Very good, Jeeves

"Very Good, Jeeves" by P. G. Wodehouse is a collection of comic short stories written in the early 20th century. It follows well-meaning but hapless aristocrat Bertie Wooster and his supremely capable valet Jeeves through a succession of country-house scrapes, romantic entanglements, and social imbroglios in the British upper class. Expect brisk farce, dazzling dialogue, and ingenious last-minute saves.

The opening of the collection drops Bertie into Aunt Agatha’s country estate, where he must impress a cabinet minister while secretly aiding his pal Bingo Little, who is tutoring Bertie’s unruly cousin. The boy maroons the minister on an island; Jeeves coolly rescues him (outwitting a savage swan) and diverts suspicion from the culprit by letting Bertie take the blame—also neatly scotching a scheme to make Bertie the minister’s secretary and spiriting him away down a waterpipe. Next, an anxious magazine editor pal is too cowed by his old headmaster to reject dreary submissions or propose to the poet he loves; Bertie’s flour-based prank misfires, but Jeeves orchestrates a staged “accident” that sparks an engagement and restores the editor’s backbone—after which Bertie blunders into his own booby trap. At the start of the Christmas tale, Bertie cancels Monte Carlo to spend the holidays at a friend’s house, plots revenge on a prankster cousin and courts the hostess’s red-headed daughter, only to botch a needle-to-hot-water-bottle wheeze and get caught in the act by Sir Roderick Glossop—who, awkwardly, has swapped rooms and been forewarned (by Jeeves) of Bertie’s nocturnal prowl. (This is an automatically generated summary.)