called Roderick Spode—leader of a silly fascist organisation called the Black Shorts—who takes an instant dislike to Bertie when he happens to bump into him in the Brompton Road antique shop, and keeps a fierce and jealous eye over Stephanie Byng. There’s one last element which is that Gussie, a guest at Totleigh Towers, has been keeping a notebook containing very unflattering portraits of both Bassett and Spode.

Right. That’s a summary of the cast and main issues. The ball gets rolling when Bertie is summoned to Totleigh by a telegram from Madeline, asking his help to sort out her troubled engagement to Gussie; but he has simultaneously been instructed to get his hands on the silver cow creamer, in order to placate her husband Tom. Then Stiffy arbitrarily decides to test her boyfriend Harold’s devotion to her, by demanding that he knock off and steal the helmet of the local constable, Oates, because she thinks he’s been beastly to her beloved dog, Bartholomew. Then Gussie stupidly manages to lose the notebook full of incriminating descriptions of Bassett and Spode.

For an impressive 300 pages, Wodehouse manages to wring every conceivable variation on these themes, having all the couples fall out with each other, make impossible demands, threaten Bertie, while the silver cow, the notebook and the policeman’s helmet all get stolen, stolen again, hidden, found, searched for, accompanied by all manner of threats and blackmail between various characters far too complicated to set down in detail.

In the end it is Jeeves who saves the day, managing to blackmail both Sir Watkyn (with a suit for malicious libel and damages) and Spode (with revealing his guilty secret) into acquiescing in the marriages of the two young couples, and releasing Bertie from the various charges he faced. This is because, at various points, Bertie is angrily accused of stealing all the two central objects – the cow creamer and the policemen’s helmet – which he keeps being caught red-handed with because the actual thieves (Aunt Dahlia and Stiffy, respectively) dump them on him at incriminating moments – anyway, once all the comic complications have been utterly wrung out of the plot, Jeeves manages to get Bertie cleared of all charges, in return for which, as I mentioned above, Bertie acquiesces in Jeeves’s wish to go for a big cruise.

Cast

Bertie Wooster – narrator of the stories, amusingly dim upper-class layabout
Jeeves – his suave and hyper-intelligent valet
Aunt Dahlia aka Mrs Dahlia Travers
Uncle Tom Travers – her husband, famous for his delicate digestion, and (newly introduced in this novel) a keen silverware collector:

This uncle is a bird who, sighting a nephew, is apt to buttonhole him and become a bit informative on the subject of sconces and foliation, not to mention scrolls, ribbon wreaths in high relief and gadroon borders, and it seemed to me that silence was best.

Anatole – their legendary cook, from Provence
Gussie Fink-Nottle – ‘a fish-faced pal of mine who, on reaching man’s estate, had buried himself in the country and devoted himself entirely to the study of newts’
Madeline Bassett – ‘A droopy, soupy, sentimental exhibit, with melting eyes and a cooing voice and the most extraordinary views on such things as stars and rabbits’
Sir Watkyn Bassett, CBE – retired judge, father of Madeline, residing at Totleigh Towers, Totleigh-in-the-Wold, Gloucestershire
- Butterfield – his butler
Sir Roderick Spode – guest of Sir Watkyn’s and leader of the Fascist organisation, the Saviours of England; according to Bertie a ‘Big chap with a small moustache and the sort of eye that can open an oyster at sixty paces’
Pomona Grindle – popular novelist – funny how popular novelists like Wodehouse or Agatha Christie, enjoy putting fictional popular novelists into their novels to satirise
Miss Stephanie Byng aka Stiffy – Madeline’s cousin, who lives at Totleigh Towers
- Bartholomew – her dog
Constable Oates – the local policeman
Harold Pinker aka Stinker Pinker – village curate who Stiffy’s engaged to – ‘a large, lumbering, Newfoundland puppy of a chap—full of zeal, yes—always doing his best, true, but never quite able to make the grade; a man, in short, who if there was a chance of bungling an enterprise and landing himself in the soup, would snatch at it’

The Junior Ganymede club

The Junior Ganymede is a club for gentlemen’s personal gentlemen in Curzon Street, to which Jeeves has belonged for some years. Under Rule Eleven, every new member is required to supply the club with full information regarding his employer. This not only provides entertaining reading, but serves as a warning to members who may be contemplating taking service with gentlemen who fall short of the ideal.

Menus

I have often lamented that in the majority of Great Literature people regularly have meals, lunches and dinners, but the author never tells you what they ate, which is extremely frustrating. In this book there’s a rare mention of a complete menu of a country house dinner:

Grade A soup (content unknown)
a toothsome fish (species unknown)
a salmi of game which
asparagus
a jam omelette
some spirited sardines on toast

A jam omelette?

On aunts

One minute aunts are the bane of his life:

‘If I had my life to live again, Jeeves, I would start it as an orphan without any aunts. Don’t they put aunts in Turkey in sacks and drop them in the Bosphorus?’
‘Odalisques, sir, I understand. Not aunts.’
‘Well, why not aunts ? Look at the trouble they cause in the world. I tell you, Jeeves, and you may quote me as saying this—Behind every poor, innocent, harmless blighter who is going down for the third time in the soup, you will find, if you look carefully enough, the aunt who shoved him into it.’

But on the other hand:

‘I should have known better than to doubt Aunt Dahlia. Aunts always know. It’s a sort of intuition.’

Why so many aunts? And why are aunts such figures of fun? Aunts dominate almost all the J&W stories and crop up in many others outside the series. They are also prominent in works by other popular authors as figures of fun, such as Agatha Christie. Why? Two big reasons.

1. Because aunts are parent replacements. They are parents but without the strict control of parents. They are representatives of the older and so, in theory, controlling generation, the generation which should bridle and control the young, but without any of an actual parent’s actual legal responsibilities and duties. This is partly why they’re figures of fun: they’re parents but stripped of all actual parental authority.

2. Because they’re female. A hundred years ago fathers were figures with total legal control over their children until they reached the age of 21, as well as dominating moral and psychological power. An uncle is a male authority figure from the parental generation but, typically, stripped of responsibility, is classically considered a more approachable and sympathetic figure, someone you can turn to for help and advice, maybe. Whereas an aunt is two times removed from the figure of authority being a) not the legal guardian and b) a female, and so one step removed from the classically male patriarchal authority role.

Why are they funny, exactly? Tradition

P.S. Mind you, the whole point of the 1920s was the widespread feeling that the younger generation scorned parental control, something Bertie himself comments on:

A glance at her [Madeline] was enough to tell one that she belonged to that small group of girls who still think a parent should have something to say about things…

Bertie on girls and women

This aunt is a formidable old creature, when stirred.

Earnest Americans, academics and feminists have plenty of ammunition to denounce Bertie – and through him, Wodehouse – as a misogynist. Certainly he misses no opportunity to roll his eyes about women, and the underlying premise of the stories is his morbid fear of ever losing his bachelor status and getting hitched to a woman. I read it, I’m aware of it, but I read it as a comic trope, like Bertie’s own stupidity, his heedless drunkenness, like Jeeves’s Godlike omniscience, like the bad-tempered old judge, the priceless chef, and so on. They’re all stereotypes. But for the record I’ll record some of the grosser incidences.

I stared at the young pill, appalled at her moral code, if you could call it that. You know, the more I see of women, the more I think that there ought to be a law. Something has got to be done about this sex, or the whole fabric of Society will collapse, and then what silly asses we shall all look.

When you really read many of these comments them, you realise the real victim of them is Bertie, because any time he expresses any opinion about anything, he reveals what a dimwit he is.

‘I am implying nothing derogatory to your cousin Madeline, when I say that the idea of being united to her in the bonds of holy wedlock is one that freezes the gizzard. The fact is in no way to her discredit. I should feel just the same about marrying many of the world’s noblest women. There are certain females whom one respects, admires, reveres, but only from a distance. If they show any signs of attempting to come closer, one is prepared to fight them off with a blackjack.

If you wanted to take a feminist line, I suppose you could say that, no matter how humorously intended, the anti-women sentiments which are found throughout Wodehouse’s works are just one more brick in the huge wall of misogynistic patriarchy which dominated British society until late in the 20th century and can, of course, still be found in many places. I.e. the humorous context doesn’t count, or doesn’t invalidate the essentially negative attitude. Whether funny or not, it’s still negative.

‘You know, Jeeves,’ I said, ‘when you really start to look into it, it’s perfectly amazing how the opposite sex seems to go out of its way to snooter me. You recall Miss Wickham and the hot-water bottle?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And Gwladys what-was-her-name, who put her boy friend with the broken leg to bed in my flat?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And Pauline Stoker, who invaded my rural cottage at dead of night in a bathing suit?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘What a sex! What a sex, Jeeves! But none of that sex, however deadlier than the male, can be ranked in the same class with this Stiffy.’

Or:

‘She wasn’t kidding. She meant business. She was fully aware that she was doing something which even by female standards was raw, but she didn’t care. The whole fact of the matter is that all this modem emancipation of women has resulted in them getting it up their noses and not giving a damn what they do. It was not like this in Queen Victoria’s day. The Prince Consort would have had a word to say about a girl like Stiffy, what?’

It’s a literally humourless interpretation, but I’m sympathetic to it…

Bertie and Sherlock and Hercule

In my review of the previous novel, ‘Right Ho, Jeeves’, I pointed out the surprisingly large influence on Wodehouse of Sherlock Holmes, so much so that Bertie refers to his adventures as ‘cases’ and the people who come to him and Jeeves for help as ‘clients’. And very obviously the entire idea of a partnership solving problems, one of whom is the super-intelligent problem-solver while the other is his dim sidekick (i.e. Jeeves and Wooster), obviously echoes Holmes and Watson.

The Holmes influence is toned down in this novel so that there’s only one reference to Watson and one to Holmes. Instead what surprised me is that Wodehouse chucks in a reference to Hercule Poirot! It’s an interesting indication of how Christie’s detective had penetrated so deeply into popular culture that he could be jokily referenced in other popular fiction.

I mean, imagine how some unfortunate Master Criminal would feel, on coming down to do a murder at the old Grange, if he found that not only was Sherlock Holmes putting in the weekend there, but Hercule Poirot, as well!

But in fact there’s more to it than that. Wodehouse deliberately drops a number of Christie references throughout the novel, turning the text itself into a sort of Christie-esque mystery.

Bertie is reading a murder mystery

To while away the time I pulled the arm-chair up and got out the mystery story I had brought with me from London. As my researches in it had already shown me, it was a particularly good one, full of crisp clues and meaty murders and I was soon absorbed.

And the novel even gives him clues what to do, as when he’s looking for the hidden notebook and the mystery he’s reading has the detective recommend looking on top of the suspect’s wardrobe.

Comparison with thrillers: Here’s Bertie recruiting Jeeves to help him write out a summary of the situation:

‘I think it would help if we did what they do in the thrillers. Do you ever read thrillers?’
‘Not very frequently, sir.’
‘Well, there’s always a bit where the detective, in order to clarify his thoughts, writes down a list of suspects, motives, times when, alibis, clues and what not. Let us try this plan. Take pencil and paper, Jeeves, and we will assemble the facts. Entitle the thing ‘ Wooster, B.—position of.’

That’s exactly what Poirot does in many of his stories.

Adversary Earlier there’d been a passing reference in a telegram. Bertie had described Bassett being suspicious of him as:

like ambassador finding veiled woman snooping round safe containing secret treaty.

This is precisely what happens in one of Christie’s early spy adventures, The Secret Adversary.

Fiddling Further, in chapter 4 while wondering what to do, Gussie stands at the mantlepiece and fiddles with a statuette on it. This is exactly what Poirot does in many of the Christie stories, rearranging bits and bobs on mantlepieces or desks under the influence of his symmetry obsessive compulsive disorder.

Little grey cells And it becomes unquestionable that Wodehouse is parodying Poirot when a moment later:

He pondered, frowning. Then the little grey cells seemed to stir.

This phrase is copyright Poirot, occurs in all the stories, and lays any doubt to rest.

Psychology Christie was at pains to distinguish Poirot from Holmes in all sorts of ways but one is to make Poirot focus not on material clues but on analysing the psychology of the murderer. Well, it’s no coincidence that throughout this novel Bertie, and others, insist on Jeeves’s superior reading of psychology. It is clearly meant to align him with Christie’s Poirot.

In these delicate matters of psychology [Jeeves] never errs.
‘I think we can find one [a solution], sir, if we approach the matter from the psychological angle.’
‘Oh, psychological?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘The psychology of the individual?’
‘Precisely, sir.’
‘Jeeves,’ I explained to Stiffy, who, of course, knew the man only slightly, scarcely more, indeed, than as a silent figure that had done some smooth potato-handing when she had lunched at my flat, ‘is and always has been a whale on the psychology of the individual. He eats it alive.’

Gooseflesher Incidentally, Bertie converts the thriller into his own poshboy argot and refers to it as a gooseflesher.

Comic phrases

About seven feet in height, and swathed in a plaid ulster which made him look about six feet across, he caught the eye and arrested it. It was as if Nature had intended to make a gorilla, and had changed its mind at the last moment.

I had described Roderick Spode to the butler as a man with an eye that could open an oyster at sixty paces, and it was an eye of this nature that he was directing at me now. He looked like a Dictator on the point of starting a purge.

‘Oh, Bertie,’ she said, in a low voice like beer trickling out of a jug, ‘you ought not to be here.’

She looked at me like someone who has just solved the crossword puzzle with a shrewd ‘Emu’ in the top right-hand corner.

Stiffy stood for a moment looking after him a bit yearningly, like a girl who wished that she had half a brick handy.

I turned to Aunt Dahlia, who was making noises like a motorbicycle in the background.

Animal similes

He paused, and swallowed convulsively, like a Pekingese taking a pill.

The Dictator had to shove his oar in. He asked if he should call a policeman, and old Bassett’s eyes gleamed for a moment. Being a magistrate makes you love the idea of calling policemen. It’s like a tiger tasting blood.

I turned to Gussie, who was now looking like a bewildered halibut.

He gave me a hard stare. The eyes behind the spectacles were cold. He looked like an annoyed turbot.

Old Bassett had been listening to these courtesies with a dazed expression on the map—gulping a bit from time to time, like a fish that has been hauled out of a pond on a bent pin and isn’t at all sure it is equal to the pressure of events.

I now gazed at him hopefully, like a seal awaiting a bit of fish.

However, the last female had no sooner passed through the door than Gussie, who had been holding it open, shot after her like a diving duck and did not return.

He was staring incredulously, like one bitten by a rabbit.

She snorted like a bison at the water-trough.

Old Bassett, who had gone into a coma again, came out of it and uttered a sound like the death-rattle of a dying duck.

There came the sound of furniture being dragged away, and presently the door opened and his head emerged cautiously, like that of a snail taking a look round after a thunderstorm.

I don’t say I didn’t leave my chair like a jackrabbit that has sat on a cactus.

The Drones club

Wodehouse’s fictitious Drones Club was located in Dover Street, off Piccadilly. A drone is a male bee that does no work and lives off the labour of others so the name is a satire on the 1920s stereotype of rich, idle young men. The Drones Club appears in not just the Jeeves and Wooster stories, but the Psmith and Blandings series, as well as others. Members mentioned in this book are:

Bertie
Freddie Widgeon
Bingo Little
Catsmeat Potter-Pirbright
Barmy Fotheringay-Phipps
Oofy Prosser

Addresses

Bertie’s address:

Bertram Wooster
Berkeley Mansions
Berkeley Square
London

Aunt Dahlia’s address:

Mrs Dahlia Travers
47 Charles Street
Berkeley Square
London.

Credit

‘The Code of the Woosters’ was published in 1938 by Herbert Jenkins. I read it online.

Related reviews

P.G. Wodehouse reviews

This lax post-war world

She was naming the Price of the Papers. In other words, after being blackmailed by an aunt at breakfast, I was now being blackmailed by a female crony before dinner. Pretty good going, even for this lax post-war world.

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by Simon on December 8, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in Comedy, English literature, Novel

Tagged A Tale of Two Cities, A.B. Filmer, abbreviations, Aberdeen terrier, Anatole, Aunt Dahlia, Barmy Fotheringay-Phipps, Bartholomew, Bertie Wooster, Bingo Little, Black Shorts, Bond Street, braggadocio, Brompton Road, Butterfield, Catsmeat Potter-Pirbright, Charles Dickens, comic novel, Comic simile, Constable Oates, Curzon Street, dictator, Dover Street, Dr Watson, Drones Club, Einstein, Eulalie Soeurs, fascism, Feminism, fiction, Freddie Widgeon, Gloucestershire, gooseflesher, Gussie Fink-Nottle, Hamlet, Harold Pinker, Herbert Jenkins, Hercule Poirot, humour, J. Washburn Stoker, Jeeves, Jeeves and Wooster, Junior Ganymede, Keats, King Lear, Kipling, little grey cells, Macbeth, Madeline Bassett, metonymy, Milady's Boudoir, misogyny, Murder Mystery, Mussolini, newts, novel, Ode to the West Wind, Oofy Prosser, Oswald Mosely, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Piccadilly, Poirot, Pomona Grindle, Pop Bassett, Provence, Psychology, Queen Victoria, rannygazoo, Rev HP Pinker, Robert Taylor, Roberta Wickham, Roderick Spode, Shakespeare, Sherlock Holmes, Sidney Carton, silverware, Sir Roderick Spode, Sir Watkyn Bassett, Somerset Maugham, Spode, Stiffy Byng, Stinker Pinker, the Black Shorts, the Code of the Woosters, the Drones Club, The Junior Ganymede club, the Saviours of Britain, The Secret Adversary, The Sensitive Plant, The Times, Totleigh Towers, Totleigh-in-the-Wold, Uncle Tom Travers, Upon Reading Chapman's Homer, WoosterWorld

Posted by Simon on December 8, 2025

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Right Ho, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse (1934)

The exquisite code of politeness of the Woosters prevented me clipping her one on the ear-hole, but I would have given a shilling to be able to do it.

I curbed my resentment. We Woosters are fair-minded. We can make allowances for men who have been parading London all night in scarlet tights.

‘No. It is too late. Remarks have been passed about my tummy which it is impossible to overlook.’

I must say for Jeeves that—till, as he is so apt to do, he starts shoving his oar in and cavilling and obstructing—he makes a very good audience. I don’t know if he is actually agog, but he looks agog, and that’s the great thing.

‘Right Ho, Jeeves’ is the second of the 11 full-length Jeeves and Wooster novels by P.G. Wodehouse. After the first novel took the characters off to the Somerset estate of Chuffy Chuffnell, this is a return to the more familiar setting of London, but the basic motor of the plot remains the same: one of Bertie Wooster’s old school friends falls in love, triggering a world of problems and complications which can only be solved by the miraculous powers of Jeeves. In this case the young chap in trouble is the unworldly nature fan, Gussie Fink-Nottle who has fallen in love with Madeline

All the usual mannerisms are here: farcical plots based on the complicated misunderstandings of posh young people falling in love and managing their eccentric parents, all refracted through the ludicrously upper class attitude of the wonderfully dim and self-deluding narrator, the upper-class idler Bertram ‘Bertie’ Wooster. And all the usual stylistic elements:

Comically dim references to classical literature

‘Well, let me tell you that the man that hath no music in himself…’ I stepped to the door. ‘Jeeves,’ I called down the passage, ‘what was it Shakespeare said the man who hadn’t music in himself was fit for?’
‘Treasons, stratagems, and spoils, sir.’
‘Thank you, Jeeves.’

It’s a running gag that Bertie regularly wants to quote some gem of English literature but can never remember the details:

I remember when I was a kid at school having to learn a poem of sorts about a fellow named Pig-something—a sculptor he would have been, no doubt—who made a statue of a girl, and what should happen one morning but that the bally thing suddenly came to life.

Bertie forgets his words

Forgetting famous quotations is just one aspect of the broader comic topos of Bertie constantly forgetting the words for things:

There you will be, up on that platform, a romantic, impressive figure, the star of the whole proceedings, the what-d’you-call-it of all eyes.

‘Come, come, Tuppy, don’t let us let this little chat become acrid. Is ‘acrid’ the word I want?’

There’s a word beginning with r——“re” something——“recal” something—No, it’s gone. But what I am driving at is that is what this Angela was showing herself.

And needing to be corrected, generally by Jeeves:

She proceeded to develop her theme, speaking in ringing, enthusiastic tones, as if she loved the topic. Jeeves could tell you the word I want. I think it’s “ecstatic”, unless that’s the sort of rash you get on your face and have to use ointment for.

And:

‘To be quite candid, Jeeves, I have frequently noticed before now a tendency or disposition on your part to become—what’s the word?’
‘I could not say, sir.’
‘Eloquent? No, it’s not eloquent. Elusive? No, it’s not elusive. It’s on the tip of my tongue. Begins with an ‘e’ and means being a jolly sight too clever.’
‘Elaborate, sir?’
‘That is the exact word I was after. Too elaborate, Jeeves.’

And:

‘What do you call it when two people of opposite sexes are bunged together in close association in a secluded spot, meeting each other every day and seeing a lot of each other?’
‘Is ‘propinquity’ the word you wish, sir?’
‘It is. I stake everything on propinquity, Jeeves. Propinquity, in my opinion, is what will do the trick.’

Jeeves’s command of vocabulary is a small but significant aspect of his overall command of all situations. Jeeves’s interventions to correct Bertie’s speech, to suggest the correct word or phrase, to supply the quotations Bertie has forgotten, these are all verbal indications or equivalents of his role in the stories, which is to be the still point around which all the stormy plot complications rage.

And it’s not just on Bertie; the narrative notes Jeeves’s effect on everyone’s vocabulary:

‘Well, it’s a matter of psychology, he said.’
There was a time when a remark like that would have had me snookered. But long association with Jeeves has developed the Wooster vocabulary considerably.

The ‘the’

A really prominent part of Bertie’s diction (defined as: ‘the choice and use of words and phrases in speech or writing’) is his insistent use of ‘the’ where everyone else would use a personal pronoun such as ‘my’, ‘his’ and so on.

Until she spoke them, I had been all sweetness and light—the sympathetic nephew prepared to strain every nerve to do his bit. I now froze, and the face became hard and set.

Tuppy, old man. Your tone shocks me. One raises the eyebrows.

He did a sort of twiddly on the turf with his foot. And, when he spoke, one spotted the tremolo in the voice.

I stroked the chin thoughtfully.

The face was pale, the eyes gooseberry-like, the ears drooping, and the whole aspect that of a man who has passed through the furnace and been caught in the machinery

Bertram in the third person

There are the many times Bertie refers to himself in the third person, mockingly but also seriously, as ‘Bertram’, both in the narrative and in dialogue with others.

