A Gentleman of Leisure

By P.G. Wodehouse

Book Overview

In this comic novel -- dedicated to Douglas Fairbanks, who starred in the stage version -- Jimmy Pitt, man-about-town and former newspaper hound, takes a bet that he cannot commit burglary. He finds breaking and entering easy enough, but then discovers that he has forced his way into the home of a tough New York policeman. Naturally, Captain McEachern has a beautiful daughter and problems of his own. The complications which ensue from their meeting, involving a rich cast of Wodehousean characters from both sides of the Atlantic, create one of his most amusing and light-hearted early novels. Book jacket.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0140124527
• ISBN13: 9780140124521
• Release Date: August 1991
• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 0.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 5.0" x 1.0" x 7.0"

Customer Reviews

Overlooked Early Wodehouse Gem.

Very interesting one this. While obviously not of the quality of his later work(i.e. from Leave It To Psmith onwards) this is a key early Wodehouse text. It almost reads like an early prototype for the aforementioned Psmith book, with it's country estate setting complete with valuable jewellery and potential thieves. Add in a very Threepwood-like peer with the backbone of a jellyfish having to contend with a formidable Uncle and Aunt and you have all the key ingredients for a classic Wodehouse.If you've read Leave It To Psmith then on no account miss this one, it's not the best of his early books(probably Pmith in the City) but it's the most prophetic.

Yet another great piece of comic writing

A Gentleman of Leisure is the first Wodehouse novel I have read which is not in the series which includes Jeeves. My initials misgivings were quickly overcome, however, when within the first chapters our main hero has not only made a bet that "any man of ordinary intelligence could break into a house," but is also attempting to win the bet. Sounds like a silly setup but the style with which Wodehouse leads the reader into it more than assured me I was going to enjoy the rest of the book.Wodehouse's characters almost never work, rarely know what is going on, and are incredibly prone to misunderstandings. In other words, P.G. would have been a great writer for such sit-coms as Friends or Three's Company (with the caveat that Wodehouse is too consistently funny for either of these shows).Wodehouse has a style of prose that makes everything he writes incredibly easy to read, even 90 years later as with A Gentleman of Leisure. His sense of comic dialogue is always right on and somehow the shear unlikeliness of every coincidental encounter goes unnoticed.As always the plot (Jimmy Pitt, our lovable hero, is trying to woo his true love, Molly McEachern) is simpler than the characters. Fortunately it is upon the characters, and not the plot, that this novel relies.