Review: Leave It to Psmith

Leave It to Psmith by P.G. Wodehouse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Wodehouse in prime form in 1923, using characters he'd originally written some years before; Mike and Psmith first appeared together in 1909, and the inhabitants of Blandings Castle in 1915.

It does suffer from his besetting sin at this period of making blatant use of coincidence to get his characters together. Not content with giving his projected romantic couple two separate and distinct connections (she is an old school friend of his old school friend's wife, and they are both, for different and unrelated reasons, going to end up at Blandings Castle), he has them meet twice in London by total coincidence; once because she's standing outside the Drones Club, to which he belongs, taking shelter from the rain, and, struck by her appearance, he steals an umbrella to give to her; the other, not long afterwards, because they happen to be at the same employment agency at the same time.

And then, not content with that, he gives them a third (indirect) encounter and a second way for him to get to Blandings. But that way involves a risky imposture, and quickly gets complicated, in what would come to be considered the classic Wodehouse style: continual farcical misunderstandings and cross-purposes, interrupted by near-disaster, sprinkled with bons mots, and resolved by daring cleverness, all in a country-house setting populated by memorably eccentric characters.

Sure, he refers to a pistol as both an automatic and a revolver (he doesn't seem to have known the difference, and makes that error in at least one other book). But setting aside this and the blatant coincidences, which do have a function in building and complicating the setup, this is excellent work, tightly plotted and consistently amusing. The romance arc is (for Wodehouse) sound, with the initially reluctant woman won over through a combination of likeability and cool-headed resourcefulness, and the character work is fully as good as his best. It makes the Gold tier of my Best of the Year for 2022.

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