27. Meet Mr. Mulliner

By: P.G. Wodehouse
As a rule, summer beach homes are required to be well stocked with musty smelling hardback novels and thrillers from the 70s and 80s. These serve only to give purpose to what would be otherwise empty bookshelves. So, when we went to stay with my aunt at the beach this year, I decided to add a few to my summer reading agenda.

The first one, Meet Mr. Mulliner is a series of short stories strung together through their narrator, who is of course, the title character. Mulliner comes into the local bar and regales anyone who will listen with stories about various members of the Mulliner family. The stories each contain some variation of a man overcoming some obstacle in the wooing of a woman- either she is uninterested, he is uninterested, someone else is uninterested for them, or the circumstance is conspiring against them. Theres also a story of a bishop and a headmaster who get high on a miracle tonic and decide to paint a statue.

Although the plots manage to be both simple and contrived, they are actually quite enjoyable. The humor is of the dry British quirky sort. For example, when the bishop and the headmaster decide in their altered state to paint the campus statue, the bishop feels that it might be impolite to suggest that they paint the statue pink instead of blue seeing as its the headmaster's school and he doesn't want to be rude- even though pink would be funnier.