‘You have Bertram Wooster in your corner, Gussie.’

Bertram Wooster is not accustomed to this gluttonous appetite for his society.

Nobody is more eager to oblige deserving aunts than Bertram Wooster, but there are limits, and sharply defined limits, at that.

Well, as anybody at the Drones will tell you, Bertram Wooster is a pretty hard chap to outgeneral.

The Woosters

In the same spirit, Bertie strews his narrative with many comically mock heroic references to his family.

I mean to say, while firmly resolved to tick him off, I didn’t want to gash his feelings too deeply. Even when displaying the iron hand, we Woosters like to keep the thing fairly matey.

Half a dozen sentences start with the formula ‘we Woosters’ before going on to boast of their accomplishments.

A Wooster’s word is his bond. Woosters may quail, but they do not edge out.

I had won the victory, and we Woosters do not triumph over a beaten foe.

We Woosters are men of tact and have a nice sense of the obligations of a host

When we Woosters put our hands to the plough, we do not readily sheathe the sword.

Slang

Slang is language at play. It is so enjoyable because it represents energy and life and is often very funny, as, for example, in rhyming slang. Wodehouse’s stories are characterised from start to finish by their extreme deployment, their barrage, of upper-class slang, which is endlessly inventive and amusing.

The mystery had conked. I saw all.

Not to put too fine a point upon it, I consider that of all the dashed silly, drivelling ideas I ever heard in my puff this is the most blithering and futile.

‘I like your crust, wiring that you would come next year or whenever it was. You’re coming now.’

The way I look at it is that, as the thing is bound to be a frost, anyway, one may as well get a hearty laugh out of it.

But I claim the right to have a pop at these problems, as they arise, in person, without having everybody behave as if Jeeves was the only onion in the hash.

I was heart and soul in favour of healing the breach and rendering everything hotsy-totsy once more between these two young sundered blighters.

The pathos of the thing gave me the pip.

He was smelling a rose at the moment in a limp sort of way, but removed the beak as I approached.

We had hit the great open spaces at a moment when twilight had not yet begun to cheese it in favour of the shades of night.

This time she shook the pumpkin.

Abbreviations

An increasingly prominent category of slang is abbreviations, abbreviating a word down to just one syllable or, increasingly often, just to one letter, ‘conspic. by its a.’ being an instance which combines both types. The abbreviated syllables cropped up in some of the short stories but I think these one-letter abbreviations only make their first appearance in the first novel i.e. are a newish innovation.

One syllable

Anybody been phoning or calling or anything during my abs.?

In the circs., no doubt, a certain moodiness was only natural.

‘No, Jeeves. No more. Enough has been said. Let us drop the subj.’

The persp., already bedewing my brow, became a regular Niagara.

‘Could?’ I said, for my attensh had been wandering.

‘I don’t suppose she said two words to anybody else, except, of course, idle conv. at the crowded dinner table.’

His manifest pippedness excited my compash, and I ventured a kindly word.

One letter

‘I wouldn’t have thought that this Fink-Nottle would ever have fallen a victim to the divine p, but, if he has, no wonder he finds the going sticky.’

However, on consideration, I saw that there was nothing to be gained by trying to lead up to it gently. It is never any use beating about the b.

I took another oz. of the life-saving and inclined my head.

I could see at a g. that the unfortunate affair had got in amongst her in no uncertain manner. Her usually cheerful map was clouded, and the genial smile conspic. by its a.

There was no play of expression on his finely chiselled to indicate it. There very seldom is on Jeeves’s f-c.

Presently I was sauntering towards the drawing-room with the good old j. nestling snugly abaft the shoulder blades.

In the stress of recent happenings I had rather let that prize-giving business slide to the back of my mind; but I had speedily recovered and, as I say, was able to reply with a manly d.f.

‘This habit of the younger g. of scattering ‘darlings’ about like birdseed is one that I deprecate.’

‘I assumed that you were apologizing for your foul conduct in looping back the last ring that night in the Drones, causing me to plunge into the swimming b. in the full soup and fish.’

Old Pop Kipling never said a truer word than when he made that crack about the f. of the s. being more d. than the m.

Binge

A note on the word ‘binge’ which in Bertie’s hands, sometimes means simply party or ‘do’ (synonymous with ‘beano’); but at other times means something more like that other fashionable ’20s and ’30s word, ‘stunt’.

a) Party

This birthday binge of his was to be on a scale calculated to stagger humanity…

These country binges are all the same. A piano, one fiddle, and a floor like sandpaper.

b) More general event

‘Gussie,’ I said, ‘take an old friend’s advice, and don’t go within a mile of this binge.’

I had told Jeeves that this binge would be fraught with interest, and it was fraught with interest.

Those interruptions had been enough to prove to the perspicacious that here, seated on the platform at the big binge of the season, was one who, if pushed forward to make a speech, might let himself go in a rather epoch-making manner.

The Drones club

Bertie is a member of the Drones Club, a collection of like-minded posh wastrels. It’s been mentioned before, but felt a bit more prominent in this book.

I sent this [telegram] off on my way to the Drones, where I spent a restful afternoon throwing cards into a top-hat with some of the better element.

I remember Cats-meat Potter-Pirbright bringing a police rattle into the Drones one night and loosing it off behind my chair…

I sang as I dressed for dinner that night. At the Drones I was so gay and cheery that there were several complaints.

Long association with the members of the Drones has put me pretty well in touch with the various ways in which an overdose of the blushful Hippocrene can take the individual…

Bertie’s memoirs

It’s a small thing, but I’m struck by the detail that Bertie refers to the texts we’re reading as his memoirs.

If you have followed these memoirs of mine with the proper care, you will be aware that I have frequently had occasion to emphasise the fact that Aunt Dahlia is all right.

This self-consciousness about the status and genre of the text – mentioning their format and motivation – harks back to Victorian story-tellers and is just one way in which it echoes Conan Doyle.

Echoes of Sherlock: cases, clients and methods

Surprisingly, Sherlock Holmes casts a long shadow over Wodehouse. For example Bertie, author of ‘these memoirs’ (much as Dr Watson is the author of the Holmes accounts), routinely refers to the challenges and problems which make up the plot as ‘cases‘ (exactly as Watson refers to Holmes’s cases). (To be fair, plenty of other detectives used the same word, but it’s Holmes they most remind us of.)

My report of the complex case of Gussie Fink-Nottle, Madeline Bassett, my Cousin Angela, my Aunt Dahlia, my Uncle Thomas, young Tuppy Glossop and the cook, Anatole.

I nodded. ‘I remember. Yes, I recall the Sipperley case.’

He deliberately echoes Watson’s way of referring to Holmes’s cases when he talks about ‘the Sipperley Case, the Episode of My Aunt Agatha and the Dog McIntosh, and the smoothly handled Affair of Uncle George and The Barmaid’s Niece’.

They are so much conceived of as ‘cases’ that they need to be handled.

‘In handling the case of Augustus Fink-Nottle, we must keep always in mind the fact that we are dealing with a poop.’

Only a couple of days ago I was compelled to take him off a case because his handling of it was so footling.

And it’s not just the concept of ‘cases’ which echo the Holmes stories but his deliberate description of the people who come to him9 with their problems as ‘clients’.

In the excitement of getting Gussie fixed up I had rather forgotten about this other client. It is often that way when you’re trying to run two cases at once.

He jokingly refers to the way so many of his friends consult Jeeves about their problems that he in effect runs ‘a consulting practice’.

That’s how these big consulting practices like Jeeves’s grow. When he’s got A out of a bad spot, A puts B on to him. And then, when he has fixed up B, B sends C along. And so on, if you get my drift, and so forth.

At one point Wodehouse has Bertie deliberately citing a very famous quote which occurs in several the Holmes stories:

‘You know my methods, Jeeves. Apply them.’

And at not one but several points, the comparison is made absolutely explicit:

One can’t give the raspberry to a client. I mean, you didn’t find Sherlock Holmes refusing to see clients just because he had been out late the night before at Doctor Watson’s birthday party.

Or when Jeeves explains to Bertie that:

‘Possibly you may recollect that it was an axiom of the late Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes, that the instinct of everyone, upon an alarm of fire, is to save the object dearest to them.’

The plot

Bertie returns to London from a holiday in Cannes spent in the company of his Aunt Dahlia Travers, her daughter Angela and her soppy friend, Madeline Bassett.

The white mess jacket

Before I get too far I need to mention that Bertie brought back from Cannes a white mess jacket (with brass buttons) and that when Jeeves sees it he takes strong objection to it. As you know, this squabble about clothes happens in many of the short stories and always follows the same pattern: the subject is established near the start, Bertie insists he’s going to put his foot down and stand no nonsense from Jeeves, then Jeeves repeatedly saves the day getting Bertie and chums out of dire situations, so that at the conclusion Bertie is so overcome with gratitude that he caves in to Jeeves and gets rid of the offending article of clothing.

Jeeves advises Gussie Fink-Nottle

Anyway, on his return he discovers that in his absence, his valet, Jeeves, has been advising Bertie’s old school friend, Gussie Fink-Nottle about a love affair. Gussie is an anti-social teetotaller who lives out in the countryside where he devotes himself to caring for newts. What has brought him to London is that he is smitten with the wet fish Madeline but is too timid to propose.

Fancy dress

When Bertie gets back to his flat after an evening at the Drones club, he discovers Gussie in conversation with Jeeves and dressed as (the devil) Mephistopheles. This is because Madeline has invited him to attend a fancy-dress ball and Jeeves has advised he doesn’t go as the standard poshboy outfit of Pierrot but something more virile and dashing (he had originally suggested a pirate outfit but Gussie ‘objected to the boots’).

In the event the fancy dress scheme is a washout because Gussie is so useless. He is staying in London with his uncle and takes a cab to the party, dressed as the devil, but en route realises he’s left his money back at his uncle’s. He thinks he’ll tap someone at the party to pay the taxi but when they arrive he finds he’s got the wrong address and the butler at the big house they’ve arrived at disclaims all knowledge of any party. He can’t even go back to his uncle’s because all the servants have been given the night off and he’s forgotten his key. So the best he can do is try to run off without paying the cab. But when the driver grabs his coat and pulls it off, Gussy is revealed in all his glory as the devil, freaking the driver out and terrifying passersby. So not, on the whole, the most successful of evenings.

Aunt Dahlia requests

The next theme is introduced when Bertie receives a telegram from his Aunt Dahlia demanding that he go down to her country seat immediately. When Bertie is too dim to do this, she storms up to London, into his flat and trumpets her plan at him: she is a governor of the local grammar school, Market Snodsbury Grammar School, which is due to have its summer prize-giving ceremony the next month and she wants Bertie to give the prizes. Incidentally, Aunt Dahlia calls Bertie:

you old ass
you maddening half-wit
a fathead
greedy young pig
poor fish
abysmal chump
eyesore
‘What a pest you are, you miserable object,’ she sighed

Gussie leaves for Brinkley Court

Next morning young Gussie comes round to Bertie’s flat, and Bertie solemnly ticks him off for listening to Jeeves and not to him, Bertie. (This is hubris. We know that all Bertie’s plans end in disaster and that time after time he is only saved by Jeeves’s ingenuity.) Then Gussie informs him that his beloved Madeline is leaving London anyway. She’s going to the country, to stay with a family named Travers at a place called Brinkley Court! This is, of course, the home of Aunt Dahlia!!

So Bertie has, what for him, is a brainwave, sees he can kill two birds with one stone. First he tells Gussie he’ll get him an invite to Brinkley Hall so he can go see his lady love. But then he telegrams to Aunt Dahlia saying he is indisposed/too busy to perform the prize-giving she bullied him into, but has found a replacement, by which he of course means Gussie.

Bertie is summoned to Brinkley Court

All appears settled but the next thing that happens is that Bertie receives an anguished telegram from Aunt Dahlia telling him that the long-planned engagement between her daughter Angela and Tuppy Glossop has been cancelled. The couple has fallen out. Apparently he said that her new hat made her look like a Pekinese dog. But what clinched it is that during her holiday in Cannes, Angela was attacked by a shark (this is played for laughs although ever since the 1977 movie of the same name, no-one thinks a shark attack is funny) but when she retold the story, Tuppy mockingly said it was probably just a log, or a flatfish at most. Which led Angela to reply that he ought to lay off the carbs as he was getting pretty lardy. And so the argument unravelled.

The reader is a bit surprised that this appears to be a big enough crisis that Bertie feels obliged to hot foot it down to Brinkley Court to comfort his aunt. Here she lays out her troubles:

Tuppy and Angela have broken off their engagement
she has to find someone to conduct the school prize-giving
her husband just received a whopping income tax bill (which he is convinced symbolises the end of British civilisation as we known it)
at the same moment that she needs to find £500 to keep her magazine, Milady’s Boudoir, afloat
but that in fact he gave her the necessary money but she lost it playing baccarat at Cannes, and can’t pluck up the courage to tell him

It’s important to emphasise that Aunt Dahlia thinks Bertie is a complete clot, thinks that every plan he suggests, in fact almost everything he says, is unmitigated idiocy. And that she prefers Jeeves. In fact it’s a recurring comic trope that everyone Bertie talks to sooner or later thanks him for coming but asks where Jeeves is. This begins to really rile Bertie.

The dinner refusal

Later, talking to Tuppy, Bertie comes up with a cunning plan. He will advise Tuppy to refuse dinner that evening, the point being is it will be a dinner cooked by Anatole, the legendary chef. And this unprecedented gesture well convince Angela he has gone off his food for love of her. And they’ll be reconciled.

When Aunt Dahlia comes to him, saying she’s had no opportunity of talking to her husband about the lost money, Bertie advises her to push away Anatole’s dinner, in order to persuade Uncle Tom how upset she is.

And when Gussie comes to him for help in wooing Madeline, he advises him to reject Anatole’s meal with the same aim in mind.

Unfortunately this cunning plan backfires big time because Anatole, like all culinary geniuses, is very sensitive, and when dish after dish is brought back to the kitchen untouched, the Frenchman decides it is a deliberate snub to his skills and quits! Vowing to return to his native Provence. Which pitches Tom Travers into depths of misery because his stomach was ruined by long years living Out East and Anatole is the only cook who can make dishes acceptable to Tom’s sensitive tum-tum.

Aunt Dahlia suggests suicide

Which is why when he next sees Aunt Dahlia she cheerfully suggests that he goes and drowns himself in the nearby pond. the plan failed for both Tuppy and Gussie as well.

So, as you can see, what we have here is five or six ‘issues’, problems or, as Bertie puts it, ‘cases’, which he sets out to solve with increasingly wayward results until, of course, finally, Jeeves steps in and saves the day.

But first things have to get worse before they can get better. And so:

1. Bertie roasts Tuppy

Bertie has the bright idea of using reverse psychology on Angela, taking her out into the garden and slagging off Tuppy to her, with the idea that she will jump to his defence. Unfortunately, the more Bertie vilifies Tuppy, the more Angela agrees with him, concluding she was wise to dump him before heading indoors. It’s at that moment that, as in a stage farce, Tuppy himself emerges from the bushes nearby where he heard every word, and proceeds to chase Bertie round the garden bench, with a view to smashing his face in.

The thing is Tuppy not only heard Bertie slagging him off but has become convinced that Angela is in love with another man and when Bertie innocently remarks that he (Bertie) and Angela were inseparable in their two-month holiday at Cannes, Tuppy puts 2 and 2 together and concludes that Angela dumped him because she is really in love with Bertie. Obviously Bertie goes to great lengths to emphasis that this isn’t true, but Tuppy still insists on thinking there must be some other man…

2. The drunken prize-giving

In an obvious set-piece, Gussie undertakes the prize-giving at the local grammar school (which Bertie had adroitly ducked) completely drunk. How come? Bertie has the disastrous idea that Gussie is failing to propose to Madeline because he is so cripplingly shy and the way to circumvent this is to pop some booze in his daily orange juice. Bertie starts from the comic premise that no man in his right mind would give up his bachelor freedom for the married state, or could bring himself to spout loads of romantic nonsense – and therefore a chap needs to be well-oiled to even try. The first problem is that, before he gets to the spiked orange juice, Gussie takes Bertie’s advice to heart and swigs half a bottle of Scotch. Realising this Bertie then tries to hide the spiked OJ but when his back is turned, Gussie swigs this as well.

Thus he is completely trolleyed when he is motored to the school by Aunt Dahlia and Uncle Tom (Jeeves and Bertie following in the latter’s car). There follows exactly the kind of comic set-piece you might expect, with Gussie shown to the place of honour on the stage in front of a hundred silent schoolboys and all their parents and proceeding, of course, to make an ass of himself.

3. The girls get engaged to the wrong men

When Gussie starts to single Bertie out for criticism from the stage, our hero legs it, gets back to Brinkley and goes for a lie-down. When he rises for dinner, he is astonished to learn that a) Angela has got engaged to drunken Gussie (!!!) and b) Madeline has gotten it into her head that she (Madeline) is engaged to Bertie. This is because the day before Bertie took her into the garden and described how there was someone staying at the house whose heart beat deeply for her – and listening to her vapourings about fairies and stars. Obviously he intended to be selling her on Gussie but Madeline got the wrong end of the stick and thinks i) he is in love with her and ii) his witless ramblings amounted to a proposal!

Aunt Dahlia is delighted

One silver lining in all this is that Aunt Dahlia, instead of being outraged at Gussie’s drunken shambles of a presentation speech, thought it was immensely entertaining, not least because he singled out her husband, Tom, for some drunken criticism, and then accused Bertie of cheating at school (in order to win the much-coveted Scripture Prize, which Bertie is very proud of and keeps reminding us of, mainly because it was the peak of his academic career). As she puts it:

‘What was there to be peeved about? I took the whole thing as a great compliment, proud to feel that any drink from my cellars could have produced such a majestic jag. It restores one’s faith in post-war whisky.’

Also, after a day of beseeching and wheedling, Dahlia has managed to persuade Anatole to withdraw his resignation. Tom (of the gyppy tummy) is delighted and so is the Aunt.

But no sooner has she finished explaining this than her butler, Seppings, enters the room to ask whether my lady gave permission for Gussie to be on the roof, making rude faces through the skylight of Anatole’s bedroom. There’s a little comic pastiche as Wodehouse describes Bertie, Aunt Dahlia and Seppings in the manner of racehorses charging up the stairs to see who can get to Anatole’s attic room first. (Aunt Dahlia won by a short head. Half a staircase separated second and third.)

At long last, Bertie asks Jeeves

Maybe I’d had a particularly trying day at work, but eventually all this farcical complexity began to wear a little. Wooster by himself eventually gets a bit much; it’s the dynamic between him and Jeeves which is so priceless. For most of this novel Bertie is not just narrating but the active protagonist of all the plot developments and this eventually starts to feel a bit monotonous.

Finally, about 83% into the text (according to my Kindle edition) Bertie swallows his pride and asks Jeeves if he can think of a way out of the terrible mess everything’s got into.

The fire alarm stunt

Jeeves proposes the old fire alarm stunt i.e. ring the house’s (very large) alarm bell as if there’s a fire, on the principle that the two erring couples will run to save each other and True Love be revealed.

The bell ringing goes easily enough but when all the inhabitants have evacuated the building and are standing around on the lawn, none of the estranged couples have gotten together. Seems like a failure.

Aunt Dahlia is amused at Bertie’s idiocy and doesn’t even mind too much when it is revealed that the front door has blown shut and all the other windows and doors are locked. Nobody has a spare key. Why not call the staff or ask the butler? Because the entire staff have gone off to Kingham Manor, the stately-home belonging to the Stretchley-Budd family, who are hosting a big dance party for servants. So it looks like all the posh inhabitants are going to have to spend the night on the lawn and everyone, accordingly, blames Bertie.

They have the bright idea to motor over to Kingham Manor to get the keys off the butler until they discover that the garage, also, is locked up and the chauffeur off at the party.

It’s at this point the Jeeves makes the suggestion that Bertie should cycle over to Kingham Manor and get the front door key. Bertie puts up every sort of objection, but Aunt Dahlia imperiously commands him to go. It’s a nightmare journey 9 miles along country lanes in the dark but there is a surprise in store. For when Bertie finally arrives at Kingham Manor, makes his way to the dance, identifies the butler and interrupts his dance, the man tells him he doesn’t have the key. More astonishing still, he tells Bertie that he gave the key to Jeeves!

Astonished and then furiously angry, Bertie sets off, with a saddle-sore bum and aching legs, the 9 mile return journey. but when he pulls up outside Brinkley Manor he discovers everyone has gone inside. And the person who answers the front door is wet Madeline who, to his vast relief, gaspingly asks Bertie to release her from their vow (their engagement that never was). This is because she realises that all along she has been bearing the flame of true love for Gussie, and wants to marry him. Bertie is amazed and relieved.

Next person he meets is Tuppy, breezily coming up from the wine cellar with bottles under his arm, who tells him they’re having a little party in the drawing room. As to the disagreement with Angela, all has been forgiven and forgotten and they are re-engaged.

As to Aunt Dahlia she is delighted because Anatole has finally decided to stay, which delights Uncle Tom so much that he has happily given her the £500 she needs to save her magazine.

In fact all the issues which have been plaguing the book have been completely sorted while Bertie was away. Of course he soon bumps into Jeeves and is too amazed at this reversal of fortune to be cross with him. And Jeeves explains: he explains that his family used to have a relative they all loved to hate; whenever she was around, she united the family in their dislike of her. Well, that’s what Jeeves did to Bertie. He let him go ahead with the fire alarm stunt precisely because it was such a bad idea that it would bring everyone together in complaining about him. Even more so when they could all complain about it being his fault they were all locked out of the house.

So while Bertie was cycling off, this rallying round a common hate figure made everyone forget their grievances and, once they’d done that, they naturally gravitated towards the people they really loved.

‘It occurred to me that were you, sir, to be established as the person responsible for the ladies and gentlemen being forced to spend the night in the garden, everybody would take so strong a dislike to you that in this common sympathy they would sooner or later come together.’

Then, when Jeeves ‘found’ the front door key (which he had had on him all the time) and it became obvious that Bertie’s long bicycle odyssey was pointless, they switched from hatred to humour and then feeling sorry for him. So by the time Bertie arrived back the bad feeling that had brought them together had evaporated and he was once again regarded as a harmless buffoon.

Very, very clever. Typically double-edged or multi-layered solution from Jeeves. And in the same way, Bertie’s anger which he nursed all the way back from the dance, dissipates when he sees the magical effects of Jeeves’s trick.

