Sam the Sudden by P.G. Wodehouse

I tend to read a P.G. Wodehouse book three or four times a year: he wrote about a hundred of the suckers, and they're pretty consistently wonderful, all sunny and amusing and fun. And I write a post here about everything I read.

So you might be getting pretty tired of me monologuing on about Wodehouse if you've been hitting this blog for any length of time, and I apologize for that. But I do enjoy Wodehouse, and I'm going to keep reading his stuff, even as I get into the quirky obscure books. (Does that make them more or less interesting to the random uninterested reader I've just imagined? I don't know.)

Thus I came to Sam the Sudden, a 1925 novel that was known as Sam in the Suburbs in the US for several decades. It is, as you might guess, about a man named Sam.

Sam Shotter is the usual one-off Wodehouse protagonist: young, male, not rich but mildly aristocratic, educated at one of England's finest schools and possessing all of the traditional 19th century fine-school virtues. Sam is also, as is reasonably common in Wodehouse, possessed of a very rich uncle, John B. Pynsent, who is also the magnate of an American business empire. Sadly, Sam is somewhat headstrong, or perhaps given to (positive, generally commendable) manias, which have and will cause him trouble.

Initially, it causes that uncle to send him away from New York, off to London to work for Lord Tilbury's publishing empire - the two magnates have a growing connection that Sam may help to cement - but in London he finds the young lady who he has already fallen hopelessly in love with, because he saw a newspaper cutting with a photo of her in a remote Canadian hunting cabin one winter.

Yes, it is a pretty goofy set-up.

Anyway, Sam ends up living in one-half of a semi-detached out in Valley Fields, a London suburb. In the other half is that young lady, Kay, and her uncle, who runs a weekly paper for Tilbury and is now Sam's boss. Believed to be in Sam's half of the house is a lost treasure, stolen by a criminal who later died in darkest South America, though not before giving clues to its location to several of his still-London-resident compatriots.

The plot goes from there, with the miscreants trying to find the hidden treasure via burglary and trickery, Sam trying to win Kay by being manly and never hesitating for a second on his every last nutty impulse, and Tilbury, before long, trying to get rid of this lunatic foisted onto his well-run collection of profitable enterprises. They can not all succeed, but there is the usual happy ending, for exactly the characters you expect will be involved.

This is not a major Wodehouse novel, but Sam's nuttiness does suit Wodehouse's style of plotting quite well - the narrative does have to make excuses for itself once or twice in reference to his actions, but that's mostly for humorous effect and secondarily out of still-ebbing 19th century feeling. This isn't exactly the way Wodehouse would go in future, but it shows him trying different ways to add complexity and humor and craziness to his plots, and succeeding pretty well. It's thus quite pleasant for readers who do know where Wodehouse went in the '30s and later.