We had been rather chary of motor boats, you may remember, since the time on Lake Penzance, when something jammed on our engine, and we had gone madly round the lake a number of times, with people on various docks trying to lasso us with ropes.
Tish is about as good as it gets in the department of lightweight reading fun. Letitia Carberry, known as Tish, is a middle-aged woman whose specialty seems to be trying out any and every new activity with great enthusiasm, particularly things involving motors and the great outdoors. Her two friends, sentimental Aggie and matter-of-fact Lizzie, who narrates the stories, are not always enthusiastic but loyally allow themselves to be dragged along. Also a regular in the stories is Tish’s young reporter nephew Charlie Sands, who seems aware that it’s impossible to keep his impulsive aunt from getting into difficulties, but endeavors to steer her in less dangerous directions and is on hand for damage control when needed.
There are five long short stories/novelettes in this book. The first, “Mind Over Motor,” is still my absolute favorite—it’s perhaps the most quintessentially Tish of them all. The three friends set out to visit and chaperone a young relative of Lizzie’s while her mother is away. Bettina’s romance with the boy next door isn’t running exactly smoothly, and the antics of the three ladies don’t help—especially when automobile-happy Tish meets a debonair young man who’s interested in organizing a motor race at the local fairgrounds. All of which builds to a perfect and hilarious climax at the race itself.
In “Like a Wolf on the Fold,” all three friends fall under the spell of a young foreigner whose affecting hard-luck stories induce them to feed, clothe and practically adopt him, to the point that they are helpless to get rid of him even when they begin to realize they’re being taken in. Probably the weakest story in the collection, with a bit of an incoherent plot and open ending, but still has its moments. In “The Simple Lifers,” Tish becomes enamored of a back-to-nature movement and drags her friends out into the Maine woods with little equipment besides a flint and steel and a bit of string, there to go barefoot and wear their hair down and live off nuts and berries and such. Before long they discover there is someone else in the forest attempting to live off the land for an entirely different reason, and end up pitching in their slim resources and considerable ingenuity to help him make a success of it.
“Tish’s Spy” is my second-favorite of the collection. Tish and Co. are off camping again, this time heading up a Canadian river with a full complement of tents, canoes, fishing equipment et cetera. But nothing can ever be quite that simple with Tish, for camping on adjacent islands are a young man whom Tish is convinced is a German spy (this is just after the outbreak of WWI) and a red-headed detective whom she is certain is watching the spy. Oh, and the ladies have also brought along a young woman whom Tish hired as a chauffeur (because all the male applicants for the job smoked too much), who might know more than she is telling. It’s perfectly obvious to the reader all along what is going on, but Tish and her friends—in between various mishaps with boats—consistently leap to the wrong conclusions, leading to another comically disastrous climax. It’s kind of like Three Men in a Boat with middle-aged ladies instead of young men. (The scene before the trip where they go hunting fishing worms at night is priceless.)
In the final tale, “My Country Tish of Thee,” Tish and friends head out west for a horseback trip through Glacier Park. Upon learning that a movie company is planning to stage a fake hold-up of tourists for publicity, Tish decides they need to be taught a lesson and that she and her friends will do it. While not quite on the level of “Tish’s Spy,” maybe because the situations the ladies get into stretch credence by being even more outrageous than usual, there were definitely several moments that made me laugh out loud—as when Tish names their pack horse Mona Lisa, “because in the mornings she was constantly missing, and having to be looked for.”
The five stories were originally published in the Saturday Evening Post between 1912 and 1916, and collected into book form in 1916. Tish is in the public domain, available free for Kindle at Amazon, Project Gutenberg, etc. This is an entry for Friday’s Forgotten Books, a weekly blog event hosted by Patti Abbott.
Annie says
I’m adding this to my to-read stack! It sounds like delightful fun!
Hamlette says
I’m putting this on my Kindle RIGHT NOW!
Hamlette says
Ohhhhh, there are sequels! Have you read those? Are they as good?
Elisabeth Grace Foley says
I read More Tish yesterday, actually, as it was the only other one currently available for free; and then I went and read a couple other stories from the first volume (“That Awful Night” and “Three Pirates of Penzance”) in the Saturday Evening Post archives at HathiTrust. And there’s a couple more Tish books not in the public domain. They’re pretty much all hilarious, though my favorites are still in the volume reviewed here!
Hamlette says
Good to know. Thanks!
Denny Lien says
I’m a Tish fan too. I especially recommend the story “The Treasure Hunt” in the late (and still in copyright, alas) collection TISH PLAYS THE GAME, but perhaps more easily findable in its reprint in the old Ellery Queen anthology 101 YEARS ENTERTAINMENT.
Along with a couple of Mark Twain pieces (on “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” and “The Awful German Language”), this is one of the rare items that can still make me laugh out loud on a third/fourth/etc. rereading.