Jeeves

But at the summit of Wodehouse’s genius are the stories of Bertie Wooster and his “gentleman’s personal gentleman,” or valet, Jeeves.

Bertie and Jeeves, as the British essayist Alexander Cockburn once asserted, are a pairing as momentous in literary history as Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, or Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson.

Wodehouse never exhausted the counterpoint between Bertie’s slangy gibbering and half-remembered literary allusions with Jeeves’ carefully modulated responses: “Very well, Jeeves, you agree with me that the situation is a lulu?”

Jeeves is a deus ex machina; we learn almost nothing about him, except for imperturbability and skill at solving the crises that Bertie falls into through his pure cloth-headedness.

Spode throws his weight around Brinkley Court, the country estate where the story takes place, harrying Bertie endlessly for reasons we don’t need to go into, until Jeeves provides Bertie with a magic word guaranteed to turn dictator Spode into a shrinking mouse.