This, the first full-length Bertie/Jeeves novel, starts with a clash of wills about Bertie's banjolele, and Jeeves gives notice. The banjolele has produced complaints from the neigh»bours in Berkeley Mansions, so Bertie proposes to take a country cottage somewhere and devote himself to mastering the instrument. His friend Lord Chuffnell (Chuffy) has a large country house (which he would like to sell) near the sea and lots of cottages. He rents one to Bertie (with his new 'man', Brinkley) and snaps Jeeves up as his own 'personal gentie-man'. At Chuffnell Regis there arrives off-shore a large yacht containing American J. Washburn Stoker, multi-millionaire, his beautiful daughter, Pauline (to whom Bertie was once, in New York, engaged; but Sir Roderick Glossop had easily convinced the girl's father that Bertie was a near-loony) and his young son, Dwight. Chuffy thinks Stoker may buy the house to be a clinic for Sir Roderick's patients. Chuffy and Pauline fall in love, but Chuffy, 'penniless', cannot, by the code, speak his love to heiress Pauline - to her fury. Chuffy's aunt lives at the Dower House near the hall. Sir Roderick is courting her. Pauline's father thinks Pauline is still pining for Bertie and he tries to keep her on board the yacht. In order to see Chuffy she swims from the yacht at night and arrives at Bertie's cottage (Bertie and Brinkley are both out) and gets into Bertie's pyjamas and his bed. Chuffy discovers her and there is a great quarrel between them. Pauline's father, thinldng that Bertie has done her wrong, decides that they must marry quickly. He kidnaps Bertie on to the yacht. There is a birthday party for Dwight on board, with minstrels. Jeeves does heroic work as a treble-agent, to release Bertie from the yacht, blacked up as a mintrel, to bring Chuffy and Pauline together and to quench Pauline's domineering father. At one stage both Bertie and Sir Roderick are going round with blacked-up faces and unable to find butter or petrol to clean up with. Brinkley sets fire to Bertie's cottae. The banjolele dies with it. Jeeves agrees to come back to Bertie if he gives the instrument up for lost for ever. (We shall meet Brinkley, the communist valet, again in Much Obliged, Jeeves. There he becomes Rupert Bingley, a sort of propertied squire in Market Snodsbury.) Bertie sacks Brinkley. It looks as though Sir Roderick and Myrtle, Lady Chuffnell are going to marry and Chuffnell Hall will become a clinic after all.

Two nice, silly policemen - Sergeant Voules and his nephew Constable Dobson - also appear.

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