I'm working thru the White Hart stories. They are oddly distasteful without much in the way of aesthetic or humorous compensation when compared to the Jorkens stories.
Jorkens belongs to a private club in the UK. He is somewhat disreputable--a sort of a better educated, more sophisticate, less shopworn W. C. Fields. He is always trying to cadge drinks, and he tells a story when he gets one.
He has one other member who wants to trip him up, and there's a kind of constant push-pull competition, with Jorkens--because he plays dirty, essentially--coming out on top mostly.
The club itself seems almost laughable, with privileged but essentially undistinguished, but harmless, members relying mainly on ideas of class and status for any sense of worth. Dunsany is inviting us to laugh at them in the same way the Marx Bros invite their audience to laugh at the wealthy in their films.
However, with White hart, these are academics in a chosen bar. They are mean-spirited and supercilious and petty, and are looking for ways to prey on new visitors to the bar by simply making them look like fools. There's no real invitation to laugh at the "regulars", so the general feeling I get is "What a sorry bunch of jerks!".
Interestingly, one of the stories, "Silence, Please", seems to me to anticipate the conceptual design of the Bose noise cancelling earphones.
[
www.bose.com]
--Sawfish
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"The food at the new restaurant is awful, but at least the portions are large."
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