Sam the Sudden (Sam in the Suburbs)

Sam Shotter (Old Wrykynian, his father English, mother American), roughing it in a log-hut in Canada, has fallen in love with a girl in a picture - a photograph from an English weekly that his predecessor in the log-hut had stuck up. Sam comes to England with his disreputable friend, and servant, Hash Todhunter, late cook on the tramp-steamer Araminta. Sam's American uncle, in process of a business negotiation with Lord Tilbury (as he now is - Sir George Pyke as was) gets Lord Tilbury to give Sam a job in Mammoth Publishing. He now writes the 'Aunt Ysobel' page ('Chats with my Girls') in the Home Companion magazine, and finds that the girl in the picture is the niece of his editor and that she lives with her uncle in the bungalow in Valley Fields next to the one that he himself has rented. And one of those semi-detacheds contains a $2 million stock of bearer bonds that had been stolen from a bank and hidden away by a thief who had died before he could cash them. So here come Soapy and Dolly Molloy and Chimp Twist (alias J. Sheringham Adair). This is our first meeting with this crooked trio. Also horrible Percy Pilbeam, now editor of Society Spice for Mammoth. And this is our first visit to Wodehouse's beloved Valley Fields, the West Dulwich of his boyhood.

Sam Shotter is a good specimen of the Wodehouse buzzer hero: no laggard in love and quick to rescue kittens stuck up in trees. He lasses the heroine at their first meeting and gets a furious rebuff. But she is ruffling his hair enjoyably in the last chapter. Sam had found the missing bonds and will get the ten per cent reward from the bank. He has also had the privilege of calling Lord Tilbury 'you pompous little bounder!'

Source: Richard Usborne. Plum Sauce. A P G Wodehouse Companion.