‘…Why not take a chance? You would like Hollywood, you know. Everybody does. Girdled by the everlasting hills, bathed in eternal sunshine. Honest, it kind of gets to you. What I mean, there’s something going on there all the time. Malibu. Catalina. Aqua Caliente. And if you aren’t getting divorced yourself, there’s always one of your friends is, and that gives you something to chat about in the long evenings. And it isn’t half such a crazy place as they make out. I know two-three people in Hollywood that are part sane.’

Monty Bodkin, hero of P.G. Wodehouse’s The Luck of the Bodkins, is a fairly unassuming chap. Decent looking, and rich to boot. All he wants is to marry Gertrude Butterwick, stalwart member of the All England Women’s Field Hockey team. But Gertrude, for all her charms, has a lamentable inclination to jealousy. While they were at Cannes, she noticed Monty appreciating the on-screen beauty of movie star Lotus Blossom, and she promptly broke their engagement. Now she’s about to board the ship SS Atlantic, steaming off to America with her teammates.

So Monty books passage himself. On the same ship, as luck (and the plot) would have it, sails none other but Lotus “Lottie” Blossom herself, along with her fiancé, Monty’s old school chum Ambrose Tennyson, whom Lottie’s boss, movie tycoon Ivor Llewellyn (also aboard), has hired as a screen writer (under the misapprehension that he’s the Tennyson who wrote “The Charge of the Light Brigade”). Ivor is suffering internal torments, having been commanded by his masterful wife to smuggle a pearl necklace into New York for her. Also aboard is Ambrose’s brother Reggie, off to take an unwanted job in Canada on the orders of his family. He’d rather marry Ivor’s assistant Mabel, but can’t afford it.

So what we’ve got is three young couples, two of whom are desperately trying, as fortunes alter, to find angles by which to manipulate Ivor into giving the guy a cushy Hollywood job. Except for Monty, who neither wants nor needs a job, but Gertrude’s father expects him to hold one as a demonstration of character. As all this intrigue swirls around the dyspeptic movie tycoon, everyone’s calculations are advanced and frustrated, in turn, by Albert Peasemarch, the well-meaning but not terribly bright room steward, sort of a Jeeves without the intellect.

I first read The Luck of the Bodkins back in the 1970s, and remembered it as one of my favorites. I am pleased to report that age has not dimmed, nor custom staled, its infinite variety. This particular novel is especially rich in Wodehouse Girls – those mercurial, impulsive, implacable creatures who rule their men absolutely and are clearly well on their ways to becoming those formidable Aunts who infest Bertie Wooster’s adventures. Lottie Blossom is a prime example, and one of my personal favorites.

Highly, highly recommended. I laughed out loud, at frequent intervals.