A Gentleman of Leisure (1910)

Terrific! As always we are ready to start again at the beginning and listen all over again. No one beats PG Wodehouse for a fabulous turn of phrase. Just wonderful in all ways! ( )

Competent heroes for Wodehouse don't seem right, somehow. ( )

Enjoyable but not one of Wodehouse's best. Mark Nelson did a very good narration in this LibriVox edition. ( )

Part of a series of reprints; this story was originally published in 1910. In spite of the reviews I read after I bought the book (fortunately), I'm enjoying it.

Some thoughts while reading: Wodehouse assumes the reader is intelligent and that he doesn't need to explain everything. I am, however, a bit perplexed about why a smart young man, who briefly was a reporter, is unable to discover the name of the woman he saw from afar on a ship: weren't passenger lists with addresses available? And once he learns that her father is a policeman, couldn't he contact a newspaper colleague to see who was known to demand payments from thieves if they wanted to operate in New York. (While Bertie Wooster only suspected that judges got rich pocketing the fines they gave out, here we have a policeman who definitely becomes wealthy by collecting graft. Wodehouse doesn't seem to have any ethical problems with this, although the character does keep his activities secret from his daughter.)

Having finished the book, it turns out, that in spite of all the complications, everything works out very nicely. ( )

"The Intrusion of Jimmy" is in my opinion one of P. G. Wodehouse's weakest novels. Apart from a few flashes of brilliance here and there, I found this somewhat dull. ( )