Review: Hot Water

Hot Water by P.G. Wodehouse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Wodehouse is best known for his series books, but he wrote some wonderful standalones as well, and this is one.

It's very much in the formula, but it's a formula I enjoy, so that's fine. There's a man of action at the heart of it, a decent fellow who nevertheless doesn't scruple about a few falsehoods in a good cause. He's engaged to one of Wodehouse's attractive-but-managing young women, who is determined to develop his sensibilities, whether he wants her to or not. There's also a managing older woman whose husband, having lost his own money and being dependent on hers, is a cypher in the home, and resents it deeply, but doesn't see what he can do about it. His wife wants him to become American Ambassador to France, which is the last thing he wants, and is putting the screws on Senator Opal to make that happen. One of the screws she is putting on Opal is that he accidentally swapped two letters, and sent his refusal of her invitation to his bootlegger, and an order for alcohol to her. Given that he's a prominent Dry (a proponent of prohibition legislation) in public, this is powerful blackmail material, and the letter therefore becomes a McGuffin.

Of the twelve characters with a part to play in the plot, six of them are operating under some form of false identity at some point during the book, and the hero, Packy, ends up using three false identities, if you count pretending to be the Senator's daughter's fiancé. I don't think that's even a record for a Wodehouse hero, but it leads to wonderful complications for all concerned, as Packy tries to retrieve the letter for the Senator, definitely not because he's in love with the Senator's daughter, given that he's engaged to the managing beauty and the daughter is engaged to the wet Bloomsbury novelist. No, it's definitely not for that reason.

Meanwhile, there are four different crooks and an undercover detective operating in the French Riviera chateau where most of the action happens, drawn there by the managing older lady's jewellery (given to her by her husband during his prosperous years, before the stock market crash wiped him out). Also, there's a disreputable and dissolute, but basically harmless, young French aristocrat who's a friend of Packy's and the son of the owner of the chateau.

The farce is high, the prose, while not as crammed full of quotations as Wodehouse often is, sparkles along, the plot is intricate and beautifully handled, and overall it's a good time.

As is often the case with these Cornerstone Digital editions, this one shows clear signs of having been scanned using OCR and then given little or no proofreading, something which it badly needed. There are a great many missing quotation marks, some other missing punctuation (usually at the ends of sentences), and inserted hyphens where, in the print version, a word broke across two lines. There are even a few instances of what look like page numbers dropped into the middle of the text. It's distracting and unprofessional, and I recommend not buying these editions. (I got my copy from the library.)

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