Young Men in Spats
1936 short story collection by P.G. Wodehouse
Young Men in Spats is a collection of short stories by P. G. Wodehouse, first published in the United Kingdom on 3 April 1936 by Herbert Jenkins, London, then in the United States with a slightly different selection of stories on 24 July 1936 by Doubleday, Doran, New York.
The collection, recounting the adventures of various members of the Drones Club (except for the last one), features many familiar characters from Wodehouse's other writings, including Freddie Widgeon and the irrepressible Mr Mulliner. One story, "Uncle Fred Flits By", features the first appearance of Pongo Twistleton and his Uncle Fred, who featured in four novels, including two appearances at Blandings Castle.
The US edition contains a slightly different selection of stories from the UK version. "Tried in the Furnace" and "Trouble Down At Tudsleigh" had not previously appeared in the US, and were held back so they could garner greater income from magazine sales. (Both stories eventually appeared in Cosmopolitan.) These two stories were accordingly replaced by three Oldest Member golf stories, "There's Always Golf", "The Letter of the Law", and "Farewell to Legs". These three Oldest Member stories had all appeared in US magazines in 1935 and early 1936; they all later appeared in the UK in Lord Emsworth and Others (1937). After their Cosmopolitan appearances, "Tried in the Furnace" was included in the US-only collection The Crime Wave at Blandings (1937), and "Trouble Down at Tudsleigh" was included in the US edition of Eggs, Beans and Crumpets (1940).
Contents
"Fate"
United Kingdom: Strand, May 1931
United States: Cosmopolitan, May 1931 (as "Compromised!")
The story is the first in the main Drones Club canon, and stars Freddie Widgeon, who would become one of the two most prominent characters in the Drones Club series, the other being Bingo Little.
The story takes place in New York, and was written and published while Prohibition was in effect in the United States.
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This entry incorporates text from “Young Men in Spats” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.