‘The effect on her of a dark, keen-eyed man like Adrian Mulliner, who spoke well and easily of footprints, psychology and the underworld, must have been stupendous.’
‘The Smile That Wins’ (Mulliner Nights)
Great piece on Private Investigators in P.G. Wodehouse’s writing from The New Thrilling Detective blog.
By Rudyard Kennedy
“Consider the case of Henry Pifield Rice… I must explain Henry early, to avoid disappointment. If I simply said he was a detective, and let it go at that, I should be obtaining the reader’s interest under false pretences. He was really only a sort of detective, a species of sleuth. At Stafford’s International Investigation Bureau, in the Strand, where he was employed, they did not require him to solve mysteries which had baffled the police. He had never measured a footprint in his life, and what he did not know about bloodstains would have filled a library.”
— a typical Wodehouse sleuth, in “Bill the Bloodhound”
P.G. Wodehouse (1881-1975) wrote nearly 100 books, almost all of them comic novels. He’s best known, of course, for creating Jeeves, the ultimate valet (or as he would have it, the ultimate “gentleman’s gentleman”), as well as other memorable figures…
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Maybe I’m wrong, but it seems Claude “Mustard” Pott, the former bookmaker and amateur shakespearian actor turned detective, is missing form the list.
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Yes, good call George!
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