Expecting Jeeves

“Good Lord, Jeeves! Is there anything you don't know?”“I could not say, sir.”That, in brief, is the essence of the relationship between aristocrat Bertie Wooster and his dryly superior valet, Jeeves. Originally published in The Strand magazine from 1918 to 1922 and later collected as The Inimitable Jeeves, these ten tales by comedic master P. G. Wodehouse abound in sparkling wit. “Scoring off Jeeves” recounts a lunch with Aunt Agatha («A pretty frightful ordeal … Practically the nearest thing to being disemboweled.”), who insists that Bertie propose to Honaria Glossop («simply nothing more nor less than a pot of poison”), necessitating Jeeves' rescue of the perennial bachelor («and according to my nearest and dearest, practically a half-witted bachelor at that”). Other stories include “The Delayed Exit of Claude and Eustace,” featuring Bertie's frolicsome cousins («as innocuous as a pair of sprightly young tarantulas”); “Aunt Agatha Takes the Count,” involving our hero's formidable relative and her intrusion upon his vacation in the south of France; and “Comrade Bingo,” in which Bertie's school chum masquerades as a Bolshevist and Jeeves comes very near to being rattled.