She bent over the spaniel. A keen observer might have noted a defensiveness in her manner. She looked like a girl preparing to cope with an aunt.
He was the sort of man who would have tried to cheer Napoleon up by talking about the Winter Sports at Moscow.
From somewhere in his system he contrived to dig up and fasten on his face an ingratiating smile.
I sniffed the dog’s breath and it was like opening the kitchen door of a Soho chophouse on a summer night.
Few things have such a tonic effect on a young man accustomed to be a little heavy on waking in the morning as the discovery that he has stolen a prize pig overnight.
She looked like something that might have occurred to Ibsen in one of his less frivolous moments.
Plot summary
Having sacked his capable secretary, the Efficient Rupert Baxter, Lord Emsworth has hired posh, drawling Hugo Carmody to be his replacement. Lord Emsworth’s sister, Lady Constance Keeble, strongly disapproves of Hugo’s lazy, half-hearted approach (which Lord Emsworth actively welcomes) and would disapprove even more if she knew that Hugo is in love with her niece, Millicent (daughter of her and Lord Emsworth’s deceased brother, Lancelot Threepwood). Lady Constance wishes Millicent would accept her nephew, Ronald ‘Ronnie’ Fish, as a suitable suitor. And Millicent is herself jealous when she hears that Hugo had, until meeting her, been going round London with a chorus girl named Sue Brown.
Meanwhile, staying in Biarritz with his mother, Ronnie has met a charming American girl named Miss Schoonmaker. But although everyone thinks she’s very eligible (i.e. rich) Ronnie is in fact in love with the same chorus girl, Sue Brown, back in London. He and Hugo both took a shine to her when they were co-owners of a West End nightclub which (quickly) went bust. Trouble is that this Sue Brown has been attracting attention from other suitors, not least a hateful little man, a private investigator named P. Frobisher Pilbeam, making Ronnie very jealous.
Trouble crops up when, after going for a drive, Ronnie and Sue return to his apartment to discover Lady Constance on the doorstep. Knowing she’d go bananas if she found him gallivanting with a chorus girl, Ronnie improvises and introduces Sue as Miss Schoonmaker, the eligible American he met in Biarritz. Lady Constance is pleased he’s squiring a millionaire’s daughter and departs for tea at Claridge’s. At which point Sue points out that Ronnie’s really dug a hole for himself because this Miss Schoonmaker has been invited to stay at Blandings, at which point Lady Constance will discover that he lied!
Added into the mix is the fact that Constance and Lord Emsworth’s disreputable brother, The Honourable Galahad ‘Gally’ Threepwood, has also come to stay at Blandings to finish writing his memoirs. Since he has led a thoroughly scandalous life, these promise to be very entertaining apart from the fact that he appears to be setting down disreputable stories about just about everyone in his generation, including all Lord Emsworth’s and Lady Constance’s friends – when it’s published they’ll become social pariahs for giving him the facilities to finish the wretched thing.
Which is why Lady Constance secretly writes a letter to the super-efficient old secretary, Rupert Baxter, begging him to come back and resolve the situation. Not to put too fine a point on it, she wants him to steal Gally’s manuscript. ‘Mr Baxter, you are my only hope!’
Meanwhile Ronnie, having arrived at Blandings, is desperately seeking some way of extracting the money held for him in trust by his uncle, ahead of his 25th birthday. He wants the money so he can marry Sue. In desperation he comes up with a wizard wheeze: how about if he kidnaps his uncle’s pride and joy, the enormous prize-winning pig Empress of Blandings, made it disappear for a few days, driving his uncle frantic, and then discovered and returned it, thus securing his uncle’s eternal gratitude? What a great plan. What could possibly go wrong? Well for a start, what could go wrong is (once he’s carried out the plan) if Lord Emsworth proceeds to hire a detective from London to come down and find his missing pig! And not any old detective, but the very same P. Frobisher Pilbeam who carries a torch for Sue Brown.