And one last thing: the clothes stunt. Like so many of the short stories, the argument between Jeeves and Bertie over an item of clothing the latter loves and the former loathes, is, as usual, decided in Jeeves’s favour. He regretfully informs Bertie that he accidentally burned the mess jacket while ironing it. To be honest, this is not a particularly clever way of solving the clothes issue; in other stories the destruction of the contentious item of clothing is intimately tied up with the denouement of the plt. Here it is just bolted on as a completely separate event. Still, as Bertie slangily sums the whole thing up:

‘The place is positively stiff with happy endings.’

The cast

Bertie Wooster – private school, Eton and Oxford, an ass and an idiot with a comically inflated sense of his own abilities
Jeeves – his valet
Augustus ‘Gussie’ Fink-Nottle – timid and anti-social, lives in Lincolnshire with his newts – ‘one of those timid, obsequious, teacup-passing, thin-bread-and-butter-offering yes-men whom women of my Aunt Dahlia’s type nearly always like at first sight’ – according to Bertie, ‘wabbling, shrinking, diffident rabbit in human shape’
Miss Madeline Bassett – only daughter of Sir Watkyn Bassett CBE – ‘a pretty enough girl in a droopy, blonde, saucer-eyed way, but not the sort of breath-taker that takes the breath’
Aunt Dahlia of Brinkley Court aka Mrs Travers, married to Tom Travers, editor of Milady’s Boudoir, ‘a large, genial soul, with whom it is a pleasure to hob-nob’
Uncle Tom Travers – Aunt Dahlia’s husband – ‘who always looked a bit like a pterodactyl with a secret sorrow’
- Seppings – Aunt Dahlia’s butler, a cold, unemotional man
- Anatole – Aunt Dahlia’s legendary cook – ‘a tubby little man with a moustache of the outsize or soup-strainer type, and you can generally take a line through it as to the state of his emotions. When all is well, it turns up at the ends like a sergeant-major’s. When the soul is bruised, it droops’
- Waterbury – their chauffeur
Hildebrand ‘Tuppy’ Glossop – ‘was the fellow who, callously ignoring the fact that we had been friends since boyhood, betted me one night at the Drones that I could swing myself across the swimming bath by the rings—a childish feat for one of my lissomeness—and then, having seen me well on the way, looped back the last ring, thus rendering it necessary for me to drop into the deep end in formal evening costume’ – ‘In build and appearance, Tuppy somewhat resembles a bulldog’
Pongo Twistleton – fellow member of the Drones Club whose birthday party goes on late into the night with the result that Bertie has a crushing hangover when Aunt Dahlia storms into his bedroom demanding that he officiate at her prize-giving

The Freudian presence

As you know I’ve been collecting references in 1920s and 1930s popular literature to Freud and Freudian ideas.

The nibs who study these matters claim, I believe, that this has got something to do with the subconscious mind, and very possibly they may be right. I wouldn’t have said off-hand that I had a subconscious mind, but I suppose I must without knowing it, and no doubt it was there, sweating away diligently at the old stand, all the while the corporeal Wooster was getting his eight hours. For directly I opened my eyes on the morrow, I saw daylight. Well, I don’t mean that exactly, because naturally I did. What I mean is that I found I had the thing all mapped out. The good old subconscious m. had delivered the goods.

And:

Jeeves, when I discussed the matter with him later, said it was something to do with inhibitions, if I caught the word correctly, and the suppression of, I think he said, the ego. What he meant, I gathered, was that, owing to the fact that Gussie had just completed a five years’ stretch of blameless seclusion among the newts, all the goofiness which ought to have been spread out thin over those five years and had been bottled up during that period came to the surface on this occasion in a lump—or, if you prefer to put it that way, like a tidal wave.

Jeeves’s miraculous mode of transportation

My private belief, as I think I have mentioned before, is that Jeeves doesn’t have to open doors. He’s like one of those birds in India who bung their astral bodies about—the chaps, I mean, who having gone into thin air in Bombay, reassemble the parts and appear two minutes later in Calcutta. Only some such theory will account for the fact that he’s not there one moment and is there the next. He just seems to float from Spot A to Spot B like some form of gas.

Jeeves’s character

One thing I have never failed to hand the man. He is magnetic. There is about him something that seems to soothe and hypnotize. To the best of my knowledge, he has never encountered a charging rhinoceros, but should this contingency occur, I have no doubt that the animal, meeting his eye, would check itself in mid-stride, roll over and lie purring with its legs in the air.

Choice phrases

She unshipped a sigh that sounded like the wind going out of a rubber duck.

You can’t expect an empty aunt to beam like a full aunt.

It isn’t often that Aunt Dahlia, normally as genial a bird as ever encouraged a gaggle of hounds to get their noses down to it, lets her angry passions rise, but when she does, strong men climb trees and pull them up after them.

Hunting, if indulged in regularly over a period of years, is a pastime that seldom fails to lend a fairly deepish tinge to the patient’s complexion, and her best friends could not have denied that even at normal times the relative’s map tended a little toward the crushed strawberry. But never had I seen it take on so pronounced a richness as now. She looked like a tomato struggling for self-expression.

Credit

‘Right Ho, Jeeves’ was published in 1934 by Herbert Jenkins. I read it online.

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by Simon on December 5, 2025 • Permalink

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Peril at End House by Agatha Christie (1932)

‘The little facts that are curious, I like to see them appear. They are significant. They point the way.’
‘The way where?’
‘You put your finger on the weak spot, my excellent Hastings. Where? Where indeed! Alas, we shall not know till we get there.’ (Chapter 4)

‘I cannot help feeling, Hastings, that there is something behind this – something that has not yet come to light.’ (Chapter 4)

‘Since this trouble with my back, I’ve read all the detective stories that ever were, I should think.
Nothing else seems to pass the time away so quick.’ (Mrs Croft laid up in bed, Chapter 5)

‘I am convinced that le bon Dieu created Hercule Poirot for the express purpose of interfering. It is my métier.’ (Poirot, Chapter 12)

Summary

This is the sixth Poirot novel and it’s not great. It’s certainly not as entertaining as its immediate predecessors, the non-Poirot stories The Murder at the Vicarage and The Sittaford Mystery. ‘Peril at End House’ suffers by comparison for at least two reasons:

Poirot is not (heresy!) as entertaining a figure as Miss Marple, let alone the freelance female detectives in novels like The Secret of Chimneys or The Sittaford Mystery (Bundle Brent or Emily Trefusis, respectively).
The story itself is thin and, instead of unfolding with impressive logic, felt to me contrived and propped up right up until the extraordinarily convoluted conclusion.

Poirot and Captain Hastings are staying at the most expensive hotel in the Cornish Riviera resort of St Loo. Here they meet a devil-may-care young woman, Magdala ‘Nick’ Buckley and her circle of friends. They’re based at the big old family house she owns perched out on the cliffs, the End House of the title. The house belonged to her dissolute grandfather, old Sir Nicholas. When her mother and father died, it was her grandfather who raised her, hence she is nicknamed after him, Nick.

The central premise of the book is that Poirot comes to believe someone is trying to kill Nick and sets out to protect her. He partly fails because at a party to watch the fireworks over the resort’s harbour, in the dark, someone mistakenly shoots dead Maggie Buckley, a cousin of Nick’s who had borrowed the latter’s distinctive shawl. At which point Poirot has Nick whisked off to a nursing home for her own protection. We are at page 100 of this 250-page book and the next 150 pages see Poirot puzzling out who would want to murder Nick and why.

What I found unsatisfactory was the way they first meet, when the young woman is poncing about on the terrace of the hotel and ducks her head when she thinks a wasp has buzzed by. Somehow Poirot mystically knows it is not a wasp but a bullet which she heard, and which also pierced the hat she was wearing. Poirot finds the bullet which pinged off the wall and landed at his feet, and then identifies the hole in the hat. This is a preposterous incident and a very weak premise to hang the rest of the book on. Why would anyone try to shoot the woman in a public place and when she’s just a few yards from the most famous detective in the world? For me the novel never recovers from this contrived and improbable beginning.

It’s in light of this failed assassination attempt that Nick and her friends mention three other recent ‘accidents’: when one night the big heavy framed painting hanging over her bed fell onto her pillow and it was only luck that she’d got up and was out of bed at that moment: the way her car ran away with her because the brakes had failed / been tampered with; on a walk along the cliffs a big boulder came bouncing down the path and only just missed her. So all this is what persuades Poirot that someone is trying to murder the flighty young woman, despite her own dismissal of all three ‘accidents’.

Next problem I had is that Nick makes it super-abundantly extra clear, especially after her friend is killed instead of her, that there is something Poirot, Hastings and all the others ‘don’t know’:

She only shook her head, reiterating: ‘You don’t know! You don’t know!’

And yet Poirot completely ignores her and bundles her off to the nursing home, wasting days devising lists of suspects and their possible motives when all along all he had to do was ask her. I was jumping up and down and yelling ‘ask her what she means’ but Poirot doesn’t get round to doing this till page 120, by which time I had already guessed from clues in the text what she was on about. In other words, Poirot was stupider and slower than me, a not particularly bright reader.

So 1) the book starts from a flawed or clumsy premise, and 2) in it Poirot is uncharacteristically dense and slow.

Next Poirot continually talks up and exaggerates the situation – someone is trying to assassinate a young woman – into a world historical crisis, claiming the would-be murderer is a fiend, an arch criminal, a devil etc etc rather than a would-be murderer. Similarly, he goes to pieces in his sympathy and compassion for Nick with every twist in the plot, in a way which seems ludicrously overblown.

Finally, I laughed in disbelief when, at the climax of the novel, Poirot suggests holding a séance to flush out the identity of the murderer. Altogether this felt like a contrived, stretched, implausible and tired effort, a big disappointment after the richly entertaining ‘The Murder at the Vicarage’ and ‘The Sittaford Mystery’.

Comedy

It starts promisingly enough, playing to the fundamental fact about the Poirot novels which is that they are comedies. Poirot’s preening pomposity and endless egotism are continually exaggerated for comic effect:

‘They say of me: “That is Hercule Poirot! – The great – the unique! – There was never any one like him, there never will be!” Eh bien – I am satisfied. I ask no more. I am modest.’ (Chapter 1)

‘Monsieur Poirot is – er – was – a great detective,’ I explained.
‘Ah! my friend,’ cried Poirot. ‘Is that all you can find to say? Mais dis donc. I say then to
Mademoiselle that I am a detective unique, unsurpassed, the greatest that ever lived!’
(Chapter 2)

So much so that when, later on, anyone remarks on his fame Christie doesn’t even have to describe Poirot’s smug preening.

‘You are a great detective, M. Poirot?’ said Mrs Buckley.
‘It has been said, Madame.’
(Chapter 16)

Just as exaggerated for comic effect are his sidekick Captain Hastings’s two key attributes which are 1) his obtuseness (continually not noticing evidence, facts, implications staring him in the face):

‘What I particularly missed was your vivid imagination, Hastings,’ he went on dreamily. ‘One needs a certain amount of light relief.’

‘Almost incredible, my poor Hastings, how you hardly ever do see ! It amazes me every time anew!’ (Chapter 1)

‘You have an extraordinary effect on me, Hastings. You have so strongly the flair in the wrong direction that I am almost tempted to go by it! You are that wholly admirable type of man, honest, credulous, honourable, who is invariably taken in by any scoundrel.’ (Chapter 4)

And 2) his weakness for a pretty face i.e. he is easily distracted by pretty women:

She looked rather lovely as she sat up in bed, her two hands clenched, and her cheeks burning.

and Poirot continually mocks him for both.

‘You would say that! It would appeal, I knew, to your romantic but slightly mediocre mind. Buried treasure – yes, you would enjoy that idea.’ (Chapter 9)

But somehow, somewhere along the way, all this stops being so funny and becomes a mannerism.

Self-referential bookishness

I can’t quite define exactly the effect but Christie repeatedly has her narrators or characters point out how much the plot they’re involved in resembles a cheap thriller, a detective story or movie, as if this self-awareness somehow elevates them above that level. Whereas it does the opposite and simply highlights how close to genre fiction, packed with the clichés and stereotypes of the genre, they actually are. Thus when someone tries to shoot the book’s lead female character, Miss Magdala ‘Nick’ Buckley.

‘And now we ask the question of the cinema, of the detective novel—Who profits by your death, Mademoiselle?’ (Chapter 3)

Or:

‘Well, this is all too, too marvellous. Do you think someone really wants to do away with me? It would be thrilling. But, of course, that sort of thing doesn’t really happen. Only in books.’ (Chapter 2)

Or when Christie has someone or other jokily compare Poirot and Hastings to Holmes and Watson:

‘One should not keep a dog and have to bark oneself,’ agreed Nick, with mock sympathy. ‘Who is the dog, by the way? Dr Watson, I presume.’
‘My name is Hastings,’ I said coldly.
(Chapter 2)

But again, Christie loses out by the comparison. Poirot may be well known but Sherlock Holmes is a global icon.

It was his constant dictum that all the world knew Hercule Poirot. Here was someone who did not.

So why does she do it numerous times in every novel? Was this knowing self-referentiality part of the genre itself? Do all detectives in all detective stories, at some point or another, compare themselves to Sherlock Holmes or suddenly realising that they’re behaving just like a character in a detective novel?

‘Since this trouble with my back, I’ve read all the detective stories that ever were, I should think. Nothing else seems to pass the time away so quick.’ (Mrs Croft laid up in bed, Chapter 5)

‘I have let myself go to the most absurd suppositions. I, Hercule Poirot, have descended to the most ignominious flights of fancy. I have adopted the mentality of the cheap thriller.’ (Chapter 9)

‘You have a tendency, Hastings, to prefer the least likely. That, no doubt, is from reading too many detective stories. In real life, nine times out of ten, it is the most likely and the most obvious person who commits the crime.’ (Chapter 9)

‘Oh dear, whoever would have thought of such a thing? Seems like an Edgar Wallace, doesn’t it?’ (nurse at the nursing home, Chapter 17)

(Richard Edgar Wallace, 1875 to 1932, wrote over 170 novels, many of them crime thrillers.)

‘Diable!’ said Poirot, as we walked away. ‘Is no one ever quite sure? In detective books – yes. But life – real life – is always full of muddle.’ (Chapter 17)

Retired

Also, I don’t understand why Christie had Poirot retire from working as a consulting detective in the second novel about him and then kept him in this state of supposed retirement for the next 40 years!

‘I am completely retired – but what will you? I have retired – I’m finished.’
‘You are not finished,’ I exclaimed, warmly.
Poirot patted my knee. ‘There speaks the good friend – the faithful dog. And you have reason, too. The grey cells, they still function – the order, the method – it is still there. But when I have retired, my friend, I have retired! It is finished! I am not a stage favourite who gives the world a dozen farewells. In all generosity I say, Let the young men have a chance.’

Except it’s the exact opposite which happens, in novel after novel: the young men don’t stand a chance; the world famous Hercule Poirot is always stepping in and solving everything for them. Poirot himself seems confused, or conflicted.

‘But surely I read that you had retired – that you’d taken a holiday for good and all.’
‘All ! Madame, you must not believe everything you read in the papers.’ (Chapter 5)

Symmetry OCD

Poirot was as jumpy as the proverbial cat. He walked about our sitting room all the afternoon, murmuring to himself and ceaselessly rearranging and straightening the ornaments.

He reached for his hat and carefully flicked an infinitesimal speck of dust from its surface. (Chapter 5)

With careful fingers he straightened the objects on the table in front of him. (Chapter 10)

See his thing with playing cards, below.

Cast

As usual, a fundamental part of Christie’s strategy is to create such a large cast of characters that just having Poirot discover all their basic backstories, and then uncover all the secrets they’re hiding, in such a way as to cast suspicion on most of them, actually makes up the text.

Poirot
Captain Hastings
Magdala ‘Nick’ Buckley – owner of the End House, ‘her small impudent dark head’, She is charming, Mademoiselle Nick, but she is a feather-head. Decidedly she is a feather-head.’
Commander George Challenger – would like to marry Nick
Frederica ‘Freddie’ Rice – Nick’s best friend, ‘Married to a beast—a man who drank and drugged and was altogether a queer of the worst description. She had to leave him a year or two ago.’ ‘She was an unusual type – weary Madonna describes it best. She had fair, almost colourless hair, parted in the middle and drawn straight down over her ears to a knot in the neck. Her face was dead white and emaciated – yet curiously attractive. Her eyes were very light grey with large pupils. She had a curious look of detachment… She impressed me, I think, as the most tired person I had ever met—tired in mind, not in body, as though she had found everything in the world to be empty and valueless.’ Turns out to be a drug addict.
Freddie’s husband aka ‘the mess’
Jim Lazarus – the art dealer in Bond Street, ‘He’s a Jew, of course, but a frightfully decent one’. ‘A tall, fair, rather exquisite young man, with a rather fleshy nose and over-emphasised good-looks, he had a supercilious manner and a tired drawl. There was a sleekness about him that I especially disliked.’
Charles Vyse – local solicitor, Nick’s cousin, stands to inherit End House if Nick dies
William Wilson – the gardener at End House, husband of…
Ellen Wilson – housemaid
their son, Alfred, who gleefully describes watching pigs being slaughtered
Bert and Mildred ‘Milly’ Croft – Australian couple who have rented the Lodge
- Edith – their maid
Maggie Buckley – Nick’s sensible cousin: ‘It was, I think, her appearance of calm good sense that so attracted me. A quiet girl, pretty in the old-fashioned sense – certainly not smart. Her face was innocent of make-up and she wore a simple, rather shabby, black evening dress. She had frank blue eyes, and a pleasant slow voice.’
Dr Graham – the trusted local doctor, there’s always one
Colonel Weston – Chief Constable of Devon
The Reverend Giles Buckley – father of murdered Maggie Buckley, ‘a small man, grey-headed, with a diffident appealing manner’
Mrs Jean Buckley – ‘a woman of character, tall and fair and showing very plainly her northern ancestry’
Captain Michael Seton – dashing airman, engaged on a long-distance flight to Australia
Sir Matthew Seton – his gruff old uncle, ‘the second richest man in England’, who disapproved of his relationship with Nick Buckley (or any other woman, come to that)
Mr Whitfield – Captain Seton’s solicitor
matron of the nursing home where Nick is sent
Hood – orderly at the nursing home, ‘a stupid but honest-looking young fellow of about twenty-two’
nurse probationer at the nursing home

Conventions

1. Suspicion

Just like Miss Marple, Poirot is suspicious of everyone.

‘What a suspicious old devil you are!’
‘You are right, mon ami. I am suspicious of everyone – of everything.’

Compare Miss M:

‘Ah!’ said Miss Marple. ‘But I always find it prudent to suspect everybody just a little. What I say is, you really never know, do you?’ (The Murder at the Vicarage, Chapter 16)

2. More

And early on in any of these mysteries someone always utters the classic trope of the genre, that there’s more to this affair than meets the eye:

‘I cannot help feeling, Hastings, that there is something behind this—something that has not yet come to light.’ (Chapter 4)

Compare:

‘Do you know, Clement,’ [Colonel Melchett] said suddenly, ‘I’ve a feeling that this is going to turn out a much more intricate and difficult business than any of us think. Dash it all, there’s something behind it.’
(The Murder at the Vicarage, Chapter 12)

And:

‘I think,’ said Inspector Narracott deliberately, ‘that there’s a lot more in this case than meets the eye.’
(The Sittaford Mystery, Chapter 4)

The strain of modern life

More than once Christie has had characters refer to ‘the strain of modern life’. She does it again here.

‘What do you mean exactly by that. Mademoiselle ? On top of everything else?’
‘I don’t mean anything particular. What the newspapers call ‘ the strain of modem life,’ I suppose. Too many cocktails, too many cigarettes – all that sort of thing. It’s just that I’ve got into a ridiculous – sort of state.’ (Chapter 5)

This phrase also crops up in some of Noel Coward’s 1920s plays. It was obviously a received idea and cliché of the time.

Poirot’s method

Poirot’s insistence on Order and Method and Psychology, is explained in every novel and quickly became formulaic.

‘Order and method! That is the first stage. To arrange the facts with neatness and precision. The next stage—’
‘Yes.’
‘The next stage is that of the psychology. The correct employment of the little grey cells…’ (Chapter 9)

Less flatteringly, there’s simply nosing around.

‘Mon ami,’ said Poirot, ‘I like to inquire into everything. Hercule Poirot is a good dog. The good dog follows the scent, and if, regrettably, there is no scent to follow, he noses around – seeking always something that is not very nice. So also, does Hercule Poirot. And often – oh ! so often – does he find it!’ (Chapter 16)

Poirot the outsider

There are some obvious points about Poirot. An essay I read said that Christie developed him during the First World War when the established doyen of detectives was Sherlock Holmes and the new author of adventure stories on the block was John Buchan. Holmes is obviously tall, fit, a dab hand with a sword, a drug addict, with a weird ability at the violin, in many ways a freak. Buchan’s heroes do lots of running round and biffing baddies. Both are true blue, public school Englishmen. Poirot is obviously conceived to be the opposite of all these things. Poirot is:

Foreign and so completely outside the English class system, completely outside, for example, the way Captain Hastings responds to other public-school educated military men as ‘pukka sahibs’. Thus his cross riposte to Hastings:

‘Poirot,’ I cried, scandalised. ‘You really can’t do that. It isn’t playing the game.’
‘I am not playing a game, mon ami.’ His voice rang out suddenly harsh and stern. ‘I am hunting down a murderer.’ (Chapter 13)

Outsider So he is an outsider to almost all English customs, cuisine, politics, traditions and so on, not just an outsider but a critic (for example, of England’s notoriously disgusting food).

Ambivalence he speaks with a French accent and has a French-sounding name and yet he isn’t French. Maybe it started out as a joke to make him Belgian and have every character he encounters think he’s French, but it turns into something more allegorical. Even in Europe, he doesn’t fit in. Or: he doesn’t fit in even with people’s stereotypes of foreigners. A Frenchman would be easy to dismiss given the millennium-old antagonism between the English and French. But Poirot both is (name and speech) and isn’t (actual nationality) French. He is neither fish, flesh nor fowl.

So whenever Poirot corrects people’s misconception about his nationality, it always wrongfoots them. Holmes is what people expect, tall, commanding, authoritative. Poirot always unsettles and unnerves people.

Short not tall – compare the over-6-foot-tall Sherlock.

