This is the first of the Jeeves book and contains eight short stories, three of which are more or less about Bertie Wooster, in the early persona of Reggie Pepper. These earlier stories are good in their own right, and especially kind of dark and villainous in hilarious ways, but they lack two essential qualities of the rest of the series — Wooster’s affable ineptitude and Jeeves’s understated brilliance.
The other stories include my first introduction to the characters, and also apparently the only story I can recall every reading outside of seeing the tv series with Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry — “Jeeves and the Hard-Boiled Egg”.
What strikes me immediately about these stories is that while they’re collected, there’s a constantly sense of reference and allusion toward previous stories and other lives, almost. So when you pick up any one of these stories there’s a satisfactory introduction to the world they inhabit, without it feeling too repetitive, but there’s also a comfortable assumption that you’ve been here before. What this feels like in the moment, is a friend telling you yet another hilarious story about his life, and that you already know most of the working parts already.
This allows you to dip in and out of the stories, to have the stories work as episodes (not unlike the structure of a lot of Sherlock Holmes tales), and for the mood to feel light. I bet there’s a good book or two to write about how story series like this one predate tv and radio series episodic storytelling. I am not the one to do that, but it would be a lot of fun to trace those paths.
(Photo: https://www.amazon.com/My-Man-Jeeves-Collectors-Wodehouse/dp/1585678759/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1551192629&sr=8-1&keywords=my+man+jeeves)