Welcome to our regularly scheduled audio Ovaltine twenty minutes before you lower your lamp. It's Episode Sixteen of a comic caper by P G Wodehouse, The Girl on the Boat: a novel first published in 1922.
John Wilson, a First Week Founding Member of The Mark Steyn Club, enjoyed last night's installment:
Now THAT is what you call a cliff-hanger! I was laughing myself silly. Can't wait to see what happens next. (That Sam Marlowe has a dangerous sadistic streak.)
Every time I hear 'Sam Marlowe' I think 'Sam Spade' and 'Philip Marlowe'.
Indeed. And the creator of both Mr Spade and Mr Marlowe was Raymond Chandler, who, like Wodehouse, went to school at Dulwich College. So it's rather like Chandler having a hard-boiled gumshoe called Bertie Jeeves. [UPDATE! Thank you to those who pointed out that Sam Spade is Mr Hammett's creation - I apologise, and plead in mitigation that I am typing through a fog of medication of which I am mighty sick.]
Mr Wilson certainly has the "dangerous sadistic" Marlowe's number. In tonight's episode, the shameless Sam indulges in more degraded derring-do:
His conscience, if he had ever had one, had become atrophied through long disuse. He had given this sensitive girl the worst fright she had had since a mouse had got into her bedroom at school. He had caused Jno Peters to totter off to the Rupert Street range making low, bleating noises. And did he care? No! All he cared about was the fact that he had erased for ever from Billie's mind that undignified picture of himself as he had appeared on the boat, and substituted another which showed him brave, resourceful, gallant. All he cared about was the fact that Billie, so cold ten minutes before, had just allowed him to kiss her for the forty-second time. If you had asked him, he would have said that he had acted for the best, and that out of evil cometh good, or some sickening thing like that. That was the sort of man Samuel Marlowe was.
He appears to have pulled it off, but has he?
If you're a member of The Mark Steyn Club you can hear me read Part Sixteen of our serialisation of The Girl on the Boat simply by clicking here and logging-in. All previous episodes can be found here.
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