Unmanly – he is dapper and preening and fussy, not at all like the manly and indifferent-to-appearance heroes like Richard Hannay / Sandy Arbuthnot. In fact Christie chose to emphasise this very unEnglish, unheroic fussiness by giving him symmetric obsessive compulsive disorder:

Symmetry OCD is a subtype of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) characterized by an intense need for things to be perfectly aligned, balanced, or arranged in a symmetrical manner. Individuals with this condition experience significant distress and anxiety when objects or patterns appear asymmetrical or imperfect.

Hence, on a physical level, his fussiness about his personal appearance, and his fiddling with objects on the table or mantelpiece to position them just so. Which is an obvious physical manifestation of the similar mental compulsion to arrange all the facts into a neat pattern. Given vivid embodiment when Poirot unexpectedly asks Hastings to go and buy him a pack of playing cards.

‘If you would be the good friend – the good helpful friend…’
‘ Yes’ I said, eagerly.
‘Go out, I beg of you, and buy me some playing cards.’
I stared. ‘Very well,’ I said coldly. I could not but suspect that he was making a deliberate excuse to get rid of me. Here, however, I misjudged him. That night, when I came into the sitting-room about ten o’clock, I found Poirot carefully building card houses – and I remembered! It was an old trick of his – soothing his nerves. He smiled at me.
‘Yes – you remember. One needs the precision. One card on another – so – in exactly the right place and that supports the weight of the card on top and so on, up.’ (Chapter 17)

Woman haters and other stereotypes

Christie uses the phrase woman hater’ in this novel and its immediate predecessors. Here, Captain Seton’s uncle, Sir Matthew Seton, is described as one.

‘He [Michael] comes of rather a mad family,’ he [Lazarus] said. ‘His uncle. Sir Matthew Seton who died about a week ago – he was as mad as a hatter.’
‘He was the mad millionaire who ran bird sanctuaries, wasn’t he?’ asked Frederica.
‘Yes. Used to buy up islands. He was a great woman-hater. Some girl chucked him once, I believe, and he took to Natural History by way of consoling himself.’ (Chapter 7)

In The Sittaford Mystery, the murdered man, Captain Trevelyan, is described by several characters as a ‘woman hater’. Mrs Willett has no time for this description.

‘I’ve known dozens of men like it. They are called women haters and all sorts of silly things, and really all the time it’s only shyness. If I could have got at him,’ said Mrs Willett with determination, ‘I’d soon have got over all that nonsense. That sort of man only wants bringing out.’
(Chapter 14)

Either 1) there were a lot of these ‘woman haters’ about in the 1920s and ’30s, or 2) Christie was particularly intrigued by them, or 3) the most likely explanation, they were yet another handy stock type of the kind her stories are constructed from (the timid vicar, the solid doctor, the handsome young artist, the flighty young woman etc etc).

Because our own age is obsessed by gender and riddled with feminist ideology, this kind of stereotype leaps out at us (just as our other modern obsession with race and ethnicity means that Christie’s stereotypical references to Jews and to any other racial type or ethnicity also leap out at the modern reader, and are liable to cause offence).

But the entire books are made of stereotypical incidents and stock character types. Modern readers just alight on some of the stereotypes, the ones which press modern buttons, and find them offensive. But if there were any Cockneys left, they might find Christie’s clichéd depiction of the Londoner Inspector Japp, offensive:

‘Well, you mustn’t be depressed, old cock,’ said Japp. ‘Even if you can’t see your way clear – well you can’t go about at your time of life and expect to have the success you used to do. We all of us get stale as the years go by. Got to give the young ‘uns a chance, you know.’
‘And yet the old dog is the one who knows the tricks,’ murmured Poirot. ‘He is cunning. He does
not leave the scent.’..
‘You’re a caution, isn’t he, Captain Hastings ? Always was. Looks much the same – hair a bit thinner on top but the face fungus fuller than ever.’
‘Eh?’ said Poirot. ‘What is that?’
‘He’s congratulating you on your moustaches,’ I said, soothingly.

‘A caution’, ‘Old cock’, ‘face fungus’ – these locutions are as stereotypical as the stereotyped posh young chap who says, ‘What ho! old chap’, the stereotyped maid who says, ‘Lord, Miss, it’s not my place’, the stereotyped military man who says, ‘Dashed bad business, Poirot’. Some of the characters themselves comment on how stereotypical they are.

‘The late Sir Matthew was the second richest man in England,’ replied Mr. Whitfield, composedly.
‘He had somewhat peculiar views, had he not?’
Mr. Whitfield looked at him severely.
‘A millionaire, M. Poirot, is allowed to be eccentric. It is almost expected of him.’ (Chapter 16)

It is certainly expected of him in this kind of novel. All these novels offer not only the challenge of the central puzzle and the challenges of all the related puzzles and mysteries which spin off from it, the entertainment value of Poirot and his comedy sidekick – but all the pleasures of recognising a gallery of stock types and caricatures, as recognisable and deeply pleasurable as characters in a panto.

Credit

‘Peril at End House’ by Agatha Christie was published in 1932 by the Collins Crime Club.

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by Simon on July 23, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in Crime, Novel

Tagged Agatha Christie, Alfred Wilson, Antisemitism, Bert Croft, bookishness, Bundle Brent, Captain Hastings, Captain Michael Seton, Charles Vyse, Cockney, Colonel Melchett, Colonel Weston, comedy, Commander George Challenger, consulting detective, Cornish Riviera, crime novel, detective books, detective novel, detective story, Devon, Dr Graham, Dr Watson, drug addiction, drugs, Edgar Wallace, Edith, Ellen Wilson, Emily Trefusis, End House, First World War, Freddie Rice, Frederica Rice, George Challenger, Hercule Poirot, Hood, Inspector Narracott, Jean Buckley, Jim Lazarus, John Buchan, Magdala Buckley, Maggie Buckley, Matthew Seton, Michael Seton, Mildred Croft, Miss Marple, Mr Whitfield, Mrs Buckley, Mrs Croft, murder, Murder Mystery, murder story, Nick Buckley, Noel Coward, novel, order and method, Peril at End House, Poirot, Psychology, pukka sahibs, Reverend Giles Buckley, Sherlock Holmes, Sir Matthew Seton, Sir Nicholas, St Loo, stereotypes, symmetry OCD, The Murder at the Vicarage, The Mystery at Chimneys, The Sittaford Mystery, the strain of modern life, William Wilson

Posted by Simon on July 23, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/07/23/peril-at-end-house-agatha-christie/

The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie (1920)

Spoiler alert: in line with common practice, I will not reveal who dunnit or the later parts of the plot.

‘The Mysterious Affair at Styles’ was 1) the first detective novel by British writer Agatha Christie and 2) introduced her fictional detective, Hercule Poirot, who was to go on to have a long career, not only in her books, but in umpteen movies and TV series right up to the present day.

In an oblique way, it has a claim to be a ‘war novel’, in the sense that:

she wrote it in the middle of the First World War, in 1916
it is set during the war
the narrator is an Army officer who has served, been wounded and invalided out of the service
the inhabitants of the posh country house where it is set repeatedly talk about the privations of war, about scrimping and recycling for the war effort (p.170)
then, about two-thirds of the way through, it has a little espionage sub-plot, as one of the characters (I won’t say who) is accused of being a German spy!

So a very strong wartime vibe throughout.

The novel made Christie’s reputation and kept a special place in her affections. When she’d made enough money from writing to buy a fine house, she named it ‘Styles’.

Hastings and Hercule

Just like the Sherlock Holmes stories, it is narrated by an Army officer recently invalided out of the service, in this case Captain Arthur J. M. Hastings, invalided out of the Great War (compare with Holmes’s Dr Watson, invalided out of the Second Afghan War (1878 to 1880)).

Hastings has a high opinion of himself which he reveals through numerous remarks which sound self-deprecating but in fact reveal his preening nature: ‘I am not a vain man where women are concerned…’ (p.137). He thinks he is smart and is quick to look down on others’ intelligence:

‘The dear fellow isn’t perhaps very bright,’ I said thoughtfully.

For most of the book Hastings laments that his friend Hercule Poirot seems to be on the wrong track, misunderstanding clues, getting worked up about nothing, is past his best, and so on. Of course, Christie makes it abundantly clear that it is Hastings who continually gets things wrong. Slowly we come to realise he has wrong opinions about more or less everyone and everything, which makes him a comic character.

The remark seemed so utterly irrelevant that I did not even take the trouble to answer it. But I decided that if I made any interesting and important discoveries—as no doubt I should—I would keep them to myself, and surprise Poirot with the ultimate result. There are times when it is one’s duty to assert oneself. (p.120)

To my surprise Poirot himself is an eccentric, oddball character. His most overt foible is a dapper attention to his own clothes and appearance, especially the famous waxed black moustache. But it is accompanied by a pronounced obsessive-compulsive disorder, for example his need, after lighting a cigarette, to place the spent match in a little China pot (p.77); or his habit, when excited by new information or disappointment, to fastidiously rearrange the objects on a mantelpiece or shelf.

And if Hastings’s view of Poirot is belittling, Poirot’s opinion of himself is a mirror image, a comic over-estimating of himself, a Napoleon complex:

‘I tell you, mon ami, it puzzles me. Me – Hercule Poirot!’

‘Mesdames and messieurs! I speak! Listen! I, Hercule Poirot!’

So at the heart of the story is this comic duo and it is their comic interplay – Hastings’ preening confidence in his own insights and their continual failure, contrasted with Poirot’s pompous self-importance and endless fussiness about details – which make the book so appealing, so amusing at so many moments that for long spells you forget it’s about a murder at all.

Detective story tropes

The story overflows with so many classic detective story tropes it’s hard to know where to start.

The victim is rich, 70-something Mrs Emily Inglethorpe.
She is murdered in her bedroom in her grand old house, Styles Court, in lovely countryside (in Essex).
She is the head of an extended household of family, friends of family, servants and professional services (doctor, lawyer).
So all the suspects are impeccably upper middle-class with perfect manners.
On the surface everything is wonderfully civilisé but one of the suspects tells Hastings that, below the surface, they all hate each other and all hate the old woman.

So a rich old lady is murdered in a grand old house. There are six or seven suspects. The narrator just happens to be on the spot and friendly with the whole family, so he gives us good portraits of them all. All the suspects are revealed to have motives for the murder.

And the whole thing is tied up, in the classic style, by Poirot calling all the main characters together in the drawing room for his detailed explanation of the murder, who did it, and summary the clues which led him to it.

A surfeit of information

As usual with crime or detective novels, it contains a great deal of information which the reader needs to process and bear in mind, far too much for me; I find reading Joseph Conrad or D.H. Lawrence much easier, because their plots are much simpler, but here there are hundreds of facts to be aware of, process and bear in mind.

First all the relationships between the main characters. Then the motives which (we slowly learn) pretty much all of them might have for bumping the old lady off. Then all the resentments among them (Miss Howard hates Alfred; John is estranged from his wife and hates Dr Bauerstein and so on).

Then the relationship stuff on the eve of the murder. We learn that only a few days before, Emily had an argument with her loyal companion, Evelyn Howard, which prompted the latter to pack her bags and leave (warning Hastings, on the way out, that they’re all a pack of sharks). We learn that on the day of her death, Mrs Inglethorpe had a standup argument with a man which was loud enough to be heard down the corridor from her room.

On a more micro level there is an incredible amount of information about minutiae. We are given a precise floor plan of the house; how the doors into Mrs Inglethorpe’s were locked or bolted from the inside; who prepared the coffee taken up to Mrs I that fateful night; just where in the hall the coffee was left to cool so that someone might or might not have slipped the poison into it. In the room of the deceased Poirot discovers a few fragments of a will someone had burned in the fireplace, fibres of a green dress or cloak on one of the bolts. What is the meaning of the smashed coffee cup on the floor? Why has Mrs Inglethorpe’s locked despatch case been forced? Why was the bedside table knocked over and what caused the large splash of candle grease on the carpet? These and scores of other details or designed to provide aficionados with a surfeit of clues.

Poirot discovers some of this by examining the scene of the crime himself; some of it emerges when he interviews everyone in the house, down to the lowliest servant; more emerges when a formal inquest is held in the local town and everyone testifies. And then there is a continual drip-drip of detail from casual conversations in between these set-piece events. The text amounts to a continual provision of data and clues.

And all this information allows some of the cast and Hastings in particular to concoct their own theories using various bits of information, to whip up entire conspiracies and postulate certain people as the murderer. Hastings, in particular, is given to wild speculations, rash assumptions and half-baked theories:

Suddenly I remembered that first conversation at tea on the day of my arrival, and the gleam in her eyes as she had said that poison was a woman’s weapon. How agitated she had been on that fatal Tuesday evening! Had Mrs. Inglethorp discovered something between her and Bauerstein, and threatened to tell her husband? Was it to stop that denunciation that the crime had been committed?

All of these are, of course, created, to fail and as foils to Poirot’s final masterly revelation. In a sense, the entire character of Hastings is an enormous red herring.

I suppose there are two attitudes to this blizzard of information. One type of person, the type who likes crosswords or sudoku, see the book as a puzzle to crack, might carefully note each new micro-detail and try , tracking the shifting kaleidoscope of clues, and work out the culprit before the book reveals it. The other type is like me, too tired, lazy or stupid to think about figuring it out – happy to follow the amiable narrative, bite or not at the numerous red herrings, content to be carried entertainingly along until Poirot’s final reveal.

Cast

The family

Emily Inglethorp – A wealthy old woman in her 70s. She married Mr Cavendish when he was a widower with two small boys and so became their stepmother. When Cavendish died she inherited his home, Styles Court, and care of the boys. That was long ago and they are all grown up and in their 40s when they learn to their dismay, that their mother is planning to marry again, to the tall, black-bearded Alfred Inglethorpe, who she first engaged as a secretary to help her with her many charities. She dies on the morning of 18 July, when other guests in the house hear banging and break down the locked door to find her expiring in the throes of some kind of poisoning. She was quite a cool, business-like lady, and no blood relative of her two ‘sons’.

Alfred Inglethorp – Tall, aloof, secretive man who joined the household as Emily’s secretary but then persuaded her to marry him. Twenty years younger than her, he is considered by her family to be a fortune-hunter and is, to begin with, the prime suspect.

John Cavendish – Emily’s elder stepson, from her first husband’s previous marriage, and the brother of Lawrence. John trained and practised before quitting to become a country squire at Styles. It is he who invites Hastings to come and stay at Styles near the beginning of the story. He is married to the fragrant Mary but she, it seems, has grown a tad too close to a local doctor, Dr Bauerstein.

Mary Cavendish – John’s wife and very beautiful. Hastings is smitten from the first moment he sees her but slowly learns that she has become close to a local physician, Dr Bauerstein.

Lawrence Cavendish – Emily’s younger stepson from her first husband’s previous marriage, and the brother of John. He studied medicine and qualified as a doctor although he doesn’t practice, and so would have a working knowledge of poisons.

Evelyn Howard – Emily’s companion and a second cousin of Alfred Inglethorp who she fiercely dislikes. She is a bluff woman in tweeds who speaks her mind in a telegraphic style. She came over to me as a certain type of lesbian.

Cynthia Murdoch – ‘The daughter of an old schoolfellow of [Emily’s] who married a rascally solicitor. He came a cropper, and the girl was left an orphan and penniless.’ Emily took her in but never stopped reminding her of her subservient status. She performs war work at the Red Cross Hospital at Tadminster, seven miles away. She works in the dispensary where she has access to medicines and poisons.

Servants

William Earl – under-gardener at Styles, sent by Mrs Inglethorpe to buy a blank will form on the day before her death.

Old Manning – gardener at Styles Court.

Dorcas – maid at Styles, very loyal to Mrs Inglethorp.

Annie – one of the housemaids, ‘a fine, strapping girl’.

Providers of professional services

Dr. Wilkins – Mrs Inglethorp’s own doctor, ‘a portly, fussy little man’.

Dr Bauerstein – a well-known toxicologist with an international reputation who happens to live close to Styles and who, we slowly learn, is seeing a lot of Mary Cavendish. Are they in love?

Mr. Wells – the family lawyer, testifies that old Mrs Inglethorpe made lots of wills.

Amy Hill – shop assistant who testified at the inquest to having sold a will form William Earl, under-gardener at Styles.

Albert Mace – chemist’s assistant who testified to selling strychnine poison to a man he claimed was Alfred Inglethorpe, who later turns out to be a man disguised as Alfred Inglethorpe.

The outsiders

Mrs Raikes – very attractive wife of a local farmer. Slowly it emerges that Alfred Inglethorpe might have been seeing her.

Hercule Poirot – Renowned Belgian private detective. He is a refugee. He fled Belgium after the Germans invaded and was kindly taken in by Emily Inglethorpe, along with half a dozen of his compatriots. He lives alone in a cottage, Leastways Cottage, in the grounds. So, like Hastings, he is right on the spot when the murder takes place and so it’s only natural that he should get involved.

Captain Arthur Hastings – Poirot’s friend and the narrator of the story. He had been serving on the Western Front but was invalided out, spent some time in a convalescent home then was given one month’s official leave. It was then that he happened to bump into his old friend John Cavendish who invited him to come and stay for the month at the Cavendish family home of Styles Court.

Detective-Inspector Inspector Japp – ‘Jimmy Japp’, a Scotland Yard detective sent to investigate the murder. He has worked with Poirot before on a number of cases (the Abercrombie forgery case, the tracking down of ‘Baron’ Altara, p.93) knows his quality and so respects his judgements.

Superintendent Summerhaye – sidekick to Jimmy Japp and his opposite regarding Poirot i.e. deeply sceptical of the Belgian’s abilities: ‘Summerhaye gave an incredulous snort’.

In court

Sir Ernest Heavywether – the famous K.C., for the defence. Heavyweather is another example of Christie’s comedy. He is James Robertson-Justice avant la letter, a blustering bear of a barrister who bullies yes or no answers out of his witnesses and so is extremely effective.

Mr. Philips, K.C. – for the prosecution.

The characterisation of Poirot

Poirot was an extraordinary looking little man. He was hardly more than five feet, four inches, but carried himself with great dignity. His head was exactly the shape of an egg, and he always perched it a little on one side. His moustache was very stiff and military. The neatness of his attire was almost incredible. I believe a speck of dust would have caused him more pain than a bullet wound. Yet this quaint dandified little man who, I was sorry to see, now limped badly, had been in his time one of the most celebrated members of the Belgian police. As a detective, his flair had been extraordinary, and he had achieved triumphs by unravelling some of the most baffling cases of the day

As you can see, Christie from the start has a very strong sense of Poirot’s individuality. Over and above his physical attributes, she deploys other strategies or tactics to really distinguish him.

One is that all the characters are made to underestimate Poirot. For a start he’s short, so everyone refers to him as that little man, a dear little man, such a dear little man etc. Hastings especially is made to systematically underestimate Poirot, dismissing him as obtuse, fussing about irrelevancies. He also tells everybody that Poirot used to be a great detective ‘in his day’ but has now rather gone to seed. Hastings refers to Poirot as ‘the little man’ more than all the other characters combined. Of course all this is designed to make Poirot’s triumphant solving of the case all the more triumphant rising, as it were, from the depths of such universal dismissal.

Poirot himself is given a number of memorable attributes. Short. Dapper and clothes conscious. Obsessive attention to detail. French accent but not actually French (Belgian is a sort of French without the historical animus), which means he can say Voila and Chut and other schoolboy French phrases at dramatic moments. He has green eyes which become particularly bright at moments of excitement.

I had often before noticed that, if anything excited him, his eyes turned green like a cat’s. They were shining like emeralds now. (p.73)

And other physiognomical indications:

Poirot, I noticed, was looking profoundly discouraged. He had that little frown between the eyes that I knew so well. (p.165)

Poirot’s procedures

Nothing Poirot says is as pithy as Sherlock Holmes’s ‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth’ or ‘You know my method. It is founded upon the observation of trifles.’ Poirot has his own set of principles which, of course, he shares with Hastings.

‘Imagination is a good servant, and a bad master. The simplest explanation is always the most likely.’ (p.75)

‘What have I always told you? Everything must be taken into account. If the fact will not fit the theory – let the theory go.’ (p.77)

‘Now all is arranged and classified. One must never permit confusion.’ (p.78)

Jimmy Japp’s locutions

I enjoyed the way Christie makes Detective-Inspector Inspector Japp talk in hackneyed phrases, not quite Cockney but clichéd, suggesting the commonplace working of his mind:

‘My word,’ he cried, ‘you’re the goods! And no mistake, Mr. Poirot!’

‘And, if it hadn’t been for Mr. Poirot here, arrested you would have been, as sure as eggs is eggs!’

Antisemitism

Many of Christie’s novels between the wars show signs of antisemitism and employ antisemitic tropes. The animus several character in this novel show towards Dr Bauernstein is at least in part attributable to the fact that he is Jewish.

‘I tell you, Mary, I won’t have it.’
Mary’s voice came, cool and liquid: ‘Have you any right to criticize my actions?’
‘It will be the talk of the village! My mother was only buried on Saturday, and here you are gadding about with the fellow.’
‘Oh,’ she shrugged her shoulders, ‘if it is only village gossip that you mind!’
‘But it isn’t. I’ve had enough of the fellow hanging about. He’s a Polish Jew, anyway.’
‘A tinge of Jewish blood is not a bad thing. It leavens the’—she looked at him—’stolid stupidity of the ordinary Englishman.’
Fire in her eyes, ice in her voice. (Chapter 9)

And:

‘He is, of course, a German by birth,’ said Poirot thoughtfully, ‘though he has practised so long in this country that nobody thinks of him as anything but an Englishman. He was naturalized about fifteen years ago. A very clever man—a Jew, of course.’ (Chapter 10)

Why ‘of course’?

The end

I won’t give the plot away, not least because it would take pages to explain the complicated sequence of events and non-events which Poirot finally explains to Hastings in the final chapter.

‘Dear me, Poirot,’ I said with a sigh, ‘I think you have explained everything. I am glad it has all ended so happily.’ (p.188)

Credit

‘The Mysterious Affair at Styles’ by Agatha Christie was published in 1920 by John Lane. References are to the 1971 Pan paperback edition.

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by Simon on June 30, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in Detective stories, Novel

Posted by Simon on June 30, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/06/30/the-mysterious-affair-at-styles-agatha-christie/

Selected Essays by Virginia Woolf – 1. Reading and Writing (2)

The Oxford World Classic edition of ‘Selected Essays by Virginia Woolf’, edited by David Bradshaw, brings together 30 of Woolf’s essays, reviews and miscellaneous prose pieces, and groups them under four headings:

Reading and Writing
Life-Writing
Women and Fiction
Looking On

Earlier blog posts give my introductory notes to the essays and summary of the first four essays in the ‘Reading and Writing’ section. This post summarises and comments on the last six essays in the ‘Reading and Writing’ section, numbers 5 to 10 in this list.

