Hutchinson / Arrow will publish a new series of PG Wodehouse’s short stories later this year, each one a veritable bracer for the soul. Quoth the blurb elves:
In recognition that Wodehouse is “a tonic for the soul”, Hutchinson will be publishing a series of four pocket-sized paperback “pick-me-ups” – each containing three of the best Wodehouse short stories – for “those moments when you’re in need of a small dose of joy”. The new four books will be published in November 2017 as £4.99 paperbacks in Arrow.
The Pick-Me-Up series will be aimed at the literary gift market for both devoted Wodehouse fans and curious new readers. The titles in the set – The Amazing Hat Mystery, Mulliner’s Buck-U-Uppo, Goodbye to All Cats and The Smile that Wins – are among Wodehouse’s most absurd, featuring repeating characters Jeeves and Wooster, Ukridge, and Mr Mulliner, the Oldest Member at the Golf Club.
I’d always assumed that Beethoven became deaf as an older man but – apologies if this is common knowledge – Beethoven (1770-1827) began to go deaf relatively early in life, in 1801. To put that into perspective, he had just finished his second symphony when he first started to suffer from tinnitus – yet to come were the remaining symphonies, Piano Concertos Nos. 4 and 5, the Violin Concerto, Waldstein and Appassionata, the Hammerklavier, the Missa Solemnis, the late quartets, and much else. If you’re feeling a little prickly today about what you have or haven’t achieved with your life to date, I don’t recommend listening to the final movement of the Ninth Symphony (and its then radical use of a choral section) and reminding yourself that the man who composed it was stone deaf: Beethoven going deaf was a tragedy, of course, although given what he created even whilst entirely deaf, you couldn’t really say it held him back to any great degree – in the grand scheme of music, it’s not as tragic as, say, Schubert dying aged 31. But a certain kind of mind might wonder what God was so busy with around about this time (Schubert died in 1828, the year after Beethoven’s death) that He couldn’t intervene in mortal affairs. Which would lead a certain kind of mind to consider the following possibilities:
(a) There is no God;
(b) God, to paraphrase Leonard Cohen, doesn’t really care for music;
(c) God was heedless, careless or jealously vindictive;
(d) God was too busy saving starving orphans; and anyway, if Schubert was really all that, he’d have been smart enough not to contract typhoid fever / syphilis / the bubonic plague (and, viz. deafness, ditto for Beethoven).
Books-wise, I read PG Wodehouse’s JEEVES AND THE FEUDAL SPIRIT this week, about which there is very little to be said other than if you haven’t read PG Wodehouse yet, drop everything and rush to your nearest bookstore and buy every Wodehouse in sight. Actually, that’s a little previous – I’m a Johnny-come-lately to the Wodehouse world, and so far I’ve only been reading the Wooster novels. For all I know – although I’m inclined to doubt it – the rest of Woodhouse’s considerable output isn’t the most purely pleasurable writing you’re ever likely to read. But, as I say, I doubt it. For the time being, though, if you stick to the Wooster novels, you won’t go far wrong. Unless this - in which a butler admits a guest into the hapless-but-unflappable Bertie Wooster’s presence - is the kind of thing you don’t like:
Seppings flung wide the gates, there was a flash of blonde hair and a whiff of Chanel Number Five and a girl came sailing in, a girl whom I was able to classify at a single glance as a pipterino of the first water.
Meanwhile, if it’s a good movie you’re thirsting after, you’ll go parched a while yet in this most barren of summers. This week in the Irish Examiner I reviewed Gods of Egypt, The Conjuring 2 and Bang Gang, none of which could be remotely described as the celluloid equivalent of a pipterino of the first water. If you’re still interested, the reviews can be found here …
Yep, it’s rubber-hose time, folks: a rapid-fire Q&A for those shifty-looking usual suspects ...
What crime novel would you most like to have written? Jim Thompson’s THE KILLER INSIDE ME.
What fictional character would you most like to have been? Ooh … Jeeves. Bertie Wooster is priceless.
Who do you read for guilty pleasures? No guilt for me … whatever I read, I love, so I’d never feel guilty about doing something I love.
Most satisfying writing moment? When everything comes together. Because I don’t write chronologically, I have files of separate scenes waiting to be arranged. When I can put them together in way that surprises me and it works out well, it feels great.
The best Irish crime novel is …? Any of Declan Hughes’.
What Irish crime novel would make a great movie? Any of Declan Hughes’.
Worst / best thing about being a writer? Solitude / solitude.
The pitch for your next book is …? It’s Colorado, it’s below-zero, an FBI Agent hunts the killer of a colleague and starts to unravel her colleague’s life … and her own. Who are you reading right now? David Sedaris – WHEN YOU ARE ENGULFED IN FLAMES.
God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be? Write. It’s an addiction. And I couldn’t do rehab. Too much sharing, too many group hugs.
The three best words to describe your own writing are …? Fuelled by coffee.
Alex Barclay’s BLOOD RUNS COLD is published by HarperCollins.
