Best 1917 Adventures (9)
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January 3, 2017
One in a series of 10 posts identifying Josh Glenn’s favorite 1917 adventure novels. Happy 100th anniversary!
P.G. Wodehouse’s comical crime adventure Piccadilly Jim.
Considered by many readers to be among Wodehouse’s three best novels, Piccadilly Jim concerns the efforts of reformed playboy Jim Crocker to win the affections of Ann, a young woman who loathes him… by pretending to be someone else, named Algernon; and then, at Anne’s request, by pretending to be Algernon impersonating Jim. Half the novel’s characters are impersonating someone else: Jim’s father, for example, pretends to be a butler; a detective pretends to be a parlor maid; and an international thief pretends to be an aristocrat. Meanwhile, Jim must rescue his loathsome, spoiled young cousin, Ogden, from kidnappers. And there’s a baseball theme, throw into the mix. This is the source, one suspects, for later screwball comedies from The Lady Eve to Hergé’s Land of Black Gold.
Fun fact: The story originally appeared in the US in the Saturday Evening Post between 16 September and 11 November 1916.
Let me know if I’ve missed any 1917 adventures that you particularly admire.