Torchy and Vee by Sewell Ford

Description

Sewell Ford built a devoted magazine following on the character of Torchy, a quick-witted, red-haired office boy who narrates his own misadventures in a slang so alive it practically gallops. In Torchy and Vee he added the one ingredient the earlier stories lacked: a wife. Vee is present, clever and utterly unshakeable — exactly the partner Torchy needs when everything in suburbia appears to go wrong at once.

The book opens on the home front of the Great War. Torchy is back from a peculiar Ordnance Department errand in the Midwest, with a commission in a staff job he never asked for, and finds Vee already planning a rescue: their neighbour Marion Gray has spent her youth nursing a demanding invalid father and now faces a fate almost worse — the courtship of the wheezing, middle-aged insurance man everyone calls “Puffy” Biggles. Vee’s answer is the Harbor Hills Community Kitchen, a ready-meals business run by neighbourhood women that gives Marion a future of her own. From there the couple take on office politics, errant poets, a case that looks like crime, and the comfort of a marriage that bickers its way to devotion.

What endures

• Dialogue that still crackles — Torchy’s slang is half the pleasure.
• American home-front life in World War I, captured with affection.
• Comedy that is kind: Ford’s jokes are never at his characters’ expense.

About This DodaBooks Edition

All 17 stories are gathered in one download with clear chapter starts, a linked index and typesetting built for long reading sessions on any device.