Guy Bolton 'borrowed' Jeeves from Wodehouse for a play. He is now a butler who helps his master, 9th Earl of Rowcester, make the money he badly needs for white elephant, leaky, 147-room stately home, Rowcester Abbey. They set up as bookies - Honest Patch Perkins (Lord Rowcester disguised) and his clerk (Jeeves disguised). This is a novel shaped out of a play. And Bertie Wooster is explained away as having gone off to a post-war school that teaches the aristocracy to fend for itself 'in case the social revolution sets in with even greater severity'.

The bookie firm is in trouble and has to welsh over a flukey double pulled off (£3,005 2s 6d) by Captain Biggar, white hunter, in love with Mrs Rosie Spottsworth, widow of two multi-millionaire Americans. (But she is nice. She had written vers libre in Greenwich Village before she started marrying millionaires.) Biggar's code says 'A poor man mustn't make advances to a rich lady' but he ends up satisfactorily engaged to marry Rosie.

Bill (9th Earl) Rowcester will marry small, pretty Jill Wyvern, freckled, local vet, ex-hockey outside right. Her father is Chief Constable of Southmoltonshire. Bill sells the Abbey to Mrs Spottsworth who, not liking its dampness, will have it transported brick by brick and rebuilt in California, to dry out at last.

There is something badly wrong, in print anyway, about Jeeves as a butler, in disguise, acting as a bookie's clerk and hamming it up. He overdoes the quotation thing ... Pliny the Younger, The Psalms, Whittier, Kipling, Omar, Tennyson, Shakespeare (eighteen times), Maugham, Marcus Aurelius, Milton, Byron, Congreve and (slightly inaccurately) Montrose. Languages: 'fons et origo mali', 'ne quid nimis', 'rem acu tetigisti', 'retiarius'. And French 'faute de mieux'. It is odd that this should ring so false. But it does.

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