Piccadilly Jim by P.G. Wodehouse

The cliché is that P.G. Wodehouse created his own world, made up of one part Edwardian dandies, one part interwar froth, one or two parts traditional melodrama plots, and a whole lot of Wodehousian comedy and writing to tie it all together. It's mostly true: no one else wrote quite like him, and his mature books do have a consistent tone and voice, and circle a clear group of plots and ideas.

But, even more so: he reused characters and situations repeatedly. His main series - Jeeves and Wooster, Psmith, Blandings Castle - intersected with each other. I'm sure someone has already mapped the universe of Wodehouse, explaining how every character can be connected to every other character with something like a Bacon number.

So I should not have been surprised that the 1917 comedy Piccadilly Jim is, at least loosely, a sequel to Wodehouse's 1913 novel The Little Nugget. I was, just a bit surprised, in a happy way: the kidnappee of the older book, a horrible boy named Ogden Ford, is the kind of person you would never want to meet in real life but is a fine bit of spice in the right book.

Nugget was a transitional book, still basically taking its thriller plot seriously and having actual physical consequences and at least one scene with bullets whizzing by. Jim is a full-bore Wodehouse comedy, with an occasional concern about someone having to go to prison (played in a end-of-The-Producers kind of way) but mostly focused on the course of true love and the getting of enough scratch to set oneself up in life with the object of said love.

It's also got one of Wodehouse's most amusing impostor plots, with Jimmy Crocker pretending not to be Jimmy Crocker to woo the girl he loves but then posing as Jimmy Crocker to infiltrate her house. There are other impostors, too, of course - it's a Wodehouse comedy, and I believe they are required.

The plot is rarely the point of a good Wodehouse novel, but let me try to sum up: Crocker is a former New York newspaperman, whose father (a minor actor) has married one of a set of two formidable sisters, who have fallen out. Crocker, his father and stepmother live in London, where Crocker has a (very deserved) reputation as a hell-raiser, which is impeding the stepmother's attempts to get her husband a noble title.

His aunt (the other sister) is the mother of the previously mentioned Ogden and is married to a Wall Street financier - more importantly, connected to the financier's niece Ann, who is the red-headed spitfire Crocker falls for - and this whole crew makes a quick visit to London to attempt to get Crocker to come work for the financier, for reasons that are clear enough early in the novel but have not remained clear in my memory.

Anyway, Crocker falls for Ann - but she hates him, since, five years before, she published a slim volume of verse that was absolute glurge, and newspaperman Crocker interviewed her for a piece absolutely making fun of her. She remembers this vividly; he had entirely forgotten.

So he follows her back to New York, taking the same ship and pretending to be someone else called Bayliss. And he does eventually take up residence in his aunt's house, pretending to be himself. There, various criminals and international agents are not only circling to make another kidnapping attempt on Ogden, but also trying to steal a new powerful explosive, invented by one of the many "young and unrecognized geniuses" the aunt has gathered about her as a literary salon.

The explosive is stolen, Ogden is kidnapped, the impostors unmasked, hard-boiled detectives hired, and so forth - not quite in that order, but you get the idea. Crocker wins Ann's love in the end. And there are a whole lot of wonderful, funny Wodehouse asides and thoughts and business along the way. This may be over a hundred years old, but it's still great: one of the earliest clearly-mature Wodehouse novels.