The Decay of Essay-Writing (1905)
Modern Fiction (1919)
The Modern Essay (1922) [review of Modern English Essays 1870 to 1920]
How It Strikes a Contemporary (1923)
Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown (1923)
Character in Fiction (1924) [a talk]
‘Impassioned Prose’ (1926) [Thomas de Quincy]
How Should One Read A Book? (1926)
Poetry, Fiction and the Future (1927)
Craftmanship (1937) [BBC radio talk]

5. Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown (1923: 5 pages)

The essence of fiction is character but the complexity of the world the Georgian novelists face means they have to reject the simplistic notions of character good enough for their Victorian and Edwardian forebears.

The story of this and the following essay are a bit confused.

In March 1923 the bestselling novelist Arnold Bennett wrote a review of Woolf’s avant-garde novel ‘Jacob’s Room’ (1922) in which he claimed her characters would never survive in ‘the real world’. This triggered Woolf to write 1) a rebuttal of Bennett’s criticisms that was published in the Athenaeum magazine in December 1923 under the title of ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’.

Woolf realised she was onto something and expanded her points into a 2) longer essay and, the following year, presented the expanded version in a paper read to the Heretics Society at Cambridge University, still titled ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, on 18 May 1924.

When T.S. Eliot, as editor of The Criterion magazine, asked Woolf for an article she submitted the text of this talk and it was published in July 1924 under the title ‘Character in Fiction’. This second version, the expanded version, is the essay following this one in this selection, number 6 in my list. Woolf and her husband then published it themselves, as a standalone pamphlet, in their own Hogarth Press, on 30 October 1924. What makes things confusing is that they chose to publish it under the title of the short version, ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’.

So this is my summary of the original 5-page review. In his selection Bradshaw follows it by publishing the longer version, as published in The Criterion and under the Criterion‘s title, ‘Character in Fiction’.

***

Woolf quotes the best-selling serious novelist of his day, Arnold Bennett, as writing in a recent essay that the foundation of good novel writing is character but that the Georgian novelists have lost interest in depicting character in preference for a blizzard of details. Woolf agrees but claims that it is Bennett and the two other successful novelists of his generation, H.G. Wells and John Galsworthy, who are chiefly responsible for drowning character in facts and details.

She claims that the characters of modern books such as Kipps or ‘The Old Wives Tale’ pale into comparison with any character from ‘the splendid opulence of the Victorian age’, notable for ‘the astonishing vividness and reality of the characters.’

For Woolf the Edwardian novelists suffer from at least three disadvantage: 1) In a sense they simply couldn’t compete with the scale and depth of the great Victorians. 2) There was also something squalid and vulgar about them. She is very rude about Samuel Butler.

No sooner had the Victorians departed than Samuel Butler, who had lived below stairs, came out like an observant boot boy, with the family secrets in ‘The Way of All Flesh’.

In the same vein John Galsworthy is accused of being overly concerned with social injustices, which was even more true of H.G. Wells and his incessant issue-mongering.

3) The impact of Constance Garnett’s powerful English translations of the Russian classic novelists, particularly Dostoyevsky. Not only the Edwardians but even the Victorians couldn’t compete with the scale and depth and complexity of characters such as Raskolnikov, Stavrogin et al.

Galsworthy gives us his sense of compassion, Wells his generous enthusiasm and Bennett his sense of time passing, but none of them match up to the great Russians.

Woolf claims that it was this, the change to a new sense of the depth and complexity of human nature, which marked the decisive break between the culture of the Edwardians and of the Georgians (King Edward VII died and was succeeded by his son George V in May 1910). This is the thinking behind her much quoted saying that ‘On or about December 1910, human character changed’, which comes in the expanded version of this essay (see below).

Character, she asserts, is crucial to human beings’ sense of life, of who we are and who other people are. Hence, if we disbelieve in the characters in novels as they are presented to us, then we want to go deeper and further, to search out their real meanings for ourselves.

At this point she introduces the figure of Mrs Brown – who is to feature so largely in the expanded version of the essay – but in a very different way from her later appearance. Here she is not much more than a name Woolf gives to her notion of a deeper, more unpredictable conception of character than the Edwardian writers can cope with, a notion which breaks up and shatters traditional ideas about character.

And it is amid these ruins of the old Victorian and Edwardian notions of ‘character’ that her generation of writers, the Georgians, have to somehow construct a reasonable dwelling place. She argues that the difficulties each of the Georgian writers encountered in trying to work out their own conception of ‘Mrs Brown’ (i.e. how to depict modern character) explain both the failures but also the daring experiments of her generation.

6. Character in Fiction (1924: 18 pages)

Extended criticism of the Edwardian novelists – Galsworthy, Bennett and Wells – for their excessive naturalistic detail which swamps their characters, for ignoring the spiritual for the material, which is why her generation of Georgian novelists must reject them.

This is the text of the paper read to The Heretics in Cambridge on 18 May 1924 mentioned above. (The Cambridge Heretics was a society formed at the University of Cambridge in 1909, to oppose compulsory Christian worship and celebrate humanist values.)

Woolf actually delivered it under the title of the original article rebutting Bennett i.e. ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ (see above) which was also the title she used when she published it in her own Hogarth Press edition. But in an effort to distinguish between the two versions, David Bradshaw publishes it here with the title it was given when published in T.S. Eliot’s journal, The Criterion i.e. ‘Character in Fiction’.

This explains why, when you look it up online, you find the text given here as ‘Character in Fiction’ is everywhere else given the Hogarth Press title of Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown.

***

Woolf opens with a modest, self-deprecating tone. She describes herself as ‘one solitary, ill-informed, and misguided individual’ and goes on to say:

It seems to me possible, perhaps desirable, that I may be the only person in this room who has committed the folly of writing, trying to write, or failing to write, a novel. And when I asked myself, as your invitation to speak to you about modern fiction made me ask myself, what demon whispered in my ear and urged me to my doom, a little figure rose before me—the figure of a man, or of a woman, who said, ‘My name is Brown. Catch me if you can.’

She gets the ball rolling going by quoting Arnold Bennett as saying that the most important thing in novel writing is creating character, everything follows from that. So that’s the Mr Bennett of the title accounted for.

To the reader’s mild surprise, Woolf suddenly makes the grand declaration that ‘on or about December 1910 human character changed.’ What changed? She explains. Between her generation and the Victorians there is a gulf:

All human relations have shifted—those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics, and literature. Let us agree to place one of these changes about the year 1910.

Ah. So it’s an arbitrary but useful dividing line which she has airily invented.

She goes on to admit that to some extent everybody is an expert in ‘character’. To assess other people’s characters is a fundamental human need. But novelists take it a stage further:

The study of character becomes to them an absorbing pursuit; to impart character an obsession. And this I find it very difficult to explain: what novelists mean when they talk about character, what the impulse is that urges them so powerfully every now and then to embody their view in writing.

Then she makes what appears, at first sight, to be one of her bewildering digressions. She tells everyone about an incident which occurred to her recently, when she was late catching a train and hurriedly climbed into a compartment where a man and woman seemed to be having an argument. They both shut up when she got in but she could feel the tension in the carriage. being Woolf, she promptly invented names for these two unknown strangers, naming the bluff irritated man Mr Smith and the much older, visibly poor woman, Mrs Brown. So this is the Mrs Brown of the title.

Woolf then reports this pair’s inconsequential conversation, Smith leaning forward and threateningly extracting from the woman what he wanted, namely a promise to meet someone named George somewhere on Thursday. Once assured of this, the man jumps out at Clapham Junction, while Mrs Brown continues on to Waterloo station, gets out and walks – like so many of the bit characters she observes in London streets – out of Woolf’s life.

What just happened? We have just watched Woolf conjure character and interest out of an apparently chance and trivial encounter and she begins to make her point:

I believe that all novels begin with an old lady in the corner opposite. I believe that all novels, that is to say, deal with character, and that it is to express character — not to preach doctrines, sing songs, or celebrate the glories of the British Empire, that the form of the novel, so clumsy, verbose, and undramatic, so rich, elastic, and alive, has been evolved.

She reminds us that Arnold Bennett claimed that fictional characters must be ‘real’ to make a book work, but Woolf asks the obvious question: what is reality? One man’s reality is another man’s nonsense.

For instance, in this article he says that Dr Watson in Sherlock Holmes is real to him: to me Dr Watson is a sack stuffed with straw, a dummy, a figure of fun.

Anyway, her point is this: Why are there no plausible characters in contemporary (1920s) fiction? She has another go at Bennett, Wells and Galsworthy, saying their books lack the completion and closure of, say, Jane Austen. They miss something, they are incomplete.

To make her point she entertainingly speculates what Wells, Galsworthy and Bennett would have made of her made-up Mrs Brown. Her three little parodies are unusually funny for Woolf. She spends most effort on Bennett’s version. Then, to check, she takes down a novel of his, Hilda Lessways. She quotes from it, from the long factual description of Hilda Lessway’s house, in order to graphically demonstrate what a blizzard of realistic detail clutters up Bennett’s texts. No wonder his novels are so bloody long.

But Woolf says Bennett’s approach is the wrong way round. The house isn’t important, the person living in it, Hilda, is the important thing.

Back to 1910 and Woolf says that E.M. Forster and D.H. Lawrence spoiled their early work by giving in to the British public’s need for conventions and facts. They compromised with what she calls the Edwardian quality of Wells-Galsworthy-Bennett’s books. Foster and Lawrence had to wriggle free of the old conventions in order to capture the uniqueness of ‘Mrs Brown’.

By now we can see that this ‘Mrs Brown’ has become a metaphor for a particular view of reality, of Life as portrayed in fiction. And so Woolf comes to the present day and tells us that she can hear all around her the sound of authors crashing and smashing down those Victorian-Edwardian conventions in order to convey the truth of life. But the trouble with contemporary authors is they don’t know what to replace all those dead old conventions with. Hence the sense of confusion and lack of common values which she lamented in ‘How it strikes a contemporary’. It’s one thing to tear down the old rule, but what are the new rules and how do we agree on them?

Then Woolf is surprisingly harsh on a couple of notorious modern writers, James Joyce and T.S. Eliot. She condemns Joyce for his indecency and Eliot for his obscurity. It’s part of her broader point that modern writers have to waste so much of their energy smashing the old conventions and forging their own way. This was not true of her ideal writers from earlier times, authors like Jane Austen or Macauley the historian, who were at one with their times and so wrote easily and gracefully. Instead:

We must reconcile ourselves to a season of failures and fragments. We must reflect that where so much strength is spent on finding a way of telling the truth the truth itself is bound to reach us in rather an exhausted and chaotic condition. Ulysses, Queen Victoria, Mr Prufrock — to give Mrs Brown some of the names she has made famous lately — is a little pale and dishevelled by the time her rescuers reach her.

Drawing to a conclusion, Woolf asks her readers to be tolerant of the problems and difficulties of modern fiction, to ‘tolerate the spasmodic, the obscure, the fragmentary, the failure.’ Modern authors are trying their best but they are having to invent a whole new world.

After all this talk about smashing and crashing and difficulties, she ends with the surprising claim that:

We are trembling on the verge of one of the great ages of English literature. But it can only be reached if we are determined never, never to desert Mrs Brown.

Summary

Well, this is a Great Essay. She delivers a good, clear point of view, forcefully and vividly expressed. Just as T.S. Eliot’s essays in the early 1920s helped him think through his position and helped the perplexed public understand what his new type of poetry was trying to do, so Woolf’s essays show her developing her new and radical aesthetic, and this is very interesting. And her criticism of Wells and Bennett’s materialism becomes more debatable, discussable and powerful, the more you read it.

7. ‘Impassioned Prose’ (1926: 8 pages)

Justification of her wish to restore poetry to prose, on the model of her hero Thomas de Quincy.

She means poetic prose, prose poetry. She laments that most prose fiction is resolutely factual, that we are continually told that it is a solecism to include poetic flights in a prose text.

If the critics agree on any point it is on this, that nothing is more reprehensible than for a prose writer to write like a poet. Poetry is poetry and prose is prose—how often have we not heard that! Poetry has one mission and prose another

Trouble is that this occludes half of life, prevents us exploring our subjective, inner lives.

Therefore all that side of the mind which is exposed in solitude they ignore. They ignore its thoughts, its rhapsodies, its dreams, with the result that the people of fiction bursting with energy on one side are atrophied on the other.

Luckily there are in all ages writers who are not themselves of the first rank but who widen the possibilities of writing for contemporaries and successors. The example she has in mind is Thomas de Quincey who wrote a huge amount, and had a poetic sensibility, but never wrote any poetry because he didn’t have the sustained gift; and by the same token wasn’t interested enough in people to be a novelist so never write fiction.

In what form was he to express this that was the most real part of his own existence? There was none ready made to his hand. He invented, as he claimed, ‘modes of impassioned prose‘. With immense elaboration and art he formed a style in which to express these ‘visionary scenes derived from the world of dreams’. For such prose there were no precedents, he believed; and he begged the reader to remember ‘the perilous difficulty’ of an attempt where ‘a single false note, a single word in a wrong key, ruins the whole music’.

And so he carved out his own space, writing poetically in the other prose genres: essays, biographies, confessions and memoirs.

He was an exception and a solitary. He made a class for himself. He widened the choice for others.

She goes on to describe at length the strength and weakness of her favourite among de Quincey’s books, the ‘Autobiographic Sketches’. By this stage she’s made her point, for surely she is the modern de Quincey, deploying ‘modes of impassioned prose’ to convey a deeper perception of life, than the stony prose writers. We sit with our friends and family, eating, talking, in too close proximity.

But draw a little apart, see people in groups, as outlines, and they become at once memorable and full of beauty. Then it is not the actual sight or sound itself that matters, but the reverberations that it makes as it travels through our minds. These are often to be found far away, strangely transformed; but it is only by gathering up and putting together these echoes and fragments that we arrive at the true nature of our experience.

She is describing her own technique.

8. How Should One Read A Book? (1926: 11 days)

Quite frequently Woolf displays the number one mistake of intellectuals and writers in thinking that the present moment, the moment she’s writing about, is somehow uniquely special, and moreover uniquely degraded and decadent. Thus she opens this essay:

At this late hour of the world’s history…

But it isn’t ‘this late hour of the world’s history’. Who’s to say this isn’t an early hour in the world’s history, that the last 3,000 years are just a prelude to what comes after. In fact they obviously will be. Human history will go on as long as there are humans to record it and who knows how long that will be – maybe thousands and thousands of years to come. This decline-and-fall trope is a cliché and doesn’t give you confidence of her broader understanding of history or society. You get the feeling that her orientating herself in culture and history is subtly awry, but then there’s something awry about all her writings, the detachment, the alienation, but also the odd insights of the mentally ill.

Anyway, her point is that there are more books than ever before (another cliché, something she also complains about in ‘The Decay of Essay-Writing’) so how should you read them? Well, there are no rules but the first thing to acknowledge is that books come in all shapes and sizes and genres and forms and we should respond appropriately.

Her essays often address issues which feel very outdated; her values are those of another age. Still in thrall to Victorian earnestness, she asks whether one should read books for pleasure or profit? Answer: no-one really cares. It’s a non-question. Maybe a GCSE-level question to get schoolchildren thinking but tangential to our concerns.

Anyway, she does make one simple Big Point, which is that nobody really understands what reading is. The physical activity, yes; you can test people on their ability to read, on their level of comprehension, on what they understand or remember. But at the more advanced level of registering nuance and implication… I wonder if there’s a specialist area of modern neuroscience devoted to the science of reading?

Belles letterism

Belles-lettres is a category of writing, originally meaning beautiful or fine writing… The phrase is sometimes used pejoratively for writing that focuses on the aesthetic qualities of language rather than its practical application.

I can’t see how a lot of Woolf could not be considered belle-letterism: the concern for fine, flowing elegant prose redolent of nineteenth century fine writing (Lamb, Pater); the use of the royal ‘we’; mention of ‘turning to the bookcase’ which evokes the comfy air of a book-lined study in a fine house or gentlemen’s club. It’s a permanent puzzle how radical and drastic her experiments in fiction were and yet how conservative and backward-looking her prose style is.

The problem [of what to read] is not so simple in a library as at the Zoölogical Gardens. Books have a great deal in common; they are always overflowing their boundaries; they are always breeding new species from unexpected matches among themselves. It is difficult to know how to approach them, to which species each belongs. But if we remember, as we turn to the bookcase, that each of these books was written by a pen which, consciously or unconsciously, tried to trace out a design, avoiding this, accepting that, adventuring the other; if we try to follow the writer in his experiment from the first word to the last, without imposing our design upon him, then we shall have a good chance of getting hold of the right end of the string.

The leisurely, all-the-time-in-the-world elegance of this authorial ‘we’, the royal we, the superior ‘we’ of the privileged literary elite.

Co-production

At the end of ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, Woolf introduced the idea that any book is a co-production between the writer and the reader. (This idea was taken up decades later, in the late 1960s, by reader response theory and to some extent anticipates Roland Barthes’ ideas about the death of the author and the birth of the creative reader.) She does the same again, here:

To read a book well, one should read it as if one were writing it. Begin not by sitting on the bench among the judges but by standing in the dock with the criminal. Be his fellow worker, become his accomplice.

Writers’ worlds

She asks us to imagine encountering a beggar in the street (as I, in fact, routinely do, every time I go shopping there are people begging or selling the Big Issue at both the front and the back entrance to Sainsburys: no escaping the modern beggar in London town).

Woolf gives an entertaining account of how such an encounter would be turned into fiction by 1) Daniel Defoe, 2) Jane Austen, 3) Thomas Hardy. Out of this little frolic she makes the fairly obvious point that each really great writer is a world of their own with a distinct perspective.

It is necessary to approach every writer differently in order to get from him all he can give us. We have to remember that it is one of the qualities of greatness that it brings heaven and earth and human nature into conformity with its own vision. It is by reason of this masterliness of theirs, this uncompromising idiosyncrasy, that great writers often require us to make heroic efforts in order to read them rightly. They bend us and break us.

She makes the equally obvious point that: sometimes the writing we have to work hardest to understand is ultimately the most rewarding; and that different works appeal to us in different moods. (Along the way she betrays her bias or premise that ‘real books [are] works of pure imagination’, in contrast to histories and other factual books.)

Over-reading

She mentions something equally as common but which I’ve never seen described before, the risk of ‘over-reading – when you overdo it with a book you’re enjoying, read too much, become tired, and suddenly realise you’re tired, fed up, and abruptly take against the whole thing:

Suddenly the book becomes dull as ditchwater and heavy as lead. We yawn and stretch and can not attend.

The cure (pretty obviously) is to read something else of a different type, Woolf’s favourite alternatives being biography or history. But:

However interesting facts may be, they are an inferior form of fiction, and gradually we become impatient of their weakness and diffuseness, of their compromises and evasions, of the slovenly sentences which they make for themselves, and are eager to revive ourselves with the greater intensity and truth of fiction.

Thus speaks the novelist who (surprise) believes that the novel is the highest form of writing. The risk of reading literary writers is taking them at their own value. As you get older you realise there are many other types of writing with just as much claim to importance, and that’s before the thousands of other human activities we need (doctors, nurses, teachers etc). Presenting the reading and writing of novels as some kind of heroic endeavour is a form of chauvinism; deeper down, a type of narcissism, defined as: ‘an excessive preoccupation with oneself and one’s own needs.’ All Woolf’s essays are about herself.

Reading poetry

Then she switches to what is required of reading poetry and its rewards.

Anyone who has read a poem with pleasure will remember the sudden conviction, the sudden recollection (for it seems sometimes as if we were about to say, or had in some previous existence already said, what Shakespeare is actually now saying), which accompany the reading of poetry, and give it its exaltation and intensity.

Good description.

After-reading

In the last part of the essay she describes what happens when we’ve finished reading a book i.e. we judge it. Here she suggests that in reading we go through two processes: one might be called the actual reading; the other the after-reading. It is really in the after-reading that all the bits and pieces we’ve been bombarded with during the reading coalesce into an overall view and opinion. Neat idea.

And is it good or bad, the novel, the fiction you just read? It’s the question which has been dogging literary theory for two and a half thousand years. The simple answer is – it’s up to you. Critics can’t help. They all disagree with each other. Opinions aren’t much help because ‘minds differ too much to admit of close correspondence in matters of detail’. The best approach is:

by realizing our own impression as acutely as possible and referring this to the judgments which we have gradually formulated in the past.

We must ask demanding questions of the book and follow the answers to the limits of our ability. Only when we’ve completed this process can we hold our opinion up against other people’s or the criteria laid down by the great critics.

Summary

To summarise:

A good reader will give the writer the benefit of every doubt; the help of all his imagination; will follow as closely, interpret as intelligently as he can. In the next place, he will judge with the utmost severity. Every book, he will remember, has the right to be judged by the best of its kind. He will be adventurous, broad in his choice, true to his own instincts, yet ready to consider those of other people.

A defence of reading

She has a last word for the moralists who criticise reading books as a lazy self-indulgent activity. She thinks the firmest defence is that books give pleasure, ‘mysterious, unknown, useless as it is’.

This is the argument of an aesthete and could have come from the lips of Oscar Wilde (we always have to remember what a Victorian Woolf was). The most obvious defence of reading is that it is educational and an educated population is an undeniable public good. The more educated and literate a population, the more economically active, productive and wealth creating. Then there’s the liberal defence that reading imaginative literature broadens the mind and produces a population of broad-minded, empathetic readers. Personally, I’ve always found this a weak argument because the twentieth century provides ample evidence of highly literate and civilised populations which allowed fiendish behaviour, Germany being the obvious one. Other factors are required to produce a liberal, civilised population besides just widespread literacy and reading.

Personally, I think practical arguments which eschew lofty aims and avoid moral principles, are most effective in a debate. And so it’s most effective not to argue that reading is valuable for this or that noble or social or moral end, but to start with the empirical fact that lots of people simply like reading. Begin with the evidence in the real world, the statistics about the numbers of books published, bought, borrowed and read each year. Can’t argue with the facts.

Lots of people go to football matches or pop concerts or go fishing or potter in their gardens. Reading takes its place among the range of activities practiced by tens of millions of people in a civilised society. It needs no more defence than that.

Comic conclusion

Woolf concludes with a piece of satirical exaggeration, stylish and silly, which made me smile.

That pleasure [of reading] is so curious, so complex, so immensely fertilizing to the mind of anyone who enjoys it, and so wide in its effects, that it would not be in the least surprising to discover, on the day of judgment when secrets are revealed and the obscure is made plain, that the reason why we have grown from pigs to men and women, and come out from our caves, and dropped our bows and arrows, and sat round the fire and talked and drunk and made merry and given to the poor and helped the sick and made pavements and houses and erected some sort of shelter and society on the waste of the world, is nothing but this: we have loved reading.

