The Luck Stone

This is a bit different from other early Wodehouse school stories: It's very much a public school story, set in a boarding school and with schoolboys as main characters. We have some of the usual tropes of the genre: sports, a fistfight, schoolboy antics... However, this one is unusual because it's also an adventure story. Wodehouse once wrote that "The worst of school life from the point of view of the writer is that nothing ever happens." Well, in this serial novel of his (it was originally serialized in a magazine for boys and only much later published in book form) things sure do happen. A lot of things, many of them suspenseful and dangerous.

During his holidays, a boy named Jimmy Stewart receives the visit of a soldier who served show more under Jimmy's father in India. The soldier wanted to see his former commanding officer, but the old man is away in Africa hunting. The soldier starts telling a wild tale of having been entrusted a precious stone he is supposed to give to Jimmy's father and having dangerous people after him, but then he is shot and he ends up entrusting the stone to Jimmy. The boy decides to take it with him to school to keep it safe until his father returns.

It's a light and fast to read story, and it works well both as a school story and as a pulp adventure. It's what nowadays we would call a YA adventure story. Fans of his humorous writing are often disappointed with these early stories because they are not really comedies, and the same happens with this one. There are a few funny scenes related to school life, but on the whole it's not a comedy. It's a ripping yarn, however, with the mandatory cliffhangers every two chapters to keep the readers on edge until the next instalment. show less

Ends rather abruptly, but a pretty good schoolboy story. Jimmy and Tommy are entrusted with a mysterious blue stone, they lose it of course, and spend the rest of the book trying to get it back.