This was an audiobook collection of short stories and a novel. I'd already heard the novel, Right Ho, Jeeves, in a separate audiobook and liked it, so while I resented having to buy it again as a part of this collection (come on Chirp, think about what you're doing!), I was interested in the short stories. I now wish I had not been tempted because this was an unpleasant mess. The weird thing is that if I'd bought this first, I might never have made it to the novel because I was so put off by the stories preceding it.
Originally, I had listened to the novel with mixed feelings because on the one hand it featured the most appalling snobbery and privilege, but this was offset on the other by the absurdity and humor which softened those harsh edges. In this collection, there was no absurdity and little humor, so all that was left were the distasteful parts, and that didn't sit well with me.
Neither did it help that while Simon Jones, who read the novel I originally had heard, did a great job, BJ Harrison, who reads this collection, is nowhere near as good. Consequently, I was neither amused nor entertained. The stories included are as follows:
- Leave It To Jeeves (1916)
- Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest (1919)
- The Aunt and the Sluggard (1919)
- Death at the Excelsior (1976)
- Jeeves and the Hard-Boiled Egg (1919)
- Jeeves in the Springtime (1923)
- The Man Upstairs (1914)
- Jeeves and the Chump Cyril (1923)
- Jeeves Takes Charge (1925)
- Deep Waters (1914)
- The Man Who Disliked Cats (1914)
- Extricating Young Gussie (1917)
- Right Ho, Jeeves (1934)
Why they're in that particular order, I do not know. Clearly it's not chronological. The stories seem to have been randomly tossed in there, so there's no flow of anything. Several were not about Jeeves or Wooster. These included Death at the Excelsior which was a boring detective story, The Man Upstairs another boring story about a man and a woman living in apartments one above the other, Deep Waters about a man who fakes being unable to swim to make time with an attractive woman he sees swimming, and The Man Who Disliked Cats about some dude who seeks to have his girlfriend's cat kill her parrot so she'll get rid of the cat, which he dislikes. Those latter two had the potential to be truly funny, but they were not, neither of them.
I was seriosuly disappointed in this collection and do not commend it at all, unless you're getting it solely for the novel at the end, but I can't speak for that having not listened to it in this version.