Heroically wrong. Houses, pavements, plumbing, wiring, power stations, reservoirs and sewerage farms aren’t designed and built by bookish readers. But it’s a rare florescence of humour in Woolf’s writing and so a little treat.

9. Poetry, Fiction and the Future (1927: 11 pages)

Describes a theoretical work of fiction in the future which will incorporate into its prose a high degree of poetry and drama, pointing towards her own novel The Waves.

Woolf claims that the present (1927) is problematic for fiction. She and so many of her contemporaries are struggling to express themselves. Why? One reason is that poetry, which was so easily available and expressive for the Victorians, has become impossibly complicated and difficult. Not only that but society is in turmoil, with the old Christianity destroyed yet people yearning to believe; with the awesome scale of scientific discoveries, from the age of the earth to the size of the universe, crushing the human spirit, creating an atmosphere of ‘doubt and conflict’.

For some reasons she moves on to consider the poetic play and notes how the attempts of the great nineteenth century poets – Byron, Shelley, Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne – were miserable failures, and how the attempts of her contemporaries (maybe she’s thinking of T.S. Eliot’s doomed attempts to revive the play in Elizabethan blank verse) have likewise failed.

Why? You have to go back to the Elizabethan dramatists (as she so often in her essays goes back to Shakespeare) to understand why. It’s because the Elizabethan playwrights could write about anything; they completely shared a worldview and experiences and a diction with their audiences and readers, and so didn’t need to hold back. Modern authors, by contrast, live in a highly atomised, class-ridden society, where everyone lives locked up in their own houses, in their own living rooms, listening to their own records or radio or reading their own books, each in little worlds of their own. No wonder the modern writer finds it so hard to cut through.

Above all there’s a corrosive cynicism which means the modern writer daren’t be caught out celebrating simple beauty without hastening to show the dark and ugly side of life as well. Poetry hasn’t the flexibility, the ability to change subjects and register, which the fragmented modern mind requires.

Therefore – and here’s her point – it may be that modern prose is going to take over some of the duties formerly performed by poetry. It may be that in 10 or 15 years’ time prose will be used for purposes it has never been used for before; that that cannibal, the novel, will have swallowed up even more of the territory of literature.

In particular there may come a book which is written in prose but with the sensibility of poetry, which will have some of the exaltation of poetry but written in prose. It will be read but not acted. We won’t even have a name for its hybrid form. I realise that she is referring to the experimental novel she was currently writing, The Waves, published in 1931 and which she referred to not as a novel but as a ‘playpoem’, and she goes on to describe other ways in which poetry will be melded with prose in her experiment.

Surprisingly, maybe, she thinks the classic novel which most successfully incorporated poetry is Tristram Shandy by Lawrence Sterne. Because it is continually changing subject matter, tone and register, we tend not to notice that there are passages of deliberately exquisite feeling, because these are completely incorporated into the text alongside the farce and pratfalls and bawdy and sentiment. Sterne fashions a prose which is getting on for being as flexible and omni-expressive as the Elizabethans.

10. Craftsmanship (1937)

A radio broadcast on April 20th, 1937. This text is immediately bewildering because it starts with a series of claims all of which seem questionable, simplistic or wrong.

We know little that is certain about words, but this we do know—words never make anything that is useful; and words are the only things that tell the truth and nothing but the truth.

‘Words tell the truth and nothing but the truth.’ This is so wrong it’s hard to know where to start. What words are, what language is and how it works, is too encyclopedic a subject to be knocked off in a pithy phrase. The claim is so vague and insubstantial I wondered if it’s one of her mad essays.

Let us then take for our starting point the statement that words are not useful. This happily needs little proving, for we are all aware of it. When we travel on the Tube, for example, when we wait on the platform for a train, there, hung up in front of us, on an illuminated signboard, are the words ‘Passing Russell Square.’ We look at those words; we repeat them; we try to impress that useful fact upon our minds; the next train will pass Russell Square. We say over and over again as we pace, ‘Passing Russell Square, passing Russell Square.’ And then as we say them, the words shuffle and change, and we find ourselves saying, ‘Passing away saith the world, passing away… The leaves decay and fall, the vapours weep their burthen to the ground. Man comes…’ And then we wake up and find ourselves at King’s Cross.

Woolf comes from another time and place. Having never done any real work, having servants to do all the housework, leading a pampered, sheltered life, Woolf has no idea, no idea at all, of the importance of words in professional contexts, in the law, in the civil service, in the administration of nations and counties and cities, in rules and regulations, in the vast world of healthcare and medicine. Only if you leave out most of what people in civilised societies use language for, can you acquiesce in the dreamy digressions of this pampered lady.

Very symptomatically the quote which ends the piece – ‘The leaves decay and fall, the vapours weep their burthen to the ground. Man comes…’ – is from Tennyson, patron saint of mellifluous dreaminess. It’s a characteristically Victorian reference point, to a man who devoted his long career to ignoring the gritty, complex realities of the Victorian age and created a dream otherworld into which his many readers and fans could take refuge. Despite her often challenging handling of her content, in terms of her style Woolf’s novels offer a similar level of mellifluous, elegantly shaped escapism, part of the reason for her enduring popularity.

Credit

‘Selected Essays of Virginia Woolf’ was published by Oxford World Classics in 2008. Most of the essays can be found online. The OWC introduction can be read on Amazon.

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by Simon on April 18, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in English literature, Essays

Tagged Arnold Bennett, Athenaeum magazine, belle-lettreism, Belles letterism, Cambridge University, character, Character in Fiction, Christianity, Co-production, Constance Garnett, Craftmanship, Craftsmanship, D.H. Lawrence, Dostoyevsky, Dr Watson, E.M. Forster, Edward VII, Edwardian novelists, English literature, Essays, fiction, George V, Georgian novelists, H.G. Wells, Hilda Lessways, Hogarth Press, How Should One Read A Book?, Impassioned Prose, Jacob's Room, James Joyce, Jane Austen, John Galsworthy, King's Cross, Kipps, Lawrence Sterne, Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown, Mr Prufrock, Mrs Brown, Over-reading, Oxford World Classics, playpoem, poetry, Poetry Fiction and the Future, Raskolnikov, reader response theory, Reading and Writing, Reading poetry, Roland Barthes, Russian novelists, Samuel Butler, Selected Essays by Virginia Woolf, Shakespeare, Sherlock Holmes, Stavrogin, T.S. Eliot, Tennyson, The Criterion, the Heretics Society, The Old Wives' Tale, The Waves, The Way of All Flesh, Thomas de Quincey, Thomas de Quincy, Tristram Shandy, Ulysses, Virginia Woolf, Waterloo station

Posted by Simon on April 18, 2025

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The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle (1927)

This is the final collection of twelve Sherlock Holmes short stories, published in the trusty Strand Magazine between October 1921 and April 1927. Incredible that the character associated with London pea-soupers, hansom cabs, gas lamps and Jack the Ripper, should live on into the Jazz Age and see the publication of Ulysses and The Great Gatsby, the Russian Civil War, the rise of Mussolini, the General Strike and talking movies. As Conan Doyle writes in the preface to this final collection:

He began his adventures in the very heart of the later Victorian era, carried it through the all-too-short reign of Edward, and has managed to hold his own little niche even in these feverish days. (Preface)

Cruelty and violence

But, possibly as a sign of the traumas the world had passed through viz. the Great War, the collapse of Europe’s land empires, and the tempestuous Bolshevik Revolution, the stories are notably crueller and harsher than previous ones.

A handsome man has acid thrown in his face.
A man finds himself among half-beasts and catches leprosy.
Holmes is severely beaten and repeatedly threatened.
When he seizes the diamond from Count Negretto Sylvius he holds a pistol to his head, more the act of a Philip Marlowe than the debonaire Holmes.
A boy infects his baby brother with incurable poison.
A woman shoots herself in the head.
A man takes medicine which turns him into a half ape.
A maniac traps his wife and lover in a gas chamber.
A deadly jellyfish kills its victims by flailing their backs to a bloody pulp.
A lion rips a beautiful woman’s face off.

Animal imagery

And the greater cruelty and violence of the stories is reflected in the much more frequent comparison of humans to animals:

‘When one tries to rise above Nature one is liable to fall below it. The highest type of man may revert to the animal if he leaves the straight road of destiny.’
The Baron has little waxed tips of hair under his nose, like an insect.
How a beastman could have laid his vile paws upon such a being of the beyond I cannot imagine. You may have noticed how extremes call to each other, the spiritual to the animal, the cave-man to the angel. You never saw a worse case than this.
It seemed that none of them could speak English, but the situation wanted clearing up, for the creature with the big head was growing furiously angry, and, uttering wild-beast cries…
A sudden wild-beast light sprang up in the dark, menacing eyes of the master criminal.
‘You cruel beast! You monster!’ she cried.
From keeping beasts in a cage, the woman seemed, by some retribution of fate, to have become herself a beast in a cage.
Ruffian, bully, beast – it was all written on that heavy-jowled face.
Holmes sprang at his throat like a tiger and twisted his face towards the ground.
I tell you, Mr Holmes. this man collects women, and takes a pride in his collection. as some men collect moths or butterflies.
‘And is this Count Sylvius one of your fish?’ ‘
Yes, and he’s a shark. He bites. The other is Sam Merton the boxer. Not a bad fellow, Sam, but the Count has used him. Sam’s not a shark. He is a great big silly bull-headed gudgeon. But he is flopping about in my net all the same.’
If I had said that a mad bull had arrived it would give a clearer impression of what occurred. The door had flown open and a huge negro had burst into the room.
She entered with ungainly struggle like some huge awkward chicken, torn, squawking, out of its coop.
‘I see. You’ve tested them before.’ ‘They are good hounds who run silent.’ ‘Such hounds have a way sooner or later of biting the hand that feeds them.’
There have been no advertisements in the agony columns. You know that I miss nothing there. They are my favourite covert for putting up a bird, and I would never have overlooked such a cock pheasant as that.’
With his dressing-gown flapping on each side of him, he looked like some huge bat glued against the side of his own house, a great square dark patch upon the moonlit wall.
In all our adventures I do not know that I have ever seen a more strange sight than this impassive and still dignified figure crouching frog-like upon the ground and goading to a wilder exhibition of passion the maddened hound, which ramped and raged in front of him, by all manner of ingenious and calculated cruelty.
It was a dreadful face – a human pig, or rather a human wild boar, for it was formidable in its bestiality. One could imagine that vile mouth champing and foaming in its rage, and one could conceive those small, vicious eyes darting pure malignancy as they looked forth upon the world. Ruffian, bully, beast – it was all written on that heavy-jowled face.
… the other, a small rat-faced man with a disagreeably furtive manner.
‘For myself, I am deeply in the hands of the Jews. I have always known that if my sister were to die my creditors would be on to my estate like a flock of vultures.’
He clawed into the air with his bony hands. His mouth was open, and for the instant he looked like some horrible bird of prey. In a flash we got a glimpse of the real Josiah Amberley, a misshapen demon with a soul as distorted as his body.

And the fact that one story is about a vampire and another about a scientist who turns himself into an ape-man clinches the sense of the ab-human, of the human mutating into the Gothic creature or beast, which permeates the stories. Humans permanently poised on the edge of bestial violence.

The Strand Magazine, vol. 73, April 1927

Sex and seduction

There’s more sex, more overtly referred to, than in the earlier stories.

Baron Grüner is a smooth-talking seducer of women; the Illustrious Client hinges on Holmes purloining the Baron’s ‘Lust Diary’.
Similarly, the gorgeous Isadora Klein has seduced numerous young men, used them and then discarded them, and the case hinges (once again) on a text which records her sexual escapades, this time a roman a clef written by her lover.
Maria Gibson is jealous enough of her husband’s relationship with the maid to kill herself.
Professor Presbury is besotted enough with a young woman he’s met to experiment with a dangerous youth serum.
Leonardo the circus acrobat has ‘the self-satisfied smile of the man of many conquests’.

It is difficult to cast your mind back to the Victorian stories where the sex element is simply absent; where there is no reference to sex whatsoever, at any point; where men drop dead of heart attacks at the mere thought of their reputations being besmirched, where women are prepared to plunge their country into war rather than have their husband read an old billet-doux (The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plan).

This is the most obvious way that, despite the way the tales are still ostensibly set in the late ’90s or early noughties – in fact the post-War Holmes is operating in a new era with new conventions,

Anglo good, foreign bad

Foreigners are generally bad, such as the smooth Baron Grüner:

The fellow is, as you may have heard, extraordinarily handsome, with a most fascinating manner. a gentle voice and that air of romance and mystery which means so much to a woman. He is said to have the whole sex at his mercy and to have made ample use of the fact… His European reputation for beauty was fully deserved. In figure he was not more than of middle size, but was built upon graceful and active lines. His face was swarthy, almost Oriental, with large, dark, languorous eyes which might easily hold an irresistible fascination for women. His hair and moustache were raven black, the latter short, pointed, and carefully waxed. His features were regular and pleasing, save only his straight, thin-lipped mouth. If ever I saw a murderer’s mouth it was there – a cruel, hard gash in the face, compressed, inexorable, and terrible.
Isadora Klein was, of course, the celebrated beauty. There was never a woman to touch her. She is pure Spanish, the real blood of the masterful Conquistadors… She rose from a settee as we entered: tall, queenly, a perfect figure, a lovely mask-like face, with two wonderful Spanish eyes which looked murder at us both.
It was as if the air of Italy had got into his blood and brought with it the old cruel Italian spirit.
This gentleman married some five years ago a Peruvian lady the daughter of a Peruvian merchant, whom he had met in
connection with the importation of nitrates. The lady was very beautiful, but the fact of her foreign birth and of her alien religion always caused a separation of interests and of feelings between husband and wife.
‘She was a creature of the tropics, a Brazilian by birth, as no doubt you know.’ ‘No, it had escaped me.’ ‘Tropical by birth and tropical by nature. A child of the sun and of passion.’
He was looked upon as an oddity by the students, and would have been their butt, but there was some strange outlandish blood in the man, which showed itself not only in his coal-black eyes and swarthy face but also in occasional outbreaks of temper, which could only be described as ferocious.

But, thankfully, in contrast to the beast-people and dastardly foreigners, there are plenty of fine upstanding, Anglo-Saxon chaps (and the occasional chapess):

Mr James M. Dodd, a big, fresh, sunburned, upstanding Briton.
‘I have found out who our client is,’ I cried, bursting with my great news. ‘Why, Holmes, it is—‘ ‘It is a loyal friend and a chivalrous gentleman,’ said Holmes.
‘He had the fighting blood in him, so it is no wonder he volunteered. There was not a finer lad in the regiment!’
“Of course I remembered him,” said I as I laid down the letter. “Big Bob Ferguson, the finest three-quarter Richmond ever had. He was always a good-natured chap.’
Our new visitor, a bright, handsome girl of a conventional English type, smiled back at Holmes as she seated herself beside Mr Bennett.
Stackhurst himself was a well-known rowing Blue in his day, and an excellent all-round scholar.
Fitzroy McPherson was the science master, a fine upstanding young fellow…
‘Forgive what is past, Murdoch. We shall understand each other better in the future.’ They passed out together with their arms linked in friendly fashion.
Who could have imagined that so rare a flower would grow from such a root and in such an atmosphere?.. I could not look upon her perfect clear-cut face, with all the soft freshness of the downlands in her delicate colouring, without realizing that no young man would cross her path unscathed.

High society and superlatives

These stories continue the trend of hobnobbing with the rich and famous – giving the reader a flattering Downton Abbeyesque feeling that they are rubbing shoulders with the glamorous, rich and aristocratic. If not actual aristocrats, the adversaries are generally men and women at the top of their field.

It is hinted that the illustrious client in the first story is the Prince of Wales.
All the doctors are the most eminent in their field – Sir Leslie Oakshott, the famous surgeon, Sir James Saunders the great dermatologist
The soldiers are all medal-winning heroes – Colonel Emsworth the Crimean V. C.
Ronder, of course, was a household word. He was the rival of Wombwell, and of Sanger, one of the greatest showmen of his day.
‘There are the Shoscombe spaniels,’ said I. ‘You hear of them at every dog show. The most exclusive breed in England.’
‘That is a colt you are running?’ ‘The best in England, Mr Holmes.’
And the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary come calling in person about the Mazarin stone!

The stories

The Adventure of the Illustrious Client (1924)

Set in 1902, in Kingston.

The dapper Sir James Damery visits on behalf of an anonymous client who wishes to prevent sweet and gullible Miss Violet Merville from marrying the Austrian Baron Adelbert Gruner, not only a cad to women but probably a murderer. While Watson is distracting the Baron with the offer of a rare Chinese antiquity, Holmes sneaks in the back and purloins the notebook the Baron keeps of all his conquests. There is little or no deduction involved. What is involved is shocking violence as a) Holmes is badly beaten up by two of the Baron’s men b) the Baron has vitriol thrown in his face by an embittered lover, Kitty Winter. The Wikipedia entry on vitriol-throwing says the French press coined the word La Vitrioleuse after a wave of 16 vitriol attacks in 1879, all of them crimes of passion. In 1894 the French artist Eugene Grasset (1841 to 1917) created a haunting lithograph title La Vitioleuse.

La Vitrioleuse by Eugene Grasset (1894)

The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier (1926)

Set in 1903, near Bedford.

First ever Holmes story narrated by Holmes himself. Fine upstanding soldier James Dodd fought side by side with good man Godfrey Emsworth, son of the famous Crimean VC. Rumoured to be wounded but then disappeared and family are strangely cagey about him. Holmes goes to Tuxbury Old Park and quickly deduces that the missing soldier has in fact contracted leprosy in South Africa and is hiding from the world with his family’s help

The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone (1921)

Set in 1903, in Harrow Weald.

First use of 3rd person narrator. Holmes has a mannekin of himself in the window to distract his watchers. By adroitly swapping places with it he persuades Count Negretto Sylvius to take out the stolen £100K jewel to show to his accomplice at which Holmes simply swipes it. Baker Street.

The Adventure of the Three Gables (1906)

Set in 1903.

Steve Dixie, a black boxer bursts in to warn Holmes off Harrow Weald which is a coincidence because he’s just had a letter from Mary Maberley who lives there. Off we go to meet her and hear her story, that an agent suddenly offered her a fortune for her house and everything in it. Through various clues Holmes deduces the involvement of the imperious Spanish beauty Isadora Klein who has dallied with half the men in London, including Mary Maberley’s dead son. Turns out he wrote a novel dramatising Isadora’s wicked ways and she suspected it was in his luggage, hence the offer for the house and all its contents.

The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire (1924)

Set in 1896, in Ryder Street, St James’s (London).

Good solid rugger player Bob Ferguson comes to Holmes stricken: after some suspicions he caught his wife at the throat of his little baby, and she turned with blood on her lips! then ran off weeping to her rooms and won’t emerge. On a visit to the rundown house Holmes quickly sees the lie of the land: the 15 year old son of the first wife is deadly jealous of the new baby by the second, Peruvian, wife and had nipped it with an south American arrow tipped with poison. The wife was gallantly sucking it out only to be completely mis-accused. The prescription for 15 year old Jacky is a year at sea! Near Horsham.

The Adventure of the Three Garridebs (1924)

Set 1902.

An American named Garrideb reluctantly appears before Holmes after an English eccentric with a vast collection of bric-a-brac named Garridenb has messaged him. His irritation and worn English clothes belie his cock and bull story about a multi-millionaire American back in Kansas named Garrideb who bequeathed his millions to whoever could find three Garridebs in the world. He claims to have found the third one in Birmingham and packs the eccentric off to meet him but, of course, Holmes and Watson stake out the now empty house where they reveal the first Garrideb to be none other than ‘Killer’ Evans from Chicago, who’d killed a confederate in London and served five years for it during which time the eccentric Garrideb moved into his flat, thus blocking access to the forger’s kit in the basement.

The Problem of Thor Bridge (1922)

Set in 1900, near Winchester, Hampshire.

Mr Neil Gibson, the Gold King, the richest gold magnate in the world, marries a Brazilian lady and settles in England but as her looks fade they argue a lot, and he becomes attached to his children’s maid, Miss Grace Dunbar. The wife Maria is found shot dead and the gun is found in Grace’s wardrobe. What could be simpler? Holmes deduces from the way the little bridge over the lake is chipped, that the wife planted a copy of the gun to implicate the maid, and then shot herself with a gun tied to a weighted string dangling into the lake!

The story is notable within the Sherlock Holmes canon for the initial reference to a tin dispatch box, located within the vaults of the Cox and Co. Bank at Charing Cross in London, where Dr Watson is said to keep the papers concerning some of Holmes’ unsolved or unfinished cases.

The Adventure of the Creeping Man (1923)

Set 1903 in Camford i.e. a fictional version of Cambridge.

Mr Trevor Bennett comes to Holmes with a problem. He is Professor Presbury’s personal secretary engaged to the professor’s only daughter, Edith. After a trip to Prague the professor has been behaving strangely, with a new vigour but also, on some nights, loping around the house and climbing the walls! Holmes shows he has been taking an experimental youth serum extracted from apes in Madagascar.

The Adventure of the Lion’s Mane (1926)

Set in 1907, on the Sussex coast.

One of the last of Holmes’s adventures and the second one to be narrated by Holmes himself! In his retirement on the South Downs cases still follow him. One of the teachers at the nearby ? academy is found stumbling up the cliffs from an early morning swim on the beach, his back horribly flailed and bloody. There is an interlude while speculation about his murderer implicates his rival in love for a nearby maiden. Only for Holmes to suddenly remember the same marks are made by a rare tropical giant jellyfish, but not before the chief suspect is himself stung almost to death.

The Adventure of the Veiled Lodger (1927)

Set in 1896, in Brixton.

The veiled lodger is the wife of the world famous circus owner ? He was a tyrant and sadist who whipped her. Her lover Leonardo the strong man cooked up a plan to stave the tyrant’s head in with a club with spikes in it to replicate a lion’s paw and release the lion they fed every day. The murder went ahead but, unfortunately the lion was maddened by the smell of blood and turned on Mrs, ripping her face off while the coward Leonardo ran off. She feels free to tell her story now she’s read that Leonardo is dead. And she has lived in retirement hiding behind a veil ever since. Holmes gallantly talks her out of committing suicide.

The Adventure of Shoscombe Old Place (1927)

Set in 1902, in Berkshire.

