Random Notes on P.G. Wodehouse

I retired in late 2024 and the first thing I did after going through the Medicare wringer was to head down to the basement and start going through some of the hundreds of books I've carted around since the 1970s with the express purpose of reading in my retirement (which some part of me thought would never actually happen). Back in 1980, I read my first P.G. Wodehouse novel, Full Moon, and pretty much laughed out loud through the whole thing. I read a few more of his books over the years but realized when I went to the basement in December 2024 that I had about ten volumes of Wodehouse that I had never read (or didn't remember reading--more on that later), so I've been working my way through them ever since, and finding a few more at the public library.

Wodehouse was a British writer known best in popular culture for creating the characters of Bertie Wooster, a youngish upper-class fellow who doesn't have to work and therefore gets involved in all kinds of trouble, and his long-suffering valet Jeeves. There have been over a dozen novels or story collections featuring Jeeves and Wooster, not to mention movies, TV shows (with Hugh Laurie as Bertie and Stephen Fry as Jeeves, pictured below, and they are so perfect that I still always picture them when I read the stories), and later novels written in homage. But Wodehouse, in addition to co-authoring several hit plays, also had other characters he wrote about who basically existed in the Jeeves universe. Full Moon was one of several Blandings Castle books featuring Lord Emsworth and his beloved pet pig the Empress; other recurring characters include Uncle Fred and a man named Psmith, all with lots of money and time on their hands.

I started my Wodehouse deep dive with several Bertie & Jeeves books and was having a fine time until I hit my fifth book at which time I realized that perhaps binging these stories was not a good idea. I'm not a binge watcher of streaming TV though I have been known to soak myself in musicians and actors and authors when I discover them. But reading a bunch of Wodehouse books in a row made me realize that, even though his humor doesn't suffer, his narratives do. The plots are all both similar and inconsequential. Bertie gets into a romantic entanglement and Jeeves gets him out of it. Bertie gets in trouble with one of his aunts and Jeeves gets him out of it. Bertie is suspected of a crime and Jeeves gets him out of it. And so on. The novels usually wind up with several situations being dealt with at the same time, and though no one could accuse Wodehouse of writing realistic stories, some of the plot points get so outlandish that I gave up caring and read just for punch lines and witticisms. That's not necessarily bad, but I slowly felt like I was reading more and enjoying it less.

For me, the high water mark was The Mating Season, which featured several recurring characters (Catsmeat, Gussie Fink-Nottle, Aunt Agatha) and one, Esmond Haddock, described as a Greek god "combination of a poet and an all-in wrestler," who I hoped to meet again. But with the next book, I realized that I was just going through the motions, reading and chuckling but not really connecting with the characters or the stories. Not only were situations being repeated, but several laugh lines were as well, and I feared I was getting to the point where I would start disliking Wodehouse so I stopped for a while. 

After a few months I picked up Thank You, Jeeves and realized I should have waited a bit longer. This one has an unusual plot in that Jeeves, fed up with Bertie playing the ukulele (badly) at all hours, resigns. Of course, he still manages to help Bertie out of tight spots, and in the end, Bertie gives in and gives up the uke. But it all still felt kind of tired. I picked up another one and a third of the way in, discovered I had read it years ago—many of his books were published under alternate titles over time. Eventually I read a non-Jeeves books, a one-off called The Adventures of Sally, and was surprised (though I shouldn't have been) that it was largely a Bertie Wooster story (with a female lead) without a Jeeves. By the halfway point, I was trudging through it. I was worried that I had become permanently disillusioned with Wodehouse.

But somehow, after another few months, I found my way back to Wodehouse through a couple of Uncle Fred books (Uncle Fred in the Springtime and Cocktail Hour) and enjoyed them. There are few direct echoes of Bertie and Jeeves in these (though some jokes get repeated) so things were just different enough that I started paying attention to the story again. I read another one-off, The Old Reliable, set in Hollywood, with recognizable tropes and laugh lines, but again different enough to feel new. Interestingly, this feels like maybe the end of my Wodehouse period. There are many other volumes out there and I have read a couple of the recent pastiches, one of which, Jeeves and the King of Clubs by Ben Schott, was quite well done, recalling Wodehouse without being slavish about it. I'm thinking a couple of times a year may be enough. And there's always the Blandings TV show from 2013 with Timothy Spall and Jennifer Saunders (above) recreating Wodehouse characters almost as well as Laurie and Fry. 

