Plum Throws Pies at the Great Detective

"Dudley Jones, Bore-Hunter."
By P. G. Wodehouse.
Short story.
First appearance: PUNCH, April and May 1903.

On the NOSTALGIA LEAGUE site, find P. G. Wodehouse ("Plum" to his friends) throwing a custard pie at the Great Detective.

As Daniel J. Neyer says in an introduction to this story that Wodehouse . . .

. . . was a life-long fan of the English detective story, or "thriller." His works are full of humorous references to the stories of Edgar Wallace, Austin Freeman, and E. Phillips Oppenheim, but the English mystery writer that Wodehouse spoofed the most was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, whose stories Wodehouse had read from his boyhood on.

. . . In fact, at the time Wodehouse wrote "Dudley Jones," Holmes had been "dead" for ten years and his impending return had only been recently announced by Doyle in THE STRAND. Wodehouse hailed this joyous occasion with a short poem in a later May number of PUNCH:

Oh SHERLOCK, SHERLOCK, he's in town again,
That prince of perspicacity, that monument of brain.
It seems he wasn't hurt at all
By tumbling down the waterfall.

Category: Detective fiction