Leave It to Psmith is the fourth, last, and best of those novels: it appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in 1923 as a serial and then soon afterward in book form. It is also a Blandings Castle novel; even this early, Wodehouse was mixing and matching his series, as if they all lived in the same, consistent world. It's actually only the second Blandings novel, after the 1915 Something Fresh; it's early enough that Lord Emsworth is still obsessed with flowers rather than pigs.
We originally met Psmith in school, where he quickly overshadowed the supposed hero, Mike Jackson. He's tall, thin, well-dressed, and gifted with both an unstoppable flow of patter and an unassailable belief in his ability to handle anything at all. (The reader can see why Wodehouse dropped him so early: a character who can accomplish anything can become difficult to handle in the main role, and works better as a supporting act, as with Jeeves or Uncle Fred.) The two middle Psmith books - Psmith in the City and Psmith, Journalist - were transitional books, mixing comedy and thriller plots. Leave It is basically mature Wodehouse, with some guns and criminals but treating them in a comic way.
Psmith is a young man looking out for his next adventure here; he has been working for a relative in a business involving fish - actual, cold, dead fish, which Psmith has come to realize he does not like at all - and is now ready to do just about anything else:
LEAVE IT TO PSMITH!
Psmith Will Help You
Psmith Is Ready For Anything
DO YOU WANT
Someone To Manage Your Affairs?
Someone To Handle Your Business?
Someone To Take The Dog For A Run?
Someone To Assassinate Your Aunt?
PSMITH WILL DO IT
CRIME NOT OBJECTED TO
Whatever Job You Have To Offer
(Provided It Has Nothing To Do With Fish)
LEAVE IT TO PSMITH!
That's the advertisement he places in a major London newspaper. It draws the attention of Lord Emsworth's dim son Freddie, who - as so often is the case in Wodehouse - desires to help his uncle steal his (the uncle's) wife's necklace and use that to support his (still the uncle's) stepdaughter. The stepdaughter, to make it even more complex, is married to Mike Jackson, Psmith's old school chum.
Freddie travels to London, to meet Psmith, at the same time Emsworth is heading up to meet a famous Canadian poet and bring that poet to stay at Blandings for an extended visit - Lady Constance, Emsworth's sister and the current owner of the necklace to be stolen, is very fond of literary figures and have been inflicting a series on them on Blandings for several years.
Of course this all leads to Psmith coming to Blandings as an impostor, pretending to be that Canadian poet. And he has fallen in love with the young woman just hired to catalog the Blandings library. And there are other, more sinister figures, looking to steal the necklace as well.
This is mature-period Wodehouse, so it's complex and witty and full of wonderful writing - his later books were still fun and wonderfully written, but the plots tended to thin down a bit. Here Wodehouse is still on the way up, adding in complication after complication and delighting in the chaos it creates.
Wodehouse's books are not serious in any way, and are wonderful precisely because of that. They create their own world, and explore all the permutations of that stranger, sillier, more entertaining and lovely world - this is one of the earliest of his best books, and a good place to start for readers who haven't discovered Wodehouse yet. It's also a good place to dive in for people who have only read Jeeves and Wooster - Blandings has another half-dozen novels basically as good as this, even if the prior Psmith books are odder and quirkier.
[1] With an asterisk on both counts for Ukridge, who was slightly earlier and even more obscure now.
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