Since I was made redundant two and half years ago I have taken on a few honorary jobs. Hitherto I have not mentioned them but as the latest has been made public I want to keep you in the picture.
I am Website Editor of the PG Wodehouse Society and it is in small print on page four of the latest edition of Wooster Sauce. I hear you sucking your teeth and wondering how such a sought after post could have fallen into my lap. Was it because I took Norman and Elin Murphy to dinner at my club? Did my occasional contributions to Wooster Sauce swing it for me? Perhaps the slap-up lunch I treated the Chairman to before that all-important meeting at which I was anointed?
Actually it was a one-horse race that a spavined mule could have won. There were no other applicants. You still, no doubt, imagine dirty work at the crossroads. You may think that as I’m not IT savvy I delegate my duties to Robert, Head of IT at 56 MG. Certainly not. He is not a member of the Society and could not be entrusted with our shibboleths. All right, I will own up; a genial chap on the Isle of Wight does all the work, takes none of the credit and that’s the truth.
Last month in Classic Detective Stories I mentioned that Edmund Crispin in The Moving Toyshop rather unusually name-checked his publisher (Gollancz). Now I am re-reading PG Wodehouse so that I will know my onions from my shallots and have come across something completely out of character. One of PGW’s many endearing traits is his ability to make up names for everything and his favoured nom de plume for a publisher is Popgood & Groolley. However, in A Few Quick Ones, he has made Edmund Crispin look pretty foolish by name-checking these chaps, the last of which of course is his own publisher: Gollancz , Hamish Hamilton, Chapman and Hall, Heinemann, Hodder and Stoughton, Macmillan, Faber and Faber and Herbert Jenkins. The story in question is Scratch Man. A subsequent story, Jeeves Makes an Omelette, reveals that Bertie Wooster wears a string vest – “mesh-knit underwear”. Bet you didn’t know that.
Certainly didn’t know that Christopher, thanks for that!
Congratulations on your appointment which I had seen in Wooster Sauce. I am puzzled that I, with my technological bent, came to be passed over but there we are. Curious how Popgood & Groolley subsequently popped up as Norman Murphy’s publishers.