Plum Pie: Summary & Reading Guide

Nine stories and the extra trimmings

Plum Pie comes late in Wodehouse’s lifetime but is no simple bowl of leftovers. Herbert Jenkins published the British volume on 22 September 1966; Simon and Schuster issued the American one on 1 December 1967. Both have the same nine short stories, with Jeeves, Blandings, Ukridge, Drones members and Mr Mulliner among the company. The British book also places extracts from Wodehouse’s Punch columns between the stories and closes with two poems and an essay. Those additions are absent from the American book. A collector comparing copies should therefore count more than the nine story titles.

“Jeeves and the Greasy Bird” offers the pleasure of revisiting Bertie and his indispensable ally in short form after the long run of novels. “Sticky Wicket at Blandings” leads to Lord Emsworth’s country, while “Ukridge Starts a Bank Account” opens the door to a quite different form of optimism. The title announces a mixed helping, and the shifts are part of its identity. It would be a mistake to file every piece as Jeeves because the best-known name appears first. Following the contents lets the reader move between comic voices without demanding that they share one cast or one chronological plot.

The Drones material gives another way into the volume. “Bingo Bans the Bomb” and “Stylish Stouts” belong to the social world of club talk and extravagant complications. “Life with Freddie” follows a familiar Drone beyond an ordinary club-room anecdote. Mr Mulliner’s family network gives “George and Alfred” another storytelling route. Its premise has an earlier life in the Reggie Pepper story “Rallying Round Old George,” but a rewritten Mulliner piece should not be treated as an unchanged reprint of Pepper’s story. I like these returns to old machinery because Wodehouse keeps finding another position for the comic weight to fall.

The publication order of individual stories is surprisingly uneven. Terry Mordue notes that only four of the nine had magazine appearances before the British book. Several appeared later, and some had no British magazine appearance. A bibliographical description saying that every story originally appeared in Playboy during 1965–67 is inaccurate: two did not appear there at all, and some cited issues followed the book. The 1966 book is thus an original collection, not merely a belated binding of nine already familiar magazine texts. That difference matters when a reader tries to trace first publication.

The British extras give the book a second rhythm. Extracts from “America Day by Day” and “Our Man in America” in Punch act as interludes, and the closing pieces are the poems “Time Like an Ever-rolling Stream” and “Printer’s Error” plus “A Note on Humour.” Calling these “three more short stories” would falsify the form. They bring Wodehouse’s journalistic and reflective voice beside his fictional worlds. The American nine-story selection is coherent on its own, but it does not reproduce that wider British reading experience. Look at the table of contents of the edition on offer if those interleaved passages are what you seek.

I would read the volume by changing worlds deliberately: a Jeeves visit, then Blandings, then the expansive confidence of Ukridge, with the Drones and Mulliner tales between. The book is a welcoming late sampler for someone who already has a favourite series and wants to discover another. The page records the original regional distinction without claiming that an ebook bearing the title necessarily includes the British poems or essay. A slim story list can conceal a very different object once the trimmings are counted.