A Few Quick Ones: Summary & Reading Guide

A small book with several long histories

A Few Quick Ones was published first in America by Simon and Schuster on 13 April 1959 and then in Britain by Herbert Jenkins on 26 June. Its ten pieces are not all new creations from that spring. They move between the Oldest Member, Mr Mulliner, Jeeves and Bertie, the Drones and Ukridge. This makes the volume a late meeting place for worlds that Wodehouse had been building over decades. The joke of the title is that even a quick visit can lead a fan down a long trail of earlier magazine versions and revised premises.

The nine stories shared by the first American and British books occur in different orders. The tenth changes: the British selection has Ukridge’s “A Tithe for Charity,” while the American replaces it with “Unpleasantness at Kozy Kot,” a Drones-world recasting related to the earlier Jeeves tale “Fixing It for Freddie.” Even a shared item can bear a different printed title: the US book uses “Jeeves Makes an Omelet” and “Freddie, Oofy and the Beef Trust.” Those are not separate adventures hidden from British readers. I would check the first edition’s contents rather than assume a modern reprint follows either 1959 arrangement.

“Jeeves Makes an Omelette” is particularly delicious to a reader of the early books. The premise has a prior life in the Reggie Pepper story “Doing Clarence a Bit of Good,” which appeared in My Man Jeeves. The transformation into a Jeeves story is a revision, not evidence that Bertie and Jeeves were present in Pepper’s original account. “The Right Approach” has another framing difference: the book version gives it Mr Mulliner’s frame, while the American Playboy printing lacks that frame and changes names. Wodehouse could rehouse a joke in a different narrative voice, and a contents list alone cannot capture all of that work.

The two golf tales are “Scratch Man” and “Joy Bells for Walter”; the latter reworks the earlier golf story “Excelsior.” “The Word in Season” belongs instead to Bingo Little, and its earlier American magazine relation circulated under “Bingo Little’s Wild Night Out.” “Big Business” was not a Mulliner tale in its magazine form. “Joy Bells for Walter” rewrites an earlier “Joy Bells for Barmy.” This volume is full of evidence that Wodehouse was still altering the machinery of old material. I find that more interesting than asking whether a late book is entirely new: the humour lies in what each version makes newly possible.

A collector should notice that “Oofy, Freddie and the Beef Trust” had already appeared under an American title in the 1949 omnibus The Best of Wodehouse. An omnibus appearance is not the same event as an original single-author collection. “Scratch Man” had also been in the 1940 American Eggs, Beans and Crumpets and is further revised in the American A Few Quick Ones. Those details put a stop to the easy assumption that a 1959 book date means a 1959 first printing for every component. They also give a fan several reasons to compare texts if a favourite story sounds unexpectedly different.

I would begin with Jeeves, then try a Mulliner tale and a golf tale to hear the switches of voice. For a complete late collection, either regional volume supplies ten pieces, but they do not supply precisely the same ten. The UK book keeps Ukridge in the mixture; the US has another Drones-adjacent revision. The page’s two contents lists identify that difference without pretending to settle every textual variant. This is a cheerful compact sampler whose bibliography has all the complexity of a much longer novel.