Category: Mike and Psmith

  • Product-of-Your-Time Rhetoric – Is Awareness the Answer?

    Agatha Christie is my third mentor for this year, and she’s also the third British writer who published actively in the ’20s and ’30s. Woolf, Wodehouse, and Christie could, very conceivably, have hung out and had some beers together. They were all about the same age and wrote throughout both World Wars. What’s so interesting…

  • Curses! Foiled Again!: Another Note on Foils

    Another thing to think about when developing good foils is creating a goal that is compatible for both parties. This is harder than it looks. How do you create two characters with different backgrounds who want the same thing, but don’t want to beat each other up in order to attain the same thing? Jeeves…

  • Political Commentary Question in Literature

    We talked about satire and politics last week, but Wodehouse also makes little comments in his works, like the following from Mike and Psmith: “‘I am with you, Comrade Jackson. You won’t mind my calling you Comrade will you? I’ve just become a socialist. It’s a great scheme. You ought to be one. You work for the…