This is a 1951 novel, though - as so often with P.G. Wodehouse - it's not set in a particular moment in time as it is in Wodehouse-land, where years bend and the external world impinges lightly if at all. It's set in Hollywood, and it's a studio-system Hollywood, more like the interwar years than the year it emerged.
At the center, and least important, is Adela Shannon Cork, the hot-tempered former star of the silent screen and widow to a millionaire. The mansion where the story is set - like a lot of Wodehouse, Old Reliable could be staged as a three-act play without a whole lot of work - is owned by Adela, but best known as "the old Carmen Flores place," after the Mexican film star who died the previous year and whose furniture is basically untouched.
Old Reliable has a fair bit of plot, but what it has even more is characters: maybe too many for its length; it doesn't give them all enough to do and many of their plot threads conclude very quickly in the end. Among those characters are Adela's brother-in law Smedley, once a Broadway impresario but now impoverished from backing far too many flops and reduced to living on Adela's tightly-pinched dime; the title character, Wilhelmina "Bill" Shannon, the brassy middle-aged older sister of Adela, formerly a screenwriter and now penning her sister's memoirs; the butler Phipps, who has a secret past as a safecracker; Bill's former writing colleague Joe Davenport, at the opening of the novel resident in New York and the young lover character of the novel; and Kay Shannon, Bill's niece (and thus Adela's as well) and Joe's love interest, who doesn't get much more personality than "the nice pretty girl."
There's also a not-overly-intelligent English nobleman resident in the house, who isn't really involved in the main plot, and a couple of Hollywood-wannabe policemen who show up a couple of times in the third act.
As usual with Wodehouse, there are two kinds of troubles that need to be sorted before the happy ending: love troubles and money troubles. Bill has been pining for Smedley for twenty years, while he has been content to be a bachelor. Joe has asked Kay to marry him more than a dozen times, but she doesn't think he's serious enough for her. Bill and Joe have an opportunity to buy a literary agency - a license to print money! - but need twenty thousand dollars to do so. And rumor has it that Carmen Flores kept a diary - full of crackerjack gossip about all of her affairs and battles and everything else a "Mexican spitfire" would be involved in - which must be hidden in the house somewhere and which could be sold for a fabulous sum, either to studio heads who would suppress it or to a publisher.
The diary is found, it changes hands multiple times, and it does end up in a safe for a time - did I mention the butler is an ex-safecracker? that's an important plot point - and multiple characters are assumed by others to be full of ready cash when they are nothing of the sort.
In the end, it all ends happily as it must - that's how Wodehouse novels work. This is a solid, if a bit short and straightforward one, from his mid-career - funny and well-constructed but running a bit to standard Wodehouse furniture and not quite long enough to really take best advantage of all its material.
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