GENERALLY UNREMEMBERED TODAY is that one of the world’s most popular and beloved humorists, Sir Pelham “Plum” Grenville Wodehouse (1881–1975), began his literary career by writing other kinds of fiction as well, including straight detective stories, of which “Murder at the Excelsior” is a good example. Several of his later stories and novels involve mystery or crime but are generally nonsensical, such as Hot Water (1932), Pigs Have Wings (1952), and Do Butlers Burgle Banks (1968).
Born in Guildford, he became a banker after graduating from Dulwich College, but, by the time he was twenty-two, he was earning more as a writer than as a banker and resigned to become a full-time writer, which he did with enormous success for the next half century. His first novel was The Pothunters (1902), but his greatest creations, the Honorable Bertie Wooster and his friend and valet, Jeeves, did not make their appearance until The Saturday Evening Post published “Extricating Young Gussie” in 1915. Wooster is a not-exceptionally-brilliant young man who ceaselessly finds himself in difficulties with his aunt, a girl, or the law, relying on Jeeves to get him out of trouble. Wodehouse’s high earnings from magazines impelled him to visit the United States several times before World War I and, for much of his life, he spent half his time in America and half in England, becoming a U.S. citizen in 1955. He wrote screenplays for MGM, beginning in 1930, and provided the book and lyrics for numerous musicals. During World War II, his English home was taken over by Nazis who treated him well, as Wodehouse told the world in broadcasts from Berlin, severely upsetting the British. He was dubbed a traitor for a time before his countrymen accepted the notion that he hadn’t really understood the ramifications of his naïve act. Shortly before his death, he was given a knighthood as Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II.
“Death at the Excelsior” was first published in the December 1914 issue of Pearson’s Magazine; it was first collected in Plum Stones—The Hidden P. G. Wodehouse (London, Galahad, 1993).