New Faulks book will be rated PG

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IF YOU READ ONE BOOK THIS WEEK

'Never Saw it Coming', by Linwood Barclay (Orion), R240

CON artist Keisha Ceylon passes herself off as a psychic, and "helps" those who are looking for missing relatives. Things go awry, however, when she tells a seemingly troubled husband of her "visions" of his wife's disappearance - and now he wants her out of the way as well. A tightly plotted thriller with some surprisingly comic twists.

THE ISSUE

Dismaying news for hardcore PG Wodehouse fans: Birdsong author Sebastian Faulks is to write the first officially sanctioned Jeeves and Wooster novel since the great comic author's death in 1975. As Wodehouse himself may have put it: "Some ideas are like mulligatawny in a poor restaurant - better left unstirred."

Faulks did a successful take on Ian Fleming's work with his 2008 best-selling James Bond novel Devil May Care, but commentators have been quick to point out that emulating Wodehouse's style will be nigh impossible - and Faulks agrees. Admitting that Wodehouse was "inimitable", he promised the Guardian that he would nevertheless "do the very best I can, with respect and with gratitude for all the pleasure the books have given, but also with a light heart".

According to publisher Hutchinson, Faulks was "perfect" to continue the adventures - and attempts to avoid the perils of matrimony - of the foppish aristocrat Bertie Wooster and his manservant Jeeves. The pair were first introduced in the 1915 short story Extricating Young Gussie.

Faulks's Jeeves and the Wedding Bells will be published in November.

CRASH COURSE

How does one write like Wodehouse anyway? Google that and you'd be on the internet all day, but among the results was this revealing extract from the New York Times's recent review of PG Wodehouse: A Life in Letters, edited by Sophie Ratcliffe:

"It was his plots that Wodehouse most worried about and fussed over, and yet his plots are not why we read him. We read him for his larksome style, his brilliant melding of high and low vocabulary, the genius of his syntax, the timelessness of his slang.

"For the most part he took all that for granted, and yet, thanks to Ratcliffe, we know he laboured over it. 'Writing a book is like building a coral reef,' he told [a friend, William] Townend. 'One goes on adding tiny bits. I must say the result is much better. With my stuff it is largely a matter of adding colour and seeing that I don't let anything through that's at all flat.'"

THE BOTTOM LINE

"There are moments, Jeeves, when one asks oneself, 'Do trousers matter?'"

"The mood will pass, sir." - The Code of the Woosters, by PG Wodehouse (first published by Herbert Jenkins, London, October 1938)