In 1905 P G Wodehouse wrote six stories, set in Wrykyn College and called Tales of Wrykyn. Two years before he had published a book with twelve stories and four essays called Tales of St Austin's, and no doubt meant to produce an equivalent Wrykyn book. Here it is at last. It contains 25 new Wodehouse short stories: the six basic Tales of Wrykyn with their original illustrations; six more Wrykyn stories; and thirteen stories set in other schools. Among the "Elsewhere" stories is Stone and the Weed, where a newfangled motor car gets a Sedleigh boy away so fast from the scene of his crime that he almost establishes an alibi; Personally Conducted, in which a teenage girl creditably maroons a Beckford housemaster at the top of a church tower; and The Adventure of Split Infinitive, at the farcically named St Astrisk's, a bitter mockery of the Sherlock Holmes stories. We despise ruthless Reginald even while we cannot help admiring his elegant revenges. However wrong the characters seem by any adult standards, even those of their own time, we are drawn into their world of warped values. They are unusual, even bizarre; certainly wry, they are in many ways also our kin.
Author
Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, KBE, was a comic writer who enjoyed enormous popular success during a career of more than seventy years and continues to be widely read over 40 years after his death. Despite the political and social upheavals that occurred during his life, much of which was spent in France and the United States, Wodehouse's main canvas remained that of prewar English upper-class society, reflecting his birth, education, and youthful writing career. An acknowledged master of English prose, Wodehouse has been admired both by contemporaries such as Hilaire Belloc, Evelyn Waugh and Rudyard Kipling and by more recent writers such as Douglas Adams, Salman Rushdie and Terry Pratchett. Sean O'Casey famously called him "English literature's performing flea", a description that Wodehouse used as the title of a collection of his letters to a friend, Bill Townend. Best known today for the Jeeves and Blandings Castle novels and short stories, Wodehouse was also a talented playwright and lyricist who was part author and writer of fifteen plays and of 250 lyrics for some thirty musical comedies. He worked with Cole Porter on the musical Anything Goes (1934) and frequently collaborated with Jerome Kern and Guy Bolton. He wrote the lyrics for the hit song Bill in Kern's Show Boat (1927), wrote the lyrics for the Gershwin/Romberg musical Rosalie (1928), and collaborated with Rudolf Friml on a musical version of The Three Musketeers (1928).
