My Man Jeeves

My Man Jeeves is a 1919 collection of eight short stories, and only four of them are actually Jeeves stories. The other four — Absent Treatment, Helping Freddie, Rallying Round Old George, and Doing Clarence a Bit of Good — feature a different Wodehouse man-about-town entirely, Reggie Pepper, who has no Jeeves standing behind him.

The Jeeves quarter is early Wodehouse but recognisably the formula that made him famous: somebody else's trouble lands in Bertie's lap — a friend's, or a houseguest an aunt's friend has left him with — Bertie takes it on, and Jeeves is the one who gets it solved. The Reggie Pepper stories run the same kind of trouble through a hero with no one that competent standing behind him — his own man Voules, in one of them, has to be bought off, and haggles the price up — which is the clearest way to see what Jeeves actually adds to the later books.

It's a good place to watch Wodehouse figure out which version of this joke works, less a Jeeves collection than the book's title advertises. Readers coming for Jeeves and Wooster get half a book of them; the other half is a different, lesser-known character doing similar comic work.