“Are you familiar with the work of the Master?” was the first question Hugh Massingberd used to ask aspiring obituarists, by which he meant not Henry James but P. G. Wodehouse. I can think of no more congenial or reassuring inquiry from a prospective employer. In the context of death notices, though, it isn’t quite what one expects to hear. And yet Massingberd, during his 1986–1994 tenure as obituaries editor for The Daily Telegraph, applied a Wodehousian aesthetic—call it the Blandings sublime—to such good effect that the once-ignored column attracted a cult following and spawned no less than five bestselling anthologies, of which the current volume purportedly represents la crème de la crème.
What then, in obituary terms, does the lesson of the Master dictate? Above all, a preponderance of subjects who are—to use Massingberd’s habitual epithet—fruity. Not fame or accomplishment but rampant eccentricity is the chief criterion for inclusion. So we are treated to a colorful succession of potty minor peers, “bristling brigadiers” (as Massingberd labels them), and other quintessential English types, all embalmed in equal parts affection and irreverence.
Some of my own favorite obits here, however, are of a different stripe, more roundly mocking and even downright venomous. The one for Billy Carter begins:
Billy Carter, who has died age 51, was President Jimmy Carter’s hard-drinking roly-poly brother whose bibulous verandah-chair comments from the peanut township of Plains, Georgia, caused periodic embarrassment at the White House.
What adjectives! One can almost
