House party
Jennifer Stevenson on the house party farce. These are so much fun to read when they work!
I think my favorite is by Wodehouse, one of the many house party comedies of manners involving Jeeves and Bertie Wooster. My usual inability to remember titles gets whacked especial with these. I think it might be Right Ho, Jeeves, but it contains my favorite of all Wodehousian scenes, the Prize Giving at Market Snodsbury.
House parties also lend themselves to mysteries; in fact, isn't there a subgenre specifically about that? I like those if they are funny, and yet I love Jo Walton's Farthing which isn't funny, it's quite sinister underneath the well-bred goings-on covering the mystery, set as it is in her creepy alt-England between the wars.
When you look at the plotting, there are few things more intricate, and yet the tone, the emotional rises and falls cannot read mechanical. There must be surprises--unmaskings--as people sneak or stomp about from room to room. Bonus when the site itself has its own secrets to be unraveled.
Recommendations welcome!
I think my favorite is by Wodehouse, one of the many house party comedies of manners involving Jeeves and Bertie Wooster. My usual inability to remember titles gets whacked especial with these. I think it might be Right Ho, Jeeves, but it contains my favorite of all Wodehousian scenes, the Prize Giving at Market Snodsbury.
House parties also lend themselves to mysteries; in fact, isn't there a subgenre specifically about that? I like those if they are funny, and yet I love Jo Walton's Farthing which isn't funny, it's quite sinister underneath the well-bred goings-on covering the mystery, set as it is in her creepy alt-England between the wars.
When you look at the plotting, there are few things more intricate, and yet the tone, the emotional rises and falls cannot read mechanical. There must be surprises--unmaskings--as people sneak or stomp about from room to room. Bonus when the site itself has its own secrets to be unraveled.
Recommendations welcome!