The Man with Two Left Feet
By P.G. Wodehouse
Reviewed by Boudewijn Rempt on February 23, 2003
A collection of Wodehouse juvenilia, this. Excellent juvenilia, written with love and fun. But also redolent of the trappings of a market that no longer exists: the humorous mainstream magazine story.
The Man with Two Left Feet contains the following stories:
- Bill the Bloodhound
- Extricating Young Gussie (a Wooster story, this, but without Jeeves)
- Wilton's Holiday
- The Mixer — I
- The Mixer — II
- Crowned Heads
- At Geisenheimer's
- The Making of Mac's
- One touch of Nature
- Black for Luck
- The Romance of an Ugly Policeman
- A Sea of Troubles
- The Man with Two Left Feet
(Summaries are provided at The Russian Wodehouse Society).
Those people who are mainly attracted to the verbal flippancy of the later Wodehouse won't think overmuch of this collection. But I'm rather fond of the human sketches in the last story 'The Man with Two Left Feet', or of the 'Romance of an Ugly Policeman'. These are leisurely paced stories, eminently suitable for reading on a warm summer evening. And the grin, chuckle or even the guffaw is never very far away, either.