Head trainer John Mason from Shoscombe Old Place, a racing stable in Berkshire, comes to Holmes about his master, Sir Robert Norberton. Mason thinks he has gone mad. The stables are actually owned by Norberton’s sister, Lady Beatrice, and the old man has huge debts. He is staking everything on the next race featuring his colt. Meanwhile, Mason lists various odd events which capture Holmes’s attention:

Lady B has stopped greeting her favourite horse
Sir Robert has become increasingly angry and stressed
in a fit of anger he gave Lady B’s dog away to the local publican
he’s been seen going into the local church crypt at night to meet a stranger
and then burnt human bones are found in the furnace at Shoscombe!

Holmes deduces that Lady B has actually died, but Sir Robert is maintaining the fiction that she’s alive to prevent his creditors seizing the estate before his horse can win the Derby. Which it does, and with his huge winnings he pays off his debts.

The Adventure of the Retired Colourman (1926)

Set 1898 in Lewisham, south London.

Holmes is hired by a retired supplier of artistic materials, Josiah Amberley, to look into his wife’s disappearance. She has left with a neighbour, Dr Ray Ernest, taking a sizeable quantity of cash and securities. Amberley wants the two tracked down. Holmes deduces that Amberley himself did away with the couple, locking them in his strong room and gassing them and then throwing them down a disused well. Holmes prevents Amberley committing suicide, predicting he will end up in Broadmoor not swinging from a rope.

Town versus country

Despite Holmes’s association with pea-souper fogs and so on, only four of these 12 stories actually take place in London. All the rest are located in the countryside.

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by Simon on January 9, 2014 • Permalink

Posted in Books, Short stories

Posted by Simon on January 9, 2014

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2014/01/09/the-case-book-of-sherlock-holmes-arthur-conan-doyle/

The Valley of Fear by Arthur Conan Doyle (1915)

The Valley of Fear was serialised in the Strand Magazine between September 1914 and May 1915. Like the first two Holmes novellas it is divided into two parts: the first half is a murder mystery set in a quiet English country house; part two provides the backstory to the murder, which began 15 years earlier in the grim, industrial coalmining districts of America. Note: America again.

The ‘now’ of the main story is the early days of Holmes’s career – ‘Those were the early days at the end of the ’80’s’. This allows the brief reintroduction of Professor Moriarty and lavish descriptions of him as the Napoleon of crime etc in the first and last chapters.

Moriarty

‘The greatest schemer of all time, the organizer of every deviltry, the controlling brain of the underworld, a brain which might have made or marred the destiny of nations – that’s the man!.. When you have one of the first brains of Europe up against you, and all the powers of darkness at his back, there are infinite possibilities…
(Part 1, chapter 1)

‘No, no, my good sir,’ said Holmes. ‘There is a master hand here. It is no case of sawed-off shotguns and clumsy six-shooters. You can tell an old master by the sweep of his brush. I can tell a Moriarty when I see one. This crime is from London, not from America.’
(Epilogue)

The superlative criminal against the superlative detective. Comic strip stuff, the godfather of a thousand pulp magazines and comics…

Part 1. The Tragedy of Birlstone (the country house murder mystery)

Birlstone is a Jacobean country house with a moat and drawbridge on the northern border of Sussex. In chapter 1 Holmes receives a message in cipher warning that danger threatens its owner, but even as Holmes and Watson decipher the message they are overtaken by events for the police come to say the owner, John Douglas, has been murdered. Holmes and a London detective, MacDonald travel to the house, but are puzzled by discrepancies at the crime scene. Apparently, someone has broken in, blown Douglas’s head clean off with a double-barrelled shotgun, and escaped through the open window and across the moat.

The cast of characters is interviewed one by one: tall beautiful Mrs Douglas; the family friend Banks who may or may not have been having an affair with her, and thus have motive; Ames the quiet butler; the housekeeper et al. It is the cast from a country house murder mystery, each character with apparent motives and only the super-sleuth can find the truth. The setting and plot made me think of Inspector Poirot and indeed, it was only a few years later, in 1920, that Agatha Christie introduced the Belgian detective, and the format crystallised into a long-running genre.

In part one the mystery at the house is fully solved to everyone’s satisfaction. But why was the murdered man pursued? That requires part two and the backstory in America. What makes these stories so nostalgic and comforting is the old fashioned narrative voice which is unafraid of buttonholing the reader and guiding us around the twists and turns of the text:

And now, my long-suffering readers, I will ask you to come away with me for a time, far from the Sussex Manor House of Birlstone, and far also from the year of grace in which we made our eventful journey which ended with the strange story of the man who had been known as John Douglas. I wish you to journey back some twenty years in time, and westward some thousands of miles in space, that I may lay before you a singular and terrible narrative—so singular and so terrible that you may find it hard to believe that even as I tell it, even so did it occur.

Do not think that I intrude one story before another is finished. As you read on you will find that this is not so. And when I have detailed those distant events and you have solved this mystery of the past, we shall meet once more in those rooms on Baker Street, where this, like so many other wonderful happenings, will find its end.
(Part 1, Chapter 7)

The story may be grim and violent; but the telling and the teller, dear sweet Watson, are as honest and reassuring as possible.

Theorising

For whatever reason, the first part of this novella contains an unprecedented description of Holmes working through various theories and scenarios. Generally, in almost all the stories, his progress through and discarding of multiple theories is only hinted at – the texts tend to focus on the final dramatic revelation of the true events. Here, tens of pages are spent discussing with Watson the pros and cons of various scenarios which fit the observed facts, talking them through in detail and rethinking them as inconvenient facts block progress. I found this very enjoyable and for this reason I prefer it to the two earlier novellas.

Part 2. The Scowrers (lawless America)

Like the two first novellas, The Valley of Fear has a backstory set in a distant land – for the second time the wild and lawless USA – which explains why the central character has been tracked across America and then to England by a vengeful secret society. In A Study in Scarlet it was the good guy chasing two wicked Mormons; here it is the good guy seeking sanctuary from the Society of Freemen, a countrywide association of working men pledged to self-defence which, in the sinister Vermissa Valley, has been perverted into a league of assassins and murderers and nicknamed ‘the Scowrers’.

Hard man McMurdo arrives in Vermissa Valley from Chicago where he was inducted into the freemen. He quickly ingratiates himself with the Bodymaster of the lodge, Boss McGinty, by talking brave, and taking part in various beatings and murders. Sentimentally, he falls in love with the tall blonde Swedish daughter of his landlord and worms his way deeper into the heart of the evil gang…

Animal imagery

There had always been animal imagery in the Holmes stories – ‘tiger’ is his favourite animal to compare criminals to throughout the stories, appearing eight times in this text, 10 times in the Return of Sherlock Holmes stories – but there seemed to be more animal analogies in this book than ever before, maybe reflecting the harsher, crueller atmosphere of the story.

‘Porlock is important, not for himself, but for the great man with whom he is in touch. Picture to yourself the pilot fish with the shark, the jackal with the lion—anything that is insignificant in companionship with what is formidable: not only formidable, Watson, but sinister – in the highest degree sinister… You have heard me speak of Professor Moriarty?’
(Part 1, Chapter 1)

Among the older men were many whose features showed the tigerish, lawless souls within.

Only once did McMurdo see him, a sly, little gray-haired rat of a man, with a slinking gait and a sidelong glance which was charged with malice.
(Part 2, Chapter 5)

McGinty had instruments enough already; but he recognized that this was a supremely able one. He felt like a man holding a fierce bloodhound in leash. There were curs to do the smaller work; but some day he would slip this creature upon its prey.
(Part 2, Chapter 5)

The long room was crowded, and through the haze of tobacco smoke he saw the tangled black mane of the Bodymaster, the cruel, unfriendly features of Baldwin, the vulture face of Harraway, the secretary, and a dozen more who were among the leaders of the lodge.
(Part 2, Chapter 6)

There was not a man in the room whose hands had not been reddened a dozen times before. They were as hardened to human murder as a butcher to sheep.
(Part 2, Chapter 7)

At the sight Boss McGinty gave the roar of a wounded bear and plunged for the half-opened door.
(Part 2, Chapter 7)

Socialism and Fenianism

A lot could be written about the true history of the Molly Maguires and their role in American industrial relations i.e. were they mafia-style criminals or heroes of the working man? And similarly about the role of American emigrants in founding and funding Irish republicanism via secret societies like the Fenians in the later 1800s.

Like any conservative professional man of his day and age, Conan Doyle thought both were criminal operations. Probably, as an author of popular fiction he was only interested in them insofar as they provided plausible fodder for his ripping yarns. A hundred years later, we are likely to see their use in this story as indications the rifts and fractures of two rich, troubled societies (UK and USA).

Crime novels by definition focus on criminal elements but, insofar as Conan Doyle chooses secret societies as the core of his two American novellas, he is highlighting not only the simple crimes he requires, but also the complex injustices which lie behind them.

Just as in the Hound of the Baskervilles, a central character voices the reader’s thoughts, that he is reading a pulp fiction and just as in the Hound voicing it, doesn’t dispel it:

‘When I reached this place I learned that I was wrong and that it wasn’t a dime novel after all.’
(Part 2, Chapter 7)

The finishing end

Oh it is, it is a dime novel – but a dime novel lifted out of its genre by the presence of Holmes. Also by the ending. An initial reading highlights the interesting parallel Conan Doyle makes between his ascetic, intellectual detective Holmes and the heroic, tough, courageous Pinkerton agent, Birdy Edwards. Just as the violence of the Scowrers is brought to an end by the devoted Pinkerton man, so the murder mystery is solved, as hundreds of other cases have been in the short stories, by the soothing presence of Holmes. Both heal clear the air, capture the criminals, cage the animals and make society safe again, as a doctor sets a broken bone and cures a disease.

Except they don’t. The hero doesn’t escape. Holmes doesn’t save his man. Moriarty cuts him down in his prime, thus leaving a bitter and ominous aftertaste to the book. It was serialised during the initial hysteria of the Great War. On the face of it, Conan Doyle used the novella to add more depth to the spooky figure of the Napoleon of crime, who only actually appears in one previous story, the Final Problem. And Sherlockians have not been slow to point out the contradiction between Dr Watson seeming familiar with Moriarty here in the late 1880s, and yet blissfully ignorant of him in the Final Problem, set later.

But we know Conan Doyle cared little about anomalies and contradictions, having Watson wounded in the shoulder in the first novel and the leg in the second etc. Seems to me he was happy to sacrifice that kind of pedantic consistency for the much greater dramatic affect the end of this book creates. On the face of it, Holmes’s staring off into the distance artistically anticipates the final death struggle at the Reichenbach Falls. But given the times, this ending seems to me to echo the dark atmosphere of His Last Bow, giving this flimsy though pacey yarn a powerfully dark and ominous undertow.

We all sat in silence for some minutes while those fateful eyes still strained to pierce the veil. (Epilogue)

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by Simon on January 6, 2014 • Permalink

Posted in Books, Detective stories, Novel

Posted by Simon on January 6, 2014

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2014/01/06/the-valley-of-fear-arthur-conan-doyle/

His Last Bow by Arthur Conan Doyle (1917)

Unlike previous collections these aren’t twelve or 13 stories published as a series in monthly instalments, but a collection of just seven Sherlock Holmes stories published intermittently between September 1908 and December 1913, plus the one-off title story published in September 1917. I.e. these were written by the successful and well-off author as and when he had an idea or needed some cash.

Anglo-Saxon good, foreign bad

Villains are generally foreign and frequently compared to animals. Mr Henderson aka the Tiger of San Pedro is both, as well as being the characteristic ‘superlative’ i.e. very worst of his type (Holmes rarely tangles with average criminals):

He is a man of fifty, strong, active, with iron-gray hair, great bunched black eyebrows, the step of a deer and the air of an emperor – a fierce, masterful man, with a red-hot spirit behind his parchment face. He is either a foreigner or has lived long in the tropics, for he is yellow and sapless, but tough as whipcord… The Tiger of San Pedro! The whole history of the man came back to me in a flash. He had made his name as the most lewd and bloodthirsty tyrant that had ever governed any country with a pretence to civilization. Strong, fearless, and energetic, he had sufficient virtue to enable him to impose his odious vices upon a cowering people for ten or twelve years. His name was a terror through all Central America.
(The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge)

I got past it and got one in with my stick that crushed his head like an egg. I would have spared her, perhaps, for all my madness, but she threw her arms round him, crying out to him, and calling him ‘Alec.’ I struck again, and she lay stretched beside him. I was like a wild beast then that had tasted blood.
(The Adventure of the Cardboard Box)

The murderer Georgiano is, of course, foreign (being Italian) and a monster to boot:

Not only was his body that of a giant but everything about him was grotesque, gigantic, and terrifying. His voice was like thunder in our little house. There was scarce room for the whirl of his great arms as he talked. His thoughts, his emotions, his passions, all were exaggerated and monstrous… and even when his words were to my husband those terrible, glaring, wild-beast eyes of his were always turned upon me.
(The Adventure of the Red Circle)

In The Adventure of the Dying Detective Culverton Smith isn’t foreign, but the ambience of the dirty Eastern world and the deadly disease he used to kill his nephew, certainly are. A rare literal example of a foreign infection killing an innocent Anglo-Saxon.

In The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax the Rev. Dr. Shlessinger, missionary from South America, is none other than Holy Peters, one of the most unscrupulous rascals that Australia has ever evolved.. [with his wife] This poor lady is in the hands of a most infernal couple, who will stick at nothing.’

For Queen and country

It is noticeable that in the final story of The Return, The Adventure of the Second Stain, and here in the Bruce-Partington Plan, Holmes can rise no higher. In both he finds purloined documents whose loss jeopardised England’s safety. In the latter he is rewarded by an emerald tie-pin from the Queen-Empress herself.

At the same time, in the same story, it is made perfectly plain that Holmes is the classic English gentleman-amateur: When Mycroft says he will be rewarded with an honour, Holmes smiles and replies: ‘I play the game for the game’s own sake.’

Until the tone is changed forever by the outbreak of the Great War and the Buchanite setting and mood of His Last Bow (1917).

Multitextuality

It is an endlessly pleasurable feature of the stories the way that the mysteries have to be pieced together from varying bits of evidence and so the texts are themselves made up of various types of text patched and sown together. Lots of letters and notes and diaries and telegrams and secret messages. It also makes the stories feel swift and punchy, since sudden revelations can come in very brief new texts which interrupt the 3rd person narrative.

The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge features a crucial message sent to Garcia telling him the coast is clear for an assassination attempt. The Adventure of the Cardboard Box features the box and message, as well as an exchange of telegrams and a long confession, taken down in shorthand, from the murderer Browner. The Bruce-Partington Plan is not the first story to hinge on messages sent via the agony column of popular newspapers, apparently a routine place for crims to send coded messages.

The stories

The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge (1908)

March 1892. John Scott Eccles makes friends with a Hispanic man and goes to stay with his odd household in Wisteria Lodge, when he awakes the house is empty but the dead body of his host is found. The tale is in two parts because it takes a while to work out that Garcia and his accomplices were part of a brotherhood dedicated to tracking down and killing The Tiger of San Pedro, a deposed Latin American dictator on the run. Esher.

The Adventure of the Cardboard Box (1892)

Date n/a. This story was the second of the twelve Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes in most British editions of the canon, and second of the eight stories from His Last Bow in most American versions. It was suppressed in some editions because it deals with actual adultery. Miss Cushing receives a card box containing with two ears in and calls in the police. Turns out her sister, with the same initial, was part of an adulterous menage in Liverpool with the sailor who married the third Cushing sister, she introduced a second man into Jim Browner’s household who began to make love to Browner’s wife, Mary – Browner said if he ever found Fairbairn in his house he’d send Sarah Cushing his ear. He finds him, kills his wife and the adulterer, and does send the severed ear of wife and lover, but to the wrong Cushing sister. Croydon and Wallington.

The Adventure of the Red Circle (1911)

Date n/a. Mrs Warren comes to see about a mystery lodger who never moves from his room, now her husband has been kidnapped! Holmes quickly deduces the lodger is a woman, different from the man who arranged it. They notice signals being sent by lantern from a room across the street. On entering the room find the body of the giant Gorgiano who is head of the Red Circle, an offshoot of the Carbonari, an Italian secret society. The hidden woman, Emilia then tells the backstory about herself and husband falling love in Italy, fleeing to New York, him being asked to murder his patron for the Red Circle, and so fleeing on to London.

The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans (1912)

November 1895. Mycroft makes a rare visit about plans for the Bruce-Partington submarine which have gone missing – 7 out of 10 papers were found on the body of a young engineer from the Woolwich office, his body found by Aldgate tube railway lines, after he ran off deserting his fiancee in the fog. Holmes makes the key deduction that the body had been laid on the roof of a tube train and fallen off at Aldgate because of a curve in the line. Cross-referencing against foreign spies in London he finds one whose dwelling backed onto the railway, and he and Watson break in. Once again the agony columns of the papers come in useful where they find coded correspondence between buyer and seller and publish an invite to collect more secret papers, thus entrapping the traitor and, ultimately, the German spy.

The Adventure of the Dying Detective (1913)

Date n/a. Holmes fakes an obscure Asian illness and worries Watson in order to lure over Culverton Smith who promptly admits to the dying Holmes that: a) he poisoned him with a spiked box sent through the post, b) he killed his nephew using the same device. At which point the police enter and Watson comes out of his hiding place. Culverton Smith isn’t foreign, but the ambience of the deadly Eastern world and disease he used to kill his nephew, is.

The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax (1911)

Date n/a. A middle aged noblewoman, famous for her inherited jewels, goes missing. Holmes sends Watson blundering round Europe on her trail for she had seemed to be trying to evade a large ‘savage’ man trailing her. Turns out to be a nobleman back from the colonies to woo her. Back in London that they track down a missionary Lady C is reported as meeting who turns out to be none other than the Australian swindler Holy Peters. After a lot of fuss, Lady C is found in a double decker coffin!

The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot Spring (1910)

March 1897. Many of the other stories use the word horror or describe moments of horror, but this is a sustained meditation on people who have been horrified to death. It is close in spirit to Conan Doyle’s fantasy and science fiction stories. Briefly, for his health Holmes and Watson decamp to a cove in Cornwall, where they are interrupted by vicar and tenant Mr Mortimer Tregennis. His sister and brothers have died and been driven mad by horror. A day later the vicar rushes up to announce Mortimer himself has also been scared to death. Holmes identifies gravel in the garden with that at the cottage of famous African adventurer Dr Leon Sterndale and forces a confession. Leon, married, in secret loved Tregennis’s sister. Tregennis stole some obscure African horror powder from Sterndale’s house, when he was showing it once, and used it against his siblings, with whom he had a financial dispute. Sterndale realises it and takes more powder to Tregennis, throws it on the lamp, and watches him died horribly as revenge for the only woman he ever loved. On reflection, Holmes lets Sterndale return to Darkest Africa. Cornwall.

His Last Bow (1917)

August 1914. Told in the third person. An epitome of Anglo-Saxon good, foreign bad, this story is, uniquely, told in the third person, with a description of two German spies standing on the cliffs of Dover in the last days before the Great War breaks out, congratulating themselves on all the spying they’ve done for Berlin. One leaves and the other awaits the Irish-American traitor who’s supplied him so much material over the past few years. It is of course Holmes in disguise who hears the German spy explain everything then chloroforms him and explains the backstory to Watson, the chauffeur i.e. how he came out of Sussex Downs retirement to save his country in its time of need.

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by Simon on January 5, 2014 • Permalink

Posted in Detective stories, Great War, Short stories

Tagged 1917, Arthur Conan Doyle, Dr Watson, His Last Bow, Holmes, Sherlock Holmes, short stories

Posted by Simon on January 5, 2014

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2014/01/05/his-last-bow-arthur-conan-doyle/

The Return of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle (1905)

Having killed off Holmes in the 1893 story The Final Problem, Conan Doyle came under intense pressure from fans and publishers to revive him. Finally he did so in 1901 to 1902 serial The Hound of the Baskervilles, though this was set before Holmes’ fictional demise and so doesn’t mention it. And then came these 13 new short stories, published monthly in the Strand magazine from September 1903 to December 1904, and collected in book form in March 1905. In the first of them Conan Doyle bites the bullet and gives his explanation of how Holmes survived his fight with Professor Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls.

In the ‘real’ world there had been a 10 year gap between the 1893 death story and the 1903 miraculous survival story; in the Holmes universe the gap is just three years, from 1891 when The Final Problem is set until 1894 when the Empty House is set. This period is referred to by Holmes specialists as ‘The Great Hiatus’, and the first story also describes his adventures around the globe during this period.

The 1890s, decade of -isms

I’ve read the 1890s described as the decade of -isms because so many movements began and proliferated then. It was the Yellow Decade, the Mauve Decade, the Naughty Nineties, central decade of the Gilded Age, the fin-de-siècle, the Reckless Decade, and saw the flourishing of symbolism, Art Nouveau, Arts & Crafts, Aestheticism, Art for Art’s Sake, post-Impressionism, neo-Impressionism, the Secession and Jugendstil in the arts. It was the zenith of Imperialism in Britain and the USA (the Spanish-American War 1898). It saw an efflorescence of radical political movements including nihilism, anarchism, communism, socialism, the New Woman and feminism, vegetarianism and so on.

What all this really shows is that the decade marks the beginning of the Modern Period because too much was beginning to happen for anybody to really understand – too many social, economic, political and cultural trends, with international affairs becoming more complicated as new powers arose (America and Japan) and old powers threatened Britain’s hegemony (Germany looming).

Theories of degeneration

Holmes himself is not immune to the siren call of the innumerable theories which the age spawned. As we know, one of the consequences of Darwin placing humans firmly in the Natural World and the product of evolution rather than Divine Creation, was that thinkers galore pondered the possibility that humankind could be actively bred to create a new race of superbeings – an idea that appealed to Nietzsche and H.G. Wells, to name but two – or its disastrous opposite, that the race or individual races were just as capable of being degraded, of collapsing through moral and physical decay. This theory had been immensely popularised by Max Nordau in his gloomy bestseller Degeneration (1896) whose tone is given by this extract:

‘We stand now in the midst of a severe mental epidemic; of a sort of black death of degeneration and hysteria…’

and received garish expression in Bram Stoker’s Gothic fantasy about an invasion of blood-drinking anti-humans from Eastern Europe who corrupted and depraved pure, white virginal damsels – Dracula (1897).

In these troubled times the Holmes stories bring tremendous reassurance, that justice can be brought to the seething underworld of crime and order to the confusion of international affairs by the steely logic of one patriotic, fair-minded, aristocratic superman.

