Ice in the Bedroom is a novel by P.G. Wodehouse, first published as a book in the United States (where the title was The Ice in the Bedroom) on February 2, 1961 by Simon & Schuster, Inc., New York, and in the United Kingdom on October 15, 1961 by Herbert Jenkins, London.
The story was originally published, in a condensed version, in the November 5, 1960, issue of the Toronto Star Weekly.
It features several Wodehouse characters from earlier books, including Drones Freddie Widgeon and Oofy Prosser, and the trio of criminals, "Chimp" Twist and "Soapy" and "Dolly" Molloy.
The novel has two intertwined sub-plots. Freddie Widgeon, who wishes to marry Sally Foster, is seeking to escape from a dull job in a London office to become the manager of a coffee plantation in Kenya. Meanwhile, in the normally quiet suburb of Valley Fields, where Freddie is living, a cache of jewellery, hidden in the home of Freddie's neighbour, is attracting the attention of a small gang of petty criminals.
The story is essentially a re-working of Sam the Sudden (1925), which was also set in the fictional Valley Fields, had a sub-plot in which the same three crooks were hunting for hidden treasure, and entwined this with a romantic sub-plot.
Famous quotes containing the words ice and/or bedroom:
“When the ice is covered with snow, I do not suspect the wealth under my feet; that there is as good as a mine under me wherever I go. How many pickerel are poised on easy fin fathoms below the loaded wain! The revolution of the seasons must be a curious phenomenon to them. At length the sun and wind brush aside their curtain, and they see the heavens again.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Look, we’re all the same; a man is a fourteen-room house—in the bedroom he’s asleep with his intelligent wife, in the living-room he’s rolling around with some bareass girl, in the library he’s paying his taxes, in the yard he’s raising tomatoes, and in the cellar he’s making a bomb to blow it all up.”
—Arthur Miller (b. 1915)