When Hugo goes up to town to put the proposition of finding the missing pig to Pilbeam, he takes the opportunity to look up old Sue and invite her out dancing. She agrees but they both need to keep it hushed up from their respective partners, Ronnie who has become convinced Sue is seeing someone else, and Millicent who is sure Hugo is still in love with this Sue woman.
Hugo takes Sue to a club named Mario’s and they dance a bit. When he goes to make a phone call, his place is taken by the oily Pilbeam creep. He’s been tailing them and now wants to press his suit to Sue. But at the same moment, big strong Ronnie has arrived. He’d driven up to London to check up on Sue, the doorman at her apartment block told him Sue had gone out to this nightclub, and Ronnie arrived just in time to see her sharing a table with oily Pilbeam and draw completely the wrong conclusion, that he is her boyfriend. He makes to attack Pilbeam but a waiter, then two, then three, then a whole crowd of waiters get in the way and Ronnie tries to punch them all before an enormous doorman arrives, immobilises him and hands him over to the police.
Next morning he’s had up in front of a judge who very handily only fines him £5. Driving him back to his hotel, Hugo tries to tell him that Sue was at the club with him, Hugo, but Ronnie thinks he’s just doing the decent thing to protect her. When Hugo drops Ronnie the latter spies Sue and storms off. When Sue arrives Hugo tells her that Pilbeam had rung up Millicent at Blanding and told her that her fiancé was out dancing with another woman, with the result that she called him and called off their engagement.
So both couples (Ronnie-Sue, Hugo-Millicent) are in disarray. This is when Sue has her Big Plan. Lady Constance already thinks she’s this Miss Schoonmaker. Why doesn’t she announce she’s taking up the invitation and coming down to Blandings now, today? Once there she will be on the spot to set Ronnie straight and regain his heart. And Millicent, once she sees Ronnie engaged to her, Sue, will realise that Hugo really was only friends with her (Sue) and will let Hugo off. What could go wrong? Hugo objects that the real Miss Schoonmaker might turn up at any moment, but Sue points out that Ronnie had already sent her a few telegrams telling her scarlet fever had broken out at Blandings and she must keep away. So she heads off to Blandings to arrive as an honoured guest.
Meanwhile, on the pig front, Gally has become irrationally convinced that the pig thief must be Lord Emsworth’s rival, Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parslow of Matchingham Hall. They confront him about it which he, of course, vehemently denies and they eventually leave, with Gally threatening to include every disreputable story he can think of about Sir Gregory in his book.
Cut to Sir Gregory turning up on the doorstep of the Argus Enquiry Agency and telling Pilbeam he is terrified about what Gally is going to write about him and asking him to get his hands on the manuscript and destroy it. Pilbeam is hesitant because how is he going to get into Blandings? But Sir Gregory makes him think again when he rather rashly offers him £500 to destroy the manuscript and Pilbeam has a brainwave. He checks that this is the same Blandings where the pig has been stolen, and then explains that Hugo Carmody had been to see him to ask him to look for the missing pig. At the time he turned the job down with some scorn but now he realises that if he accepts the pig job, it will be his entrée to the castle. And once in and pretending to investigate the pig thing, in reality he can take the first opportunity to get into Gally’s study and pinch the manuscript.
Going along with this, Sir Gregory suggests that he invite Lady Constance, Lord Emsworth and Gally over to his for a reconciliation dinner. That will get Gally out of the house for Pilbeam to find and pinch the manuscript.
So now there are two young men on a mission to nick it, Baxter and Pilbeam.
When Lady Constance announces to a startled Lord Emsworth that Sir Gregory has invited them to dinner, he refuses, but is surprised when Gally of all people says that, on the contrary, they should go. As soon as Lady Constance has left, Gally explains why. They will go to dinner with Sir Gregory, pretend to accept his olive branch, but then steal his pig in revenge!
So you get the picture. It’s a country house farce, combining a pair of love stories featuring fake identities, jealousies and misunderstandings; along with not one but two pig kidnappings fraught with comic complications; and then the cack-handed attempts to steal the notorious manuscript by not one but two notoriously inept young men. Enjoy!
