Round 41 - 4 April 2000

1. "In some way, I associate you with a side of beef. "Shorty Smith?" Stumpy Whiting?...No, I've got it, by Gad. Stinker.." The Hon. Galahad Threepwood recognizes his old schoolmate, George "Stinker" Pyke, now swanking about under the alias of Lord Tilbury, in Heavy Weather.

2. "Mugsy, we used to call him. He was younger than me by some three years, one of those tough, chunky, beetle-browed kids who scowl at their seniors and bully their juniors." Lord Ickenham with some not-so-fond memories of Sir Aylmer Bostock in Uncle Dynamite. It appears that the housemaid Elsie Bean was right in referring to the erstwhile Mugsy as an overbearing dishpot.

3. "God Bless my soul! Why, it's Pimples!" Lord Emsworth, with the ready tact for which he is famous, calls Sir Roderick Glossop by his unlovely school sobriquet.

4. "It is useless for you to pretend that you do not owe me that sum, Bimbo. You took it off me forty-three years ago as we were crossing the cricket field one lovely summer evening. 'Barmy,' you said, 'Would you like to lend me two bob?' And I said, 'No, but I suppose I'll have to,' and the monet changed hands." Lord Ickenham in Uncle Dynamite again, this time with Major Brabazon Plank, who is not a miner.

5. "At school, they called him Bungling..." Aubrey Upjohn, the Creakle of Bertie Wooster's formative years, in Jeeves in the Offing, aka How Right You Are Jeeves.

6. "Sorry, Pieface."..."Shouldn't have spoken as I did, Boko"... The Bish and The Vicar in "Mulliner's Buck-U-Uppo".

Round 42 - 17 April 2000

1. For The Girl on the Boat aka Three Men and a Maid, Anne-Marie proposes Wooers Come to Windles. She states, "I think the house, Windles, should be mentioned in the title." We agree, and give her points for it, but we confess that Wooers Come to Windles is too difficult to say, at least for this side of the Atlantic. We opt for Simha's L'amour L'Atlantic, although it does sound a bit like a low French farce about people hiding in closets. Perhaps the real problem here is that The Girl in the Boat isn't one of Plum's best, and doesn't lend itself to the imagination.

2. Full Moon: Two good entries here. We go for Anne-Marie's Vee's Day. It is a pun (we think) on "V-E Day" and we just like the image of Veronica Wedge having her own holiday. Simha's The Case of the Pig Headed Porker also scored with us.

3. The Mating Season. Two minds listing in the same direction. Simha suggests Aunts and Mastodons, while Anne-Marie opts for Aunt-Hill. Outstanding! Full marks for both.

4. Biffen's Millions aka Frozen Assets: Simha's Travails of a Trouser Seeker is a masterpiece. Anne-Marie's Dachshund and Boodle also good.

Round 43 - 26 April 2000

"It was just as I feared. He was in for another attack of poetry."

It is fitting that in our last quiz for April, we should pay tribute to the devil's muse. Here in America, April is National Poetry Month. For one month a year, it is actually legal to recite poetry in the lower forty-eight. (Alaska and Hawaii haven't been heard from.)

Many Wodehouse characters have fancied themselves filled with the divine fire. Identify the following snippets from various parabolas of joy, and their authors. As always, extra credit for context.

1. "Gaped like some dull-witted animal": from "Caliban at Sunset" by Percy Gorringe, who used Stilton Cheesewright as his model for the insensitive protagonist, in Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit. Bertie was relieved to discover later that Percy also wrote thrillers under the nom de bloodstain Rex West.

2. "I am a worm that wriggles in a swamp of Disillusionment": Lancelot Mulliner pens "Darkling: a Threnody" as a proposed advertisement for his uncle's Briggs Breakfast Pickles. They part ways in a dispute over limp leather (kinky!) in "Came the Dawn" (Meet Mr Mulliner).

3. "Imposing pile, reared up 'midst pleasant grounds, The scene of many a battle, lost or won": The opening lines to a poem submitted by four different St. Austinians for the Sixth Form Poetry Prize. A merry mix-up then ensues. (From "The Prize Poem" in Tales of St. Austin's.)

4. "The champion was a willing lad. He gave the public all he had. His was a genuine fighting soul. He'd lots of speed and much control.": Who else could this describe but Washington McCall, winner of the Pie-Eating Championship of the World (and spiritual first cousin to Hungry Smeed), in Chapter 22 of Indiscretions of Archie.

Round 44 - 7 May 2000

Wodehouse often referred to characters who effect the action, but never actually appear onstage. Below are three such characters to identify - bonus points for knowing which ones may have appeared elsewhere in the canon.

