The Luck of the Bodkins by P.G. Wodehouse

I forget just how much P.G. Wodehouse's books twine together. Yes, obviously he has the clear series: Jeeves and Blandings and Psmith, most obviously. But most of his books are set in a common world, even when he doesn't say so.

So I was amused to see that The Luck of the Bodkins, an officially non-series book that I just read, is a loose sequel to Heavy Weather, a Blandings Castle book I read last year, but a different sequel than Full Moon, another Blandings book I read earlier this year.

Full Moon comes back to Blandings; Bodkins follows Monty Bodkins, but they're both quintessentially Wodehousian, about young men and their young women, minor criminal capers, the struggle to find a suitable position (pays well, mollifies gruff older relatives, allows one to be near the loved one), and that sunny Wodehousian world, one part dream, one part Edwardian, and one part inter-war.

This time out, there are three young men: Monty, who is rich but needs to prove to his fiancée's uncle that he is stable and responsible by keeping a job for a year; Ambrose Tennyson, a novelist engaged to a spitfire Hollywood actress, Lotus Blossom; and Ambrose's younger brother Reggie Tennyson, being shipped by his family off to Montreal to take a dreary office job. (Reggie will find a girl to fall in love with over the course of the book.)

Most of the action takes place on the transatlantic liner RMS Atlantic, on its nearly week-long journey from England to New York. There, most of the cast are supposedly aided - but not actually so - by the steward Albert Peasemarch, who is specific enough that he never became a caricature to me. (Though maybe if I knew better the specific assumptions Wodehouse was working from in 1935, he would have been more obviously stereotypical.)

All three circle Ivor Llewellyn, head of the Superba-Llewellyn film studio, who also has to smuggle a very valuable necklace following the demands of his spitfire actress wife - kept off-stage the entire book, to better be a gorgon. Ivor is worried about Customs detectives, and Monty actually is a detective (of a sort), which fuels a certain amount of confusion and funny scenes. Lotus Blossom ("Lottie," originally of the Murphys of Hoboken) has a contract with Llewlleyn, as does Ambrose as the novel opens.

But Ivor discovers Ambrose is "the wrong Tennyson" - i.e., not the poet then dead for about thirty years - and tears up that contract. And having a spitfire actress nearby breaks up Monty's engagement. And Reggie is scheming to find a way to avoid being shut up in boring old Montreal - wouldn't some kind of job in Hollywood be better?

Complications multiply, including a stuffed Mickey Mouse and the singing career of Peasemarch, but, in the end, all of the couples are re-united (or united, in Reggie's case, as he falls in love with Ivor's sister-in-law), the diamond necklace is successfully smuggled, and all of the people who need a contract with Superba-Llewellyn get one, for the obligatory happy ending.

This was longer than the Wodehouses I've read recently, maybe because he had three couples to juggle, but it's prime-era Wodehouse, and a joy to read. As usual, I highly recommend reading Wodehouse whenever life gets to be too serious or you just need something dependably funny, sunny, and lovely.