Cast
- Clarence, ninth Earl of Emsworth – ‘a long, lean, stringy man of about sixty’, in Sue’s eyes ‘a long, stringy man of mild and benevolent aspect’
- Beach – his butler
- James – a footman
- Thomas – another footman
- Hugo Carmody – Lord Emsworth’s secretary, tall, languid, expert on the saxophone and in love with…
- Miss Millicent – Lord Emsworth’s niece, daughter of his late brother, Lancelot Threepwood – ‘a tall, fair girl with soft blue eyes and a face like the Soul’s Awakening. Her whole appearance radiated wholesome innocence’
- Lady Constance Keeble – Lord Emsworth’s sister, ‘a woman of still remarkable beauty, with features cast in a commanding mould and fine eyes’
- The Honourable Galahad ‘Gally’ Threepwood – brother of the Earl of Emsworth and Lady Constance – come to Blandings to write his memoirs – ‘a short, trim, dapper little man of the type one associates automatically in one’s mind with checked suits, tight trousers, white bowler hats, pink carnations and race-glasses bumping against the left hip’ – Number One in the Thriftless Aristocrats series written about by Pilbeam in his Society Spice days
- Ronald ‘Ronnie’ Fish – self-consciously short, Lord Emsworth’s nephew, Eton and Cambridge – he and Hugo ran a nightclub called the Hot Spot, just off Bond Street – now going out with Sue Brown, see below (Miles Fish, Ronnie’s father, had been the biggest fool in the Brigade of Guards)
- Lady Julia Fish – Ronald’s mother, doesn’t appear in the book (‘In this chronicle the Lady Julia Fish, relict of the late Major-General Sir Miles Fish, C.B.O. of the Brigade of Guards, has made no appearance’)
- Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parslow of Matchingham Hall – 52, neighbouring landowner and rival in prize flower, vegetable and pig competitions – fat, terrified of being exposed in Gally’s memoirs, especially the notorious story about him and the prawns!
- Mr Mortimer Mason – stout senior partner in the firm of Mason and Saxby, Theatrical Enterprises, Ltd – employer of…
- Sue Brown – chorus girl – ‘a tiny thing, mostly large eyes and a wide, happy smile. She had a dancer’s figure and in every movement of her there was Youth’ – who Ronnie Fish is desperately in love with – her mother was a chorus girl
- Mac, the guardian of the stage door at the Regal Theatre in Shaftesbury Avenue, weighs 17 stone (!)
- Rupert Baxter – also know as The Efficient Baxter, Lord Emsworth’s former secretary, ‘a swarthy complexioned young man with a supercilious expression’
- P. Frobisher Pilbeam – owner of the Argus Enquiry Agency, one-time editor of the society gossip magazine Society Spice – his ‘eyes were too small and too close together and he marcelled his hair in a manner distressing to right-thinking people’ – in Ronnie’s eyes, a ‘reptilian looking squirt with narrow eyes and his hair done in ridges’
- Pirbright – Lord Emsworth’s new pig man
Thoughts
It’s long and farcically complicated, with many funny moments, but I didn’t like ‘Summer Lightning’ as much as any of the Jeeves and Wooster novels or as much as ‘Leave It To Psmith’. The Psmith book took a while to get started, bumbling around with the three young women who’d been at school together but once Psmith himself entered the story, he galvanised it with his distinct kind of carefree upper class behaviour and absurdist flights of fantasy. He really stands out as a character as do, in their ways, Jeeves and Wooster.
By contrast none of the characters in this novel stand out so vividly. Hugo Carmody is a watered-down version of posh twit Bertie Wooster just as the butler Beach is on the way to but doesn’t have the omnicompetence of Jeeves. Addle-brained Lord Emsworth is always funny but his sister Constance doesn’t have the vivid presence of either of Bertie’s terrible aunts, loud Aunt Dahlia or the feared Aunt Agatha.
Credit
‘Summer Lightning’ by P.G. Wodehouse was published in 1929 by Herbert Jenkins. I read it online.
Books & Boots 