Big Money by P.G. Wodehouse

Sometimes I think the difference between a great Wodehouse book and a merely good one is that the great book doesn't waste time or space. It bounces from high point to high point, and closes out quickly even if a reader could argue everything isn't completely solved yet. The standard comparison is to a soufflé: whip it up high, set it in front of the reader, and be done.

Big Money, a 1931 standalone set in London, is one of the better Wodehouse books, from his prime period, and it does all of that - particularly wrapping up its ending quickly and cleanly, choosing a perfect moment rather than trying to tie off every last plot thread.

As usual with Wodehouse, the plot is driven by two engines: the drive of love and the need for some money to make that love feasible.

Ann Moon, an American heiress, is visiting her uncle, the millionaire T. Paterson Frisby, who has hired the genteelly impoverished Lady Vera Mace to chaperone the young lady and, with luck, find her a suitable young man with a good title to replace the unsuitable chap in the USA she was just shipped away from. Lady Vera has a nephew, "Biscuit" Biskerton, who she thinks would be very suitable for Ann. The Biscuit is also close chums with his old schoolmate Berry Conway, who yearns for adventure in the West of the USA but works as Frisby's secretary after his family money was entirely spent by his guardian aunt.

There's a secondary young lady, Kitchie Valentine, necessary so both of the young men can have a happy ending. There's a supposedly-worthless mine, far out in those Western US badlands, owned by Conway, and a decidedly not-cricket secret plan by Frisby to buy that (actually valuable to him) mine through two shady characters, Captain Kelly and Mr, Hoke.

And Lady Vera herself has hopes of capturing Frisby, who was widowed quite some time ago.

This is one of Wodehouse's "suburban" books - I've noticed a few novels of this era set a bunch of their action in new residential areas on the then-outskirts of London, and use them as a new exciting middle ground between bucolic splendor and the sophistication of city streets. The Biscuit has huge debts, and is being hounded by a phalanx of commercial enterprises who provided him with boots and shirts and so forth, all of whom would like to be paid for those things. To avoid potentially messy legal entanglements, particularly at a point when he's trying to get married to a heiress, he hides in a suburban semi-detached house under an assumed name - and, of course, that house is right next door to where Conway already lives.

The plot is a succession of the usual Wodehouse scenes: talking in offices, scheming for money or love, amusing collisions of interesting characters, leaping through conveniently open windows into strange houses, being bothered by the radical anti-aristocratic element so common in the new suburbs, and so forth. There's no official impostors, though one character does pretend to be a Secret Service agent for quite a long time. As I said up top, it comes together swiftly at the end and closes out in a great moment rather than wasting time anatomizing everyone's happy endings - at his best, Wodehouse was confident enough to imply and be done with it.