humorous books

In the 1930s, two of the most successful and prolific novelists ever were at the height of their powers. Producing on average more than a book a year each, P.G. Wodehouse and Agatha Christie (and yes, her books can be funny) were among the first authors to gain a substantial following largely through writing books that fitted into a series centred around the same characters – Wodehouse with his Jeeves and Wooster and Blandings series, and Christie with her Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple books.

Both authors were English and both were born into the upper middle class of the 19^th century. And they knew each other. Writing at a rapid pace for their large established readership, Wodehouse and Christie followed their own formulas, which although different – Wodehouse with his upper-class young men and their romantic and financial difficulties, and Christie with her murder mysteries – had points of similarity.

Each writer contrived to produce an atmosphere of light and leisured English town and country life, without the complications of sex and violence (Christie’s murders are of a domestic setting and usually accomplished off-stage). The similarities between their techniques extended to the borrowing from different genres. As Christie incorporated humour and often a touch of romance into her stories, Wodehouse frequently incorporated crime and detection, and he too used romance as a plot line. Both assimilated some of the common prejudices and social views of the time.

P.G. Wodehouse had introduced his Blandings setting and characters in 1915 with the novel Something Fresh, and continued with them off and on during the 1920s. During the 1930s he published three titles, including Blandings Castle (1935) that featured the central setting of the stories. With the character of the absent-minded Lord Emsworth and a cast of changing support characters, the books and stories together form a collection of quintessentially English humour.

Besides the characters and the often absurd situations in which they find themselves, the humour of Wodehouse’s books lies in his use of language. Part of this involves his frequent engaging in wordplay, such as inserting abbreviations in the middle of a sentence, particularly in the Jeeves stories.

Wodehouse published the first full-length Jeeves and Wooster novel in 1934, with Thank You, Jeeves, and two more titles later in the decade. Readers were already familiar with the characters, the hapless man-about-town Bertie Wooster and his manservant Jeeves, through the short stories that Wodehouse had been publishing since 1915. Collected into three volumes, although he did rework some of them, the stories had been rereleased in The Inimitable Jeeves(1923), Carry On, Jeeves(1925) and Very Good, Jeeves (1930).

Also writing short stories as well as books, Agatha Christie was the top selling novelist of all time. She produced her first Miss Marple book in 1930, The Murder at the Vicarage, with the character already having appeared in the short story ‘The Tuesday Night Club’ in 1927. But the 1930s really belonged to the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, perhaps her best-known character, and the star of 33 of her novels and over fifty short stories from 1920 to 1975.

Christie published twelve Poirot novels during the 1930s, with such well-known titles as Murder on the Orient Express (1934) and Death on the Nile (1937), not that these are the most humorous of her books. In Cards on the Table (1936), on the other hand, Christie uses humour to move the plot line along, and includes the character of novelist Mrs Ariadne Oliver (possibly a caricature of the author herself), whose intuition frequently leads her to the wrong conclusion.

Other aspects of humour, and possibly part of the reason for the longevity and extent of Christie’s popularity, come through the characters’ conversations and wry take on the English habits and characteristics of the time. Poirot is often accompanied by his side-kick Hastings, who by means of a contrasting viewpoint is frequently the pivot that shows Poirot’s detective talents to their best advantage.

The Poirot stories, although they contain some regularly appearing characters such as Hastings and Detective Chief Inspector Japp, cannot be classified as a series of the ‘ongoing saga’ type, any more than Wodehouse’s books can. They are a collection of books designed around a popular character, and the pressure of public opinion was often taken into account by Christie. Despite becoming tired of her most successful invention, Christie continued to write with Poirot as a central character because the public liked him.

The 1930s were of course the interwar years, and despite the depression were seen by some as a high point for a popular culture that included books. Readers of Wodehouse are often also readers of Christie, possibly because they both depict a similar kind of place; social, privileged and safe (murders aside), and encapsulating a way of life that didn’t change, at least in the 1930s. So, escapist literature, or time well spent? It’s up to the reader to say which.

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Authors

P.G. Wodehouse, Agatha Christie

Titles

Something Fresh, Blandings Castle, The Inimitable Jeeves,Carry On, Jeeves,Very Good, Jeeves, Thank You, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse

The Murder at the Vicarage, Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nileand Cards on the Table  by Agatha Christie