NPR

Jeeves And Wooster, But Make It A Modern Spy Novel

Ben Shott has taken the iconic P.G. Wodehouse comic characters (with the blessing of the Wodehouse estate) and twisted "five degrees to starboard" in his new novel Jeeves and the King of Clubs.
Matthew Macfadyen (right) and Stephen Mangan played Jeeves and Wooster, respectively, in <em>Perfect Nonsense</em>, a 2013 stage production. The characters were first created by comic author P.G. Wodehouse.

The character of Jeeves is such a colossus of fiction that the name is actually a synonym for a personal manservant.

In P.G. Wodehouse's comic masterpieces, he was the unflappable valet to Bertie Wooster, the young English sophisticate who frequently got into capers and scrapes that only Jeeves could get him out of.

With the permission of the Wodehouse estate, there's a new Jeeves-and-Wooster novel out, this time written by bestselling author Ben Schott. He says it's a fictional world that means "everything" to him.

"I mean, it was a world that I've loved since I was a child," Schott says. "Like, I think, a lot of Wodehouse fans, the

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