The Problem with Charlie Chan

Back in the 1960s and 1970s, Charlie Chan would have needed no introduction to anyone with any pop culture knowledge. Chan was the creation of author Earl Derr Biggers, whose first claim to fame was a 1913 novel called Seven Keys to Baldpate. It was adapted for the stage, became a hit, and was filmed several times. But Biggers found more fame as the creator of Charlie Chan, a Chinese detective who worked for the Honolulu police department. Six novels were published before Biggers' untimely death in 1933 at the age of 49. (Pictured below is a reprint of the first novel, The House Without a Key.) The Chan property exploded in popularity on the silver screen, with some fifty films made between 1926 and 1949. In the beginning, they were high-level B-films in terms of budget and actors, but they were treated like A-films and made a great deal of money for Fox. Eventually the budgets dropped and the series was taken over by Monogram, a B-movie studio, but they still remained popular enough that one or two films a year were released. 

When I was a kid in the 60s and 70s, the Chan movies were run frequently on television, especially on weekend afternoons. Like the Sherlock Holmes movies that Basil Rathbone starred in over the same time period, I saw them as basically interchangeable, and they played more like episodes of a TV show. Most adhered to a formula which involved Chan traveling somewhere, on a vacation or a visit to a friend, and getting involved in a murder investigation (sometimes his friend was the murder victim). In most of the movies, one of Chan's adult sons accompanied him, offering assistance but usually being more of a hindrance than a help—the phrase "number one son," which is how Chan often referred to his son, was an oft-used pop culture saying. (Below is Victor Sen Yung as Jimmy Chan.)

Three actors played Chan: Warner Oland (until his death in 1938), Sidney Toler (until his death in 1947) and Roland Winters (in the last six films of the series). All three actors have their fans, though I think Oland was the most closely associated with the series—after his death, the budgets shrank and the movies started looking and feeling like cheapies, even though they were still very entertaining. Though there was a 50s TV series, there were no more movies (except for a lame and campy film in 1981), but their constant presentation on TV, including a Saturday morning kids' cartoon show in 1972, kept the character alive for a while.

In 2003, Fox restored their library of Chan movies, ran them on their cable channel, and released them in DVD boxed sets. They proved to still be popular, but by this time, the films had become controversial, accused of being racist, or at least steeped in racism. It wasn't so much the character of Chan that caused problems—he did speak in a somewhat halting English, parodied beautifully by Peter Sellers in Murder by Death, but he always outwitted not just the bad guys but the white good guys, often cops, who mocked him or underestimated his abilities. The real problem was that none of the three actors who played Chan were Asian. They all wore varying versions of "yellowface" makeup to make them look like the stereotype of a Chinese man. What is overlooked in current-day complaints about the films being racist is that in the 30s and 40s, there were no Asian stars in Hollywood. The Chan sons and other Chinese supporting characters were played by Asian actors, but there were no bankable Asian stars to play leads. To compound the problem, most of the later movies featured a stereotyped Black sidekick character who often conformed to degrading stereotypes. (Below is Oland as Chan with co-star Boris Karloff in Charlie Chan at the Opera.)

I can completely understand people today being offended by the portrayal of Chan in the classic era and choosing not to watch the films. But I have remained a fan over the years. All three of the Chan actors wore their stereotypes lightly and I don't find the intentions or the results of the portrayals to be racist. (The books are even less so.) Some Chan fans bemoan the fact that no one is making Chan movies these days. I think even if a Chinese actor played the part, there is a thick patina of stereotyping and potential offensiveness that could not be diluted, and the film would have to be comic or satiric. The Chan movies, to some degree, have been victims of cancel culture, as they are not run much anymore on TV—even TCM doesn't show them. However, they are available in various ways: DVDs, streaming services, YouTube. Every Charlie Chan film that was made (except for a handful of early ones that are lost) has been released for home video and they are still for sale. I stand in the middle when folks start yelling about this issue. Many members of a Charlie Chan fan group I belong to on Facebook (mostly older white people) bitch up a storm about the idea than anyone can find them offensive, unable to put themselves in the shoes of Asian (or progressive) viewers. On the other side are offended viewers who would be OK with the films being suppressed. I would argue that, in the main, they are not racist, even if the production structure behind them was. As for me, I own them all and watch them frequently, though I would never share them with people who didn't know what they were getting into. Below is my complete Chan movie collection.