P.G. Wodehouse and Crime Fiction
The Influence of Mysteries and Thrillers on the Comic Novelist
P.G. Wodehouse’s work is not exactly full of serious crime. There is the occasional bit of jewel theft, and members of the Drones Club are always at risk of being arrested for stealing policemen’s helmets on Boat Race Night, but it would be difficult to describe any of Wodehouse’s novels as a “thriller”.
What they lack in crime, however, they make up for in crime novels. Whenever Bertie Wooster isn’t out for an evening on the town, he is usually reading what he calls “an improving book”, with a title such as The Man with the Missing Toe or By Order of the Czar. Unlike romance novels, which generally attract Wodehouse’s contempt, reading a crime novel is a sign of a character good judgement and taste. Mr. Mulliner speaks feelingly of the great grief which the poets has unaccountably failed to explore: “that of the man half-way through a detective novel who finds himself at bedtime without the book.”
Writing detective novels is an even surer sign of a good chap. James Rodman, the hero of the short story Honeysuckle Cottage is a young novelist who produces five hundred words of “wholesome bloodstained fiction” every day, and even scorns the use of romantic heroines, believing that “an artist with a true reverence for his craft should not descend to gooey love stories, but should stick austerely to revolvers, cries in the night, missing papers, mysterious Chinamen, and dead bodies – with or without gash in throat.” The story, a hilarious twist on the “haunted house” tale, tells how Rodman moves into the cottage of a late aunt who was a hugely successful romantic novelist, and finds his life and work being disturbed by the malign influence of sentimental fiction.
Though he didn’t produce a bona fide thriller amongst his novels, Wodehouse did borrow the conventions of the genre several times. His most sustained parody was The Crimewave at Blandings, in which the inhabitants of the stately home take pot shots at each other with an air gun, resulting in a mess of blackmail and coverups.
The story produces brilliant collisions between the elegant setting, Wodehouse’s brilliantly meandering and amiable prose, and the supposed requirements of a “thriller”, such as: “The wave of crime, then, which was to rock one of Shrophire’s stateliest homes to its foundations began towards the middle of a fine summer afternoon, and the persons involved in it were disposed as follows:” He even philosophises on the subject: “The thing that poisons life for gunmen and sometimes makes them wonder whether it is worth while going on is the tendency of the outside public to butt in at inconvenient moments.”
With P.G. Wodehouse’s fascination for crime fiction, and the example of The Crimewave at Blandings to show how he handled the form in a short story, it is difficult not to wish that he had tried his hand, if only once, at a full-length comic detective novel...
