The Pothunters by P.G. Wodehouse

I'll admit that one tag is a bit puckish: The Pothunters was written for younger readers, admittedly, but those are younger readers who were born about 1890 and were, at around the turn of the last century, ensconced in one of Britain's finer institutions of higher learning. I doubt any of those people are even still alive, and, if one or two were, they would be roughly a hundred and thirty years old.

On the other hand, The Pothunters is still a pleasant, amusing story of a bunch of boys at a fictional school, with dialogue that's definitely outdated but still feels like the way smartish boys would snap at each other. The plot is fairly low-stakes - a couple of silver cups, prizes for various athletic competitions, have been stolen, and one boy might be "sent down" on circumstantial evidence even though he didn't steal them - but treated seriously, and it's not low-stakes for the boys involved.

The Pothunters was P.G. Wodehouse's first novel, published in issues of Public School Magazine in early 1902 and collected into book form later that year. Wodehouse was only twenty at the time, just a couple of years out of school himself, and trying as hard as he could to build a writing career that would get him out of a dull job at a bank. (Spoiler: it worked. He resigned as soon as this novel was published as a book, just before his twenty-first birthday, and had a long and successful career as a comic novelist before being knighted and dying in 1975.)

Pothunters has a large cast of mostly boys - the details of century-old foreign boarding schools are somewhat a mystery to me, but I estimate they're in their early teens - plus a master or two and one detective from London in a featured role. Also some random groundskeepers, mostly to chase those boys away from "out of bounds" places, create dramatic tension, and threaten dire consequences. As far as I can remember, not only are there no women in it, there's no hint that the human species even contains a feminine variant. (Did I mention it was a novel for schoolboys who had lived in all-male settings pretty much their entire lives to date?)

The plot circles that silver-cup theft, or perhaps wanders around the school of St. Austin's (fictional, mostly based on Dulwich College, where Wodehouse was educated), giving Wodehouse room to have scenes with many boys in various contexts. It's a fairly thin plot, and is solved without much trouble - and not particularly by the actions of the main characters. But the point of The Pothunters is to show a way of life and a kind of person: schoolboys at a "good school" at the time. It does that well, and I found these boys amusing and their dialogue obviously of its time but otherwise entirely believable and lively.

I would not start reading Wodehouse here, a century later with other, better options. But it's better than I expected, and I can see why his original audience, which had to start Wodehouse with his first book, enjoyed The Pothunters back in the Aughts and wanted more Wodehouse after reading it.