Word: wodehousian
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...Safekeeping, a witty, Wodehousian gavotte from the confines of an English boys' school to the streets of Harlem, with several beguiling stops between, Mcdonald records the travails of a small boy, heir to a dukedom, who is orphaned during the London blitz and sent off to the uncertain care of a sodden New York City tabloid reporter. Within weeks the boy becomes the target of a Mafia hit man, thereby allowing the author to mix sociology and satire, goofy narrative and authentic terror...
...named for actual pubs, most of them in the English countryside, and until Help the Poor Struggler they have involved a quirky trio: a stereotypically literary, sensitive bachelor detective from Scotland Yard, a fey, scholarly nobleman who has eccentrically given up his titles, and, usually, the nobleman's meddling, Wodehousian aunt. That arch setup proved charming in her early books but has worn a little thin, as Grimes seems to recognize...
...consult Webster's Dictionary rather than the Oxford. Victorian and Edwardian euphemisms such as "bally" and "ruddy" work their way into the tale of a British knight who once "allowed some hornswoggling highbinder to stick him with . . . dud Smelly River Ordinaries"*-and, of course, there are the usual Wodehousian references to or quotations from Shakespeare and Wordsworth, Walt Whitman, Lord Tennyson and Publishers Knopf, Holt, Doubleday, Simon & Schuster-all balled up together...
...march for a free Ireland." Dispatched to London on a secret mission to recover a canvas of the late Spanish painter, Afrodisio Lafuente y Chaos, that the Dublin press has loudly and incorrectly trumpeted as Ireland's own, Tommy promptly funks it and is rescued by a Wodehousian young Englishman named Felix Horniman. Chiefly because Tommy reminds him of a dyspeptic monkey he once befriended in India, Felix casually pinches the picture for him, and the two of them make off for Dublin. The rest of Novelist Tracy's book is a Waughtered-down Irish stew...
Cocktail Time ("A Novel about a Novel"), the latest of Wodehouse's 76 books, shares with its predecessors the Wodehousian characteristic of being strictly up to date in time and half a century behind in taste. Its characters display, as always, what Essayist John W. Aldridge calls ''the miraculous capacity of the human body to operate without the assistance of any mental powers whatever." Among the 15-odd starters...