Monday, December 12, 2011

Guest from England

My neighbors had a guest from England visiting them and they brought him by to see my morgue.

He is a professor at the University of London. He told me that newspapers often put humorous pieces among the real stories. He suggested that maybe the clippings in the morgue were written for that purpose. He thought maybe sometimes "M.E. Meegs" took his ideas from the newspaper, and once from a Sherlock Holmes story, but basically made most of it up just to be funny.

He mentioned P.G. Wodehouse (of Jeeves and Wooster) wrote such pieces around 1901 and Wodehouse moved from London and lived in Long Island somewhere.

I went to the library and found a biography on Wodehouse and he did write little bits for newspapers, but they were mostly funny poems. And in 1901 he worked at a bank in London. He didn't move to Long Island until 1915, I think.

But maybe that is the type of person I should look for, an Englishman living in Brooklyn, or on the Island.

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