Holmes and the Boer War

The Boer War (1899 to 1902) had given all thinking Britons a profound shock. It was the first time in decades that the British Army had fought white men and, instead of the easy victories we’d come to expect of ‘our boys’ over fuzzy wuzzies and tribesmen, it turned out that British soldiers and British generals were simply no match for the fit, motivated and highly skilled Boers, or of the colonial troops from Australia, New Zealand or Canada who came to our aid. Eventually we won the war, but only after being internationally humiliated.

Interestingly, Conan Doyle and Kipling both responded to the South African debâcle by setting up gun clubs in their neighbourhoods with a view to training the local yeoman up to the standards of the Boers. And in their writings there is an increased emphasis on the importance of good breeding and the danger of its opposite, moral decay.

Thus Kipling’s poem, The Islanders (1902) warns the English that they have become lazy and decadent and will lose their Empire unless they buck up their ideas. Thus Conan Doyle wrote not one but two books, justifying Britain’s conduct of the Boer War (for which patriotic propaganda he was knighted in 1902).

And thus, in a much more implicit way, the Holmes stories after The Hiatus show a keener interest in the subjects of Englishness, of lineage, of noble families either maintaining themselves or degenerating.

The Hound of the Baskervilles a novel about Degeneration

The whole plot of The Hound is a civil war among the Baskerville clan: the upright Sir Henry, nephew of the noble Sir Charles and toughened up by a life in the Anglo-Saxon colonies, is threatened by the grandson of the Sir Charles’s degenerate younger brother Rodger, of part-Spanish (i.e. non Anglo) parentage, now masquerading as the lepidopterist Stapleton, a black-hearted villain who has inherited the degenerate blood of the lecherous libertine Hugo Baskerville. Good blood versus bad blood. Nobility versus degeneracy. And a man toughened and matured by life in the Anglo-Saxon colonies versus a creeping, hypocritical villain brought up in corrupt Latin America.

And so it is that, in the story of his return, we find Holmes speculating on the importance of family and breeding:

There are some trees, Watson, which grow to a certain height, and then suddenly develop some unsightly eccentricity. You will see it often in humans. I have a theory that the individual represents in his development the whole procession of his ancestors, and that such a sudden turn to good or evil stands for some strong influence which came into the line of his pedigree. The person becomes, as it were, the epitome of the history of his own family. (The Adventure of The Empty House)

This post-Boer War anxiety leaks out various ways, including its opposite, the over-enthusiastic patriotism or jingoism which characterised the period and can be defined as ‘excessive bias in judging one’s own country as superior to others’:

‘It is my duty to warn you that it will be used against you,’ cried the inspector, with the magnificent fair play of the British criminal law.

Stereotypes

To some extent these anxieties are the continuation of Victorian stereotypes, but with a new, pseudo-scientific edge. After all, stereotypes of all kinds are the staple of both detective fiction and Victorian melodrama. The Holmes texts are extremely simple-minded in this respect. Can you work out which of the following is a wicked baddy and which is a sterling English goody?

He was blinking in the bright light of the corridor, and peering at us and at the smouldering fire. It was an odious face – crafty, vicious, malignant, with shifty, light-gray eyes and white lashes.
(The Adventure of the Norwood Builder)

He was a fine creature, this man of the old English soil — simple, straight, and gentle, with his great, earnest blue eyes and broad, comely face. His love for his wife and his trust in her shone in his features.
(The Adventure of the Dancing Men)

Or take honest true Captain Croker in The Adventure of the Abbey Grange.

There was a sound upon the stairs, and our door was opened to admit as fine a specimen of manhood as ever passed through it. He was a very tall young man, golden-moustached, blue-eyed, with a skin which had been burned by tropical suns, and a springy step, which showed that the huge frame was as active as it was strong.

Tall, blue eyes, strong and fit from exercise, preferably in the colonies; that is the ideal hero.

Goodies and baddies

There is something reassuring and consoling about Holmes’s knowledge, about his certainty – the world of crime isn’t opaque and murky but clear and obvious to him and, via these stereotypes, it is made childishly simple for us. Tall with blue eyes, good; short or dark-haired, bad.

Superlatives

At the same time, there is something childish, something of the playground, in his confident superlatives; all the people Holmes has to deal with are the best or the worst: Abe Slaney is, apparently, ‘the most dangerous crook in Chicago’. Jack Woodley is the greatest brute and bully in South Africa – a man whose name is a holy terror from Kimberley to Johannesburg. (The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist). Charles Augustus Milverton is ‘the worst man in London… the king of all the blackmailers.’ ‘Lord Mount-James is one of the richest men in England.’ Sir Eustace Brackenstall is the richest man in Kent. Lady Hilda Trelawney Hope is ‘the most lovely woman in London’. The wickedest man, the noblest woman, the Napoleon of crime etc. A comic strip view of the world.

The abhuman, or humans becoming animals

The Wikipedia article on Degeneration introduced me to the term abhuman:

‘a “Gothic body” or something that is only vestigially human and possibly in the process of becoming something monstrous, such as a vampire or werewolf’

If not quite Gothic monsters, it seems to me that these post Boer War stories are nonetheless haunted by the notion of people, criminals specifically, turning into animals, of the degraded subhuman emerging from the human:

Have you not tethered a young kid under a tree, lain above it with your rifle, and waited for the bait to bring up your tiger? This empty house is my tree, and you are my tiger.
(The Adventure of the Empty House)

It was a long and melancholy vigil, and yet brought with it something of the thrill which the hunter feels when he lies beside the water-pool, and waits for the coming of the thirsty beast of prey. What savage creature was it which might steal upon us out of the darkness? Was it a fierce tiger of crime, which could only be taken fighting hard with flashing fang and claw, or would it prove to be some skulking jackal, dangerous only to the weak and unguarded?
(The Adventure of Black Peter)

Do you feel a creeping, shrinking sensation, Watson, when you stand before the serpents in the Zoo, and see the slithery, gliding, venomous creatures, with their deadly eyes and wicked, flattened faces? Well, that’s how Milverton impresses me. I’ve had to do with fifty murderers in my career, but the worst of them never gave me the repulsion which I have for this fellow.
(The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton)

It was evidently taken by a snapshot from a small camera. It represented an alert, sharp-featured simian man, with thick eyebrows and a very peculiar projection of the lower part of the face, like the muzzle of a baboon.
(The Adventure of the Six Napoleons)

Cornucopiousness

As usual, the stories are littered with references to other stories which Watson hasn’t had time to write up, thus continually expanding the Holmes universe and reinforcing the Holmes myth.

The references in this volume include the case of the Ferrers Documents, and the Abergavenny murder (The Adventure of the Priory School). the sudden death of Cardinal Tosca, the case of the canary-trainer, the tragedy of Woodman’s Lee (The Adventure of Black Peter), the Conk-Singleton forgery case (The Adventure of the Six Napoleons), the repulsive story of the red leech and the terrible death of Crosby, the banker, the Addleton tragedy and the singular contents of the ancient British barrow, the famous Smith-Mortimer succession case and the tracking and arrest of Huret, the Boulevard assassin (The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez).

The stories

The Adventure of the Empty House (The return of Holmes)

The Honourable Ronald Adair has returned from Australia, where his father is governor of a province, with his mother. He is found shot dead in a sealed room. Holmes proves it was done with a rifle by Colonel Moran who served in India but had gone bad, over a gambling debt.

The Adventure of the Norwood Builder

John Hector McFarlane is framed by the wicked Jonas Oldacre who hated his mother ever since she rejected him for a better man, and therefore faked his own murder in order to frame JHM. Norwood, south London.

The Adventure of the Dancing Men

Hilton Cubitt, fine upstanding Norfolk squire marries an American lady and then mysterious letters and notes start appearing, scaring her. Obviously this a Return of the Repressed type story, sure enough American crook Abe Slaney believes she’s promised to him and there’s a shoot-out in which the upstanding English squire is killed.

The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist

Violet Smith goes to be housekeeper to a Mr Carruthers near Farnham. Every Saturday she is followed on her way to the train by a solitary cyclist. On the day H&W go down, her trap is empty because she has been kidnapped and forcibly married by wicked Jack Woodley, because she has just become heir to Ralph Smith, who made his fortune in South African gold.

The Adventure of the Priory School

Thorneycroft Huxtable, The Duke of Holdernesse, has allowed his wicked natural son, James, to arrange kidnap his son by the Duchess, Lord Saltire, but hadn’t reckoned on the rascally kidnapper killing the schoolmaster who followed the young heir.

The Adventure of Black Peter

A drunk old sailor and tyrant to his family is found transfixed by a harpoon in his garden shed/workroom in Forest Row, Sussex. Holmes and Watson watch a young man break into the shed and keen young Hoplins arrest him but he claims innocence that his father fled a failing bank with securities on a boat to Norway. He suspects Black Peter’s ship picked him up, murdered him and was selling the securities. Holmes advertises for a harpooner and of the applicants correctly identifies the killer who claims it was self defence.

The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton

Client: Lady Eva Blackwell. The worst man in London collects information to blackmail highborn men and women. Holmes and Watson break into his house with a view to retrieving the letters which incriminate their client and, hidden, watch another high-born women assassinate CAM.

The Adventure of the Six Napoleons

Inspector Lestrade arrives at Holmes’s rooms with a case of plaster casts of Napoleon which have been burgled and shattered. On the latest one an Italian is found with his throat cut. Holmes pieces together that Beppo, a savage simian criminal member of the Mafia, stole ‘the famous black pearl of the Borgias’ and, on the run from the cops, stopped by the plaster casting workshop where he worked and quickly embedded the pearl into one of the many casts of Napoleon the factory was producing. Released from prison a year later, he’s systematically tracking down all the casts to recover the pearl.

The Adventure of the Three Students

Hilton Soames, tutor at one of our ancient universities, steps out of his room for a moment while proofing tomorrow’s Greek exam texts, when he returns they’ve been removed along with odd signs. Holmes deduces which of the possible undergraduates did it, and how he was protected by Soames scout who was previously the student’s father’s servant. The whole thing a hymn to Edwardian probity as the undergraduate offers a fulsome apology and goes to take up a job in the Rhodesian police. Empire as refuge, opportunity for a second chance, to redeem oneself.

The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez

Inspector Stanley Hopkins arrives with news of the murder of Mr. Willoughby Smith, secretary to Professor Coram of Yoxley Old Place, Kent. Turns out the old professor is a former Nihilist from Tsarist Russia who turned in his comrades and fled to England. His former wife, Anna, followed him here to secure papers which proved her lover was innocent and release him from the salt mines but poor Willoughby intervened and was accidentally stabbed. She kills herself.

The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter

This refers to student Godfrey Staunton who abandons the Cambridge rugby team on the eve of the match against Oxford, last seen running off with a bearded man. Trail leads to Cambridge and one Dr Armstrong who is all obstruction until Holmes tracks Staunton to a cottage where he had been called to the bedside of his beautiful but poor-born wife, married and treated in secret because it was against the wishes of his super-rich uncle Lord Mount-James.

The Adventure of the Abbey Grange

Inspector Hopkins calls H&W down to Chiselhurst to Abbey Grange where the horrible drunkard Sir Eustace Brackenstall is dead. His wife was tied up by a local gang of burglars who killed EB and made off with the silver. Except they didn’t Holmes deduces that the entire story was cooked up by honest bluff Captain Croker who loves Mary, Lady Brackenstall, and was in a midnight assignation when Lord B came raving in and they had a fair fight. Holmes tests Croker’s loyalty, then releases him. True to my Empire theme, Mary is Australian, and Capt C a man who has seen service in sun-baked climes.

The Adventure of the Second Stain

The Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs, no less, require Holmes to find a letter written by an angry foreign leader whose publication could lead to war. It emerges the PM’s wife was being blackmailed and forced to hand over the Diplomatic Letter in exchange for a youthful love letter. Holmes helps her replace it. England is saved! At the end of which, Watson declares Holmes has now retired to the Sussex Downs to keep bees!

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by Simon on January 4, 2014 • Permalink

Posted in Books, Short stories

Posted by Simon on January 4, 2014

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2014/01/04/the-return-of-sherlock-holmes-arthur-conan-doyle/

The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle (1902)

‘Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!’

Fed up with the difficulty of constructing the crossword-puzzle-like short stories, and keen to concentrate his energies on the historical yarns which he much preferred writing, Conan Doyle had killed off Sherlock Holmes in the short story The Final Problem, published in the Strand magazine in December 1893 (one hundred and twenty years ago to the month).

But his other novels and stories (and plays) didn’t do nearly so well financially, the clamour from fans and publishers alike grew louder and, on board ship back from the Boer War where he had worked as a volunteer doctor at Bloemfontein, he struck up a friendship with one Fletcher Robinson who knew a story about a legendary monster hound – and so the seed of his most popular story was sown.

The Hound of the Baskervilles was serialised in the Strand from August 1901 to April 1902 before being published in book form later the same year.

Multitextuality

As usual the text is itself made out of a tissue of other subsidiary texts which are, in effect, pasted together to make up the master text. Thus in the first few pages Watson looks up details of Dr Mortimer in a medical register, Dr Mortimer presents H&D with a manuscript from the 1730s which tells the legend of the Baskervilles, before reading out the newspaper report of the death of Sir Charles Baskerville, there is the mysterious letter made from words cut & pasted from the Times newspaper, a number of telegrams and, of course, most of the events down in Devon are described in the letters the faithful Watson posts to Holmes, before he uses diary form, and before he reverts to traditional 3rd-party narrative.

So the texts themselves enact the problem or challenge of assembling disparate evidence into an orderly narrative.

Cornucopiusness

I’ve made up this word to describe the way every Holmes text mentions a sizable number of other Holmes cases/texts, thus creating the impression of a potentially endless universe of stories. Thus increasing the plausibility of the fictional context or universe in which the fictional character can operate. Hence the many people who write letters to 221b believing Holmes is an actual person. Thus the crossover fictions which involve him with Jack the Ripper or the Great War. Bigging up Holmes’s reputation.

One wonders whether Conan Doyle, exasperated at having to revive his fictional puppet, wrote some of these ones tongue in cheek:

I was exceedingly preoccupied by that little affair of the Vatican cameos, and in my anxiety to oblige the Pope I lost touch with several interesting English cases. (Chapter 2)

In chapter five Holmes claims to have dealt with ‘five hundred cases of capital importance’, quite an inflation since the 70 or so Watson mentioned in the previous volume. In the epilogue a few other quick cases have been solved before Holmes has time to tie up all the loose ends: the card scandal of the Nonpareil Club and mystery of Mlle Carère.

Melodrama

As Holmes lays the situation before him the young Sir Henry Holmes, barely returned from the colonies to claim the cursed title and house, exclaims: ‘I seem to have walked right into the thick of a dime novel’. But making a character point out that he is appearing in a cheap melodrama doesn’t in any way prevent him from actually appearing in a cheap melodrama.

Not only the Gothic atmospherics laid on heavily in the gloomy and accursed ancestral home in the middle of the bleak and ominous Dartmoor, but the characters have a wonderful Edwardian cheesiness:

There he sat, with his tweed suit and his American accent, in the corner of a prosaic railway-carriage, and yet as I looked at his dark and expressive face I felt more than ever how true a descendant he was of that long line of high-blooded, fiery, and masterful men. There were pride, valour, and strength in his thick brows, his sensitive nostrils and his large hazel eyes. If on that forbidding moor a difficult and dangerous quest should lie before us, this was at least a comrade for whom one might venture to take a risk with the certainty that he would bravely share it. (Chapter 6)

Or the description of the fine specimen of Edwardian womanhood, Miss Stapleton:

She was darker than any brunette whom I have seen in England—slim, elegant, and tall. She had a proud, finely-cut face, so regular that it might have seemed impassive were it not for the sensitive mouth and the beautiful dark, eager eyes. With her perfect figure and elegant dress she was, indeed, a strange apparition upon a lonely moorland path. (Chapter 7)

And her subsequent realisation that her husband was a bounder:

‘Thank God! Thank God! Oh, this villain! See how he has treated me!’ She shot her arms out from her sleeves, and we saw with horror that they were all mottled with bruises. ‘But this is nothing—nothing! It is my mind and soul that he has tortured and defiled. I could endure it all, ill-usage, solitude, a life of deception, everything, as long as I could still cling to the hope that I had his love, but now I know that in this also I have been his dupe and his tool.’ She broke into passionate sobbing as she spoke. (Chapter 14)

Only the figure of Holmes the calculating machine lifts these fictions above the pulp melodrama which so many of their situations consist of. That and the soundness of Conan Doyle’s sentences. They are beautifully grammatical. Even when describing the most overwrought emotions Conan Doyle’s prose remains clear and sound. (Contrast him in this with Kipling’s horrible prose style, infected with archaisms and biblicalisms and tags of argot.) They are the textual equivalent of Mrs Hudson and the bachelor rooms, they are anchors of safety and security, a measure of the man’s bluff Edwardian hearty good cheer.

The horror

I was standing in front of him, when I saw his eyes fix themselves over my shoulder and stare past me with an expression of the most dreadful horror. (Chapter 2)

Something brown was rolling and tossing among the green sedges. Then a long, agonized, writhing neck shot upward and a dreadful cry echoed over the moor. It turned me cold with horror. (Chapter 7)

Barrymore sprang up from the window with a sharp hiss of his breath and stood, livid and trembling, before us. His dark eyes, glaring out of the white mask of his face, were full of horror and astonishment. (Chapter 9)

A terrible scream—a prolonged yell of horror and anguish—burst out of the silence of the moor. That frightful cry turned the blood to ice in my veins. (Chapter 12)

Holmes laid his hand upon him and held it up again with an exclamation of horror. (Chapter 12)

You only have to compare the liberal use of ‘horror’ in Conan Doyle’s penny-dreadful melodramas with Joseph Conrad’s famous use of it in Heart of Darkness, to realise how thin and superficial the Conan Doyle is. There is pretty much no psychology at all in them. Gentlemen have a hereditary nobility, ladies are dignified and beautiful, criminals are stunted and coarse, the baddy is a cunning fiend! We are barely dealing with people but ciphers in a game of Cluedo.

In the Holmes texts we can see Victorian melodrama, a strand in Dickens and a central concern of Wilkie Collins, giving birth to its offspring, the American dimestore novel which mutates into the pulp fiction of the 1920s and 30s, and in its country of birth gives rise to the Golden Age of Detectives between the wars, Lord Peter Wimsey, Hercules Poirot et al.

The British Empire

As in all the previous stories there is a strong colonial connection: the previous Baskerville, Sir Charles, had made his fortune in South African gold and the new tenant, Sir Henry, has to be recalled from adventures in the States and Canada where he had lived a manly outdoor life.

As in the previous two novels and many of the short stories there is a strong sense of the interconnectedness of, the easy travel to and from, the Anglo-Saxon colonies – America, Canada, Australia, South Africa – and that these are places where a man goes off to make his fortune, to forge a new personality, to return transformed. Kipling is the great embodiment of this moment, carrying his Indian heritage with him to the South Africa of the Boer War or the Vermont of Teddy Roosevelt, an ideology of supreme confidence in the White Man’s destiny to rule and triumph.

Though both Conan Doyle and Kipling are concerned at the rise of Germany or our unpreparedness to defend the Empire, neither of them begins to doubt that the ideology is itself fatally flawed, unlike the bitter fatalism of Conrad for whom the entire project is a savage farce.

No, after all the two-penny ‘horror’, Holmes and Watson are home again by the fireside in 221b Baker Street, as Holmes ties up the last outstanding loose ends of his latest and greatest triumph.

Holmes and the Boer War

See also my analysis of Holmes and the Boer War and review of The Boer War 1899 to 1902 by Thomas Pakenham. The war revealed the shocking malnutrition and stuntedness of English conscripts, crystallising late-Victorian anxiety about the degeneration of the race.

The Hound of the Baskervilles is, at bottom, a cautionary tale about degeneration within one family: in which the degenerate, dastardly, half-Spanish Stapleton/Baskerville who has inherited the degraded blood of the libertine Hugo, mistreats his lovely wife and tries to murder the fine, upstanding Sir Henry, not only the heir to the noble blood of the family, but steeled and hardened in the tough, manly world of the Anglo-Saxon colonies.

Pure blood versus impure blood. Nobility and pure breeding versus half-breed mongrel. Sincerity and honesty versus criminal concealment. Anglo-Saxon morals versus low, half-hispanic treachery!

Illustration for the Hound of the Baskervilles by Sidney Paget (Wikimedia Commons)

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by Simon on December 31, 2013 • Permalink

Posted in Books, Novel

Tagged 1902, Arthur Conan Doyle, Dr Watson, Holmes, novel, Sherlock Holmes, The Hound of the Baskervilles

Posted by Simon on December 31, 2013

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2013/12/31/the-hound-of-the-baskervilles-arthur-conan-doyle/

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Books & Boots

All posts tagged Dr Watson

The Code of the Woosters by P.G. Wodehouse (1938)

The Mixture as Before

Bertie struggles to find the right word

Bertie struggles with classic quotes

Jeeves’s literary quotes

Jeeves and clothes

The comic strategy of stating the obvious

Clash of registers

The village constable

Abbreviations

Trimmed

One letter

Formulaic phraseology

Inappropriate

Slang phrases

Aunt Dahlia’s insults

Jeeves’s wisdom

Sir Roderick Spode

Plot

Cast

The Junior Ganymede club

Menus

On aunts

Bertie on girls and women

Bertie and Sherlock and Hercule

Comic phrases

Animal similes

The Drones club

Addresses

Credit

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This lax post-war world

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Right Ho, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse (1934)

Comically dim references to classical literature

Bertie forgets his words

The ‘the’

Bertram in the third person

The Woosters

Slang

Abbreviations

One syllable

One letter

Binge

a) Party

b) More general event

The Drones club

Bertie’s memoirs

Echoes of Sherlock: cases, clients and methods

The plot

The white mess jacket

Jeeves advises Gussie Fink-Nottle

Fancy dress

Aunt Dahlia requests

Gussie leaves for Brinkley Court

Bertie is summoned to Brinkley Court

The dinner refusal

Aunt Dahlia suggests suicide

1. Bertie roasts Tuppy

2. The drunken prize-giving

3. The girls get engaged to the wrong men

Aunt Dahlia is delighted

At long last, Bertie asks Jeeves

The fire alarm stunt

The cast

The Freudian presence

Jeeves’s miraculous mode of transportation

Jeeves’s character

Choice phrases

Credit

Related links

Related reviews

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Peril at End House by Agatha Christie (1932)

Summary

Comedy

Self-referential bookishness