1. He sneaked Bertie Wooster's socks. This was Meadowes, the valet who, at the beginning of "Jeeves Takes Charge" has been very properly sacked for that sartorial crime, opening the door (most properly for a valet) for Jeeves to take over. Bonus points were awarded for knowing that Meadowes is also the name of Archibald Mulliner's man in both "The Reverent Wooing of Archibald" and "Archibald and the Masses". The same man? We shall never know, but Archibald's valet is an ardent Socialist, and we can speculate that working for Bertie is enough to send anyone into the arms of the revolution. Extra bonus points to Sarah Cutts and Ian Michaud for reminding us that Catsmeat Potter-Pirbright posed as a valet named "Meadowes" in The Mating Season.

2. A poor substitute for Angus McAllister in all matters pumpkin. This was Robert Barker, "that broken reed," in "The Custody of the Pumpkin". He took over when McAllister quit in high dudgeon (a town outside of Market Snodsbury), but was not up to the task.

3. This slushy authoress exercised a spell from beyond the grave, to the dismay of her nephew, a determined bachelor. Leila J Pinckney in "Honeysuckle Cottage". James Rodman, her nephew, nearly succumbed to the awful power of the cottage, but escaped in time. Incidentally, this tale was reprinted in the December 1958 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

Round 45 - 16 May 2000

1. ‘The whole situation resembled some great moment in a Greek tragedy, where somebody is stepping high, wide and handsome, quite unconscious that all the while Nemesis is at his heels.’

Constable Eustace Oates was being relentlessly pursued by Bartholomew (Stiffy Byng's temperamental Scottie).

The Code of the Woosters, ch. 4.

2. ‘(...) others will see in the thing that inevitability which was such a feature of the best Greek tragedy. Æschylus once said to Euripides "You can't beat inevitability," and Euripides said he had often thought so, too.’

The house was Ashenden Manor (in Hampshire). It belonged to Bill Oakshott, but was ruled with a dishpottic hand by his uncle, Sir Aylmer Bostock, who had dug himself into the woodwork.

Just to keep the record straight, let us list the six characters who had either succumbed to the lure of the whisky decanter or (in one case) just meant to do St Bernard dog duty. They were Pongo Twistleton, Elsie Bean, Bill Oakshott and Lord Ickenham (ch. 8), then Pongo again, Sir Aylmer Bostock and Lady Bostock (ch. 9). The more mathematically-minded among you may come up with a total of seven, but in that case there must be an error in your calculations. Don't let it worry you too much, though; after all, your Quizmistress's distinguished countryman Dr Cosinus, a famous mathematician, had some trouble with the total number of his own feet!

Uncle Dynamite, ch. 9, section 2.

3. ‘It is all very well to excite pity and terror, as Aristotle recommends, but there are limits. In the ancient Greek tragedies it was an ironclad rule that all the real rough stuff should take place off-stage, and I shall follow this admirable principle.’

The wretched victim was golfer J. Cuthbert Banks, who endured endless meetings of the Wood Hills Literary society – ‘on vers libre Poetry, the Seventeenth-Century Essayists, the Neo-Scandinavian Movement in Portuguese Literature, and other subjects of a similar nature’. Was even Adeline Smethurst worth such tortures? You may well ask!

"The Clicking of Cuthbert" (The Clicking of Cuthbert and Other Stories).

Round 46 - 24 May 2000

Classical mythology

1. ‘White and shining, he tripped along over the turf like a Theocritan shepherd hastening to keep an appointment with a nymph.’

This bucolic lover was none other than Freddie Threepwood hurrying across the Blandings water-meadows to meet nymph-like Aggie Donaldson and fold her in a warm embrace. He happened to be observed by his father through the latter's newly acquired telescope, with dramatic consequences.

‘The Custody of the Pumpkin’ (Blandings Castle and Elsewhere)

2. ‘"This won't do, you know!" he said austerely. "This sort o’ thing won't do, ’ere, you know!"

"Take your hands off me!" (...)

"’Ullo! ’Ullo! ’Ullo!" he said in a shocked voice, as of a god defied by a mortal. " ’Ullo! ’Ullo! ’Ul-lo!"’

The majestic policeman who towered over rebellious Percy (Lord Belpher) was not named, though further on – in the rhyming newspaper account of this deplorable incident – he was identified by his number, C. 231.

A Damsel in Distress, ch. 4

3. ‘(...) practically the only thing he had not done was to make a noise like an alarm clock, and he had been operating less than a minute and a half when X stirred on her pillow, sat up and finally, hearing the bang on the door, got up. With the air of an Amazon donning her armour before going into battle, she put on a dressing-gown (...).’

