Women, Wine and Song! from The Globe By The Way Book

 

Women, Wine and Song! is a playful, madcap pastiche of Victorian melodrama and the cliff-hanging adventure serials of P. G. Wodehouse’s youth. Add to that the sparkling wordplay and crisp, inane dialogue for which Wodehouse was to become world-famous and we have one of his funniest early works. In this effort, he has great fun as he parodies the contrived theatricality of the mystery-drama and rubs elbows with a few personalities of the day. Wodehouse never wrote anything quite like it again.

Thanks to John Dawson for providing the transcription and annotations. We are further indebted to Tony Ring for securing the “no objection” from the Estate. Ian Michaud did yeoman work in proofreading the text. Norman Murphy did his bit in helping John with some of the annotations. Neil Midkiff reformatted the annotations and added a few, did a second round of proofreading, and supplied improved scans of the illustrations. Lastly, we would like to express our gratitude to the Wodehouse Estate in graciously allowing us to publish this extract from The Globe By The Way Book.

 

1. Brooklands by Night

2. Those in Peril on the Deep

3. In the Temple of Mammon

4. A Villain’s Wooing

5. Limelight and Love

6. The Blue Ribbon of the Turf. Derby Day!

7. The Vault at Midnight

8. Europe’s Plague Depot

9. The Rigour of the Game

10. A Way they have in the Army

11. The Stroke of Fate

12. The Voice of Marjorie

 

John Dawson’s Notes