Welcome to the latest in our series of audio adventures, Tales for Our Time. This month's yarn was published 103 years ago, and is revived here because of its comic ingenuity and sheer delight: The Girl on the Boat, by P G Wodehouse.
Some listeners enjoy our tales as a mug of nightly audio Ovaltine twenty minutes before they lower their lamp. Others leave it a few episodes to see if it's worth their commitment and then jump in for a big binge-listen. Either way, in tonight's installment, Sam visits his father's office at the Inns of Court and discovers Mr Peters the clerk relieved to find him still alive. Sam is puzzled:
"Ocean liners aren't often wrecked nowadays."
"I was thinking more of the brawls on shore. America's a dangerous country. But perhaps you were not in touch with the underworld..?"
He took up the revolver, gave it a fond and almost paternal look, and replaced it on the desk.
"What on earth are you doing with that thing?" asked Sam.
Mr Peters lowered his voice.
"I'm going to America myself in a few days' time, Mr Samuel. It's my annual holiday, and the guv'nor's sending me over with papers in connection with The People v Schultz and Bowen... So I thought it best to be prepared."
The first smile that he had permitted himself for nearly two weeks flitted across Sam's face.
"What on earth sort of place do you think New York is?" he asked. "It's safer than London."
"Ah, but what about the Underworld? I've seen these American films that they send over here, Mr Samuel. Did you ever see 'Wolves of the Bowery?' There was a man in that in just my position, carrying important papers, and what they didn't try to do to him! No, I'm taking no chances, Mr Samuel!"
"I should have said you were, lugging that thing about with you."
Mr Peters seemed wounded.
"Oh, I understand the mechanism perfectly, and I am becoming a very fair shot... You have to draw like a flash of lightning, Mr Samuel. If you'd ever seen a film called 'Two-Gun-Thomas,' you'd realise that."
Members of The Mark Steyn Club can hear Part Ten of our tale simply by clicking here and logging-in. Earlier episodes can be found here.
Thank you for your interesting comments on this latest yarn. We always get questions about the theme music for our tales. Greg Belz, a Tennessee member of The Mark Steyn Club, writes:
Please reveal the name of the jaunty tune that opens and closes each installment of Plum's sea-going adventure (and who composed and performs it). Thanks for the splendid entertainment: always!
Well, in recent serialisations, Greg - such as Lord of the World and Mystery in White, we got into the groove of allocating the theme tune to a musically inclined sibling of the author. But we don't have to do that with P G Wodehouse, so I picked a song called "Journey's End", written by Plum and his longtime composing partner Jerome Kern for a West End musical called The Cabaret Girl, starring Dorothy Dickson and first produced at the Winter Garden in London in 1922, the same year as The Girl in the Boat. The recording by George Olsen is from three years later, when Kern exhumed "Journey's End" for a Broadway show called The City Chap.
Since Greg brought up the subject, I have very fond memories of Miss Dickson singing The Cabaret Girl's big song, "Dancing Time", to me over tea in her flat forty years ago and making me do the boy part. A couple of weeks later, I bumped into her daughter, also Dorothy (and wife of the actor Anthony Quayle), who said her mum had really enjoyed it - although not as much, I suspect, as when her lifelong friend the Queen Mother came round to Miss Dickson's pad on her eightieth birthday and entered the sitting room singing "Dancing Time" - word-perfect, the whole thing, after half-a-century. I love that song almost as much as the Queen Mum did.
If you want to hear more Kern & Wodehouse songs, I play an hour's worth here. Make the most of it: between the wokesters and the jihad boys, all of this stuff will be vapourised within a decade.
If you have friends who might appreciate The Girl on the Boat, Northanger Abbey, Nineteen Eighty-Four or our other tales, we have a special Steyn Club Gift Membership that lets them in on that and on all the other goings-on in The Mark Steyn Club. It makes a fun birthday present.
If you've only joined the Steyn Club in recent days and missed our earlier serials (Conan Doyle's The Tragedy of the Korosko, Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent, Baroness Orczy's The Scarlet Pimpernel, Anthony Hope's The Prisoner of Zenda, plus Kipling, Kafka, Dickens, Gogol, Louisa May Alcott, Jane Austen, G K Chesterton, Agatha Christie, H G Wells, Scott Fitzgerald and more), you can find them all on our easy-to-access Netflix-style Tales for Our Time home page. Indeed, it's so easy to access that we've introduced a similar format for our poetry and music outings.
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To become a member of The Mark Steyn Club, please click here - and please join me tomorrow for Part Eleven of The Girl on the Boat.