This formidable X was Mrs Adela Cork, the former Empress of Stormy Emotion who looked as sternly imperious as Louise de Querouaille (or Kéroualle). The nocturnal prowler who was unsuccessfully trying to emulate Chingachgook in the corridor outside her bedroom door was her brother-in-law, Smedley Cork; he looked ‘like a Roman emperor who had been doing himself too well on starchy foods and forgetting to watch his calories’, which – together with nervousness – may explain why he was not quite as silent as he hoped to be.

The Old Reliable, ch. 15. This book may not number among the best Wodehouse novels, but it does have its moments ...

Round 47 - 1 June 2000

1. ‘Through the gap there came a hand. In the hand was a silver salver. On the salver lay something squishy that writhed and wriggled.’

X was Simmons, Lady Wickham's butler, decorously returning Sidney to its owner, Roland Attwater.

‘Something Squishy’ (Mr Mulliner Speaking or The World of Mr Mulliner).

2. ‘"Did my ancestors say ‘Can't’ on the stricken fields of the Middle Ages, when told off to go and fight the Paynim? As a matter of fact," said Y confidentially, "I believe lots of them did, as you can verify by turning up Richard Cœur de Lion's dispatches, so perhaps it is a pity that I asked the question."’

Y was Lord Ickenham, gently rebuking Bill Oakshott. ‘Uncle Fred’ was planning to go on impersonating Major Plank in order to enter Ashenden Manor as an honoured guest.

Uncle Dynamite, ch. 6, section 3.

3. ‘He looked like a man who has been poring over a clue in a crossword puzzle, at a loss to divine what "large Australian bird" can possibly be, and in an unexpected flash has had it come to him. Just as such a man will quiver in every limb and cry "Emu!", just as Archimedes on a well-known occasion quivered in every limb and cried "Eureka!" – so now did Z quiver in every limb and cry "Coo!" ’

Z was the inimitable Albert Peasemarch, suddenly realising that the fateful writing on the wall was due to Lotus Blossom's larkiness, not love. He was speaking to poor Monty Bodkin, of course.

The Luck of the Bodkins, ch. 9.

Round 48 - 10 June 2000

1. Bertie – trying to preserve ‘the old sang-froid’ – was speaking to Tuppy Glossop, who had just emerged with incandescent eyes from the bushes in which he had been lurking while Bertie was saying ‘frightful things about poor old Tuppy’ to the latter's darling Angela.

Right Ho, Jeeves, ch. 15.

2. Sir Buckstone Abbott was less than enthusiastic about inviting his wife's brother, Sam Bulpitt, to stay at Walsingford Hall as a non-paying guest, while his daughter Jane told him that he must.

Summer Moonshine, ch. 2.

3. Sidney McMurdo, paying a threatening call on John Gooch, the writer of gory thrillers, was accusing him of ‘stealing’ muscular Agnes Flack from him. ‘John Gooch stared at him, thoroughly bewildered. The idea of stealing Agnes Flack was rather like the notion of sneaking off with the Albert Hall.’

‘Those in Peril on the Tee’ (from Mr Mulliner Speaking or The World of Mr Mulliner).

Round 49 - 20 June 2000

1. As everyone correctly deduced, this was Psmith, wearing a shrub rather than a flower at the request of the botanically-challenged Freddie Threepwood. Leave it to Psmith, Chapter 6.

2. This was Lord Marshmorton in Chapter 1 of A Damsel in Distress. He confused many by his resemblance to Lord Emsworth. They are very similar, but Lord Marshmorton marries a chorus girl at the end. I suspect all Lord Emsworth's sisters would have expired in the face of such a contretemps.

3. McAllister, Lord Emsworth's head gardener was the man of wrath in this question. It occurs in "Lord Emsworth and The Girlfriend", in Blandings Castle. Lord Emsworth was inspired to courage by a Fresh Air London girl called Gladys.

Round 50 - 28 June 2000

1. The frightening Honoria Glossop in "The Rummy Affair of Old Biffy", from Carry On Jeeves. This scourge seems to have been engaged to hordes, including Bertie himself.

2. Beulah Brinkmeyer was the sister to a Hollywood producer, and was in charge of Joey Cooley, the child star. Joey and Lord Havershot most unfortunately changed places in the Fourth Dimension and exchanged bodies. Laughing Gas, chapter 6.

3. Question 3's answer was only known as the Good Sport. In Uneasy Money Lord Dawlish was initially appalled, but later mellowed. "Was it, he asked himself, altogether her fault that she was so massive and spoke as if she were addressing an open air meeting in a strong gale? Perhaps it was hereditary. Perhaps her father had been a circus giant and her mother the strong woman of the troupe."