The Plot That Thickened by P. G. Wodehouse

"Married men don't assert themselves, not if they know what's good for them."

I decided to read the sequel to P. G. Wodehouse's The Luck of the Bodkins while that 1935 novel was still fresh in my mind, and hunted it up on the internet archive.  The best available scan of the book was not of the 1972 British edition, entitled Pearls, Girls, and Monty Bodkin, but the 1973 U. S. printing, which bears the title The Plot That Thickened.  

Monty has worked for Ivor Llewellyn's Hollywood studio for a year as the novel opens.  Thinking this year of labor will satisfy his fiancé Gertrude Butterwick's father (J. G. Butterwick doesn't want his daughter marrying some loafer, even a loafer like Monty who is rich through inheritance) he quits his job and returns home to England.  Alas and alack, Gertrude honors her father to a fault, and told dear old Dad how Monty got his job with Llewellyn: by holding hostage a piece of jewelry Llewellyn was smuggling into America at the behest of his domineering wife Grayce.  J. G. rules that this underhanded method of gaining employment invalidates Monty's year of work as evidence he is not a loafer; if Monty wants to get Butterwick's essential approval for his marriage to Gertrude, he will have to take on another job, and it is not like this goofball has many marketable skills.

In Hollywood, Monty had a beautiful blonde secretary, Sandy Miller.  Sandy fell in love with the good-looking Monty, and was shaken when he suddenly left the Left Coast for his old stomping grounds in London.  But Sandy is resourceful; she gets a job as Grayce Llewelyn's assistant right before the Llewellyns leave for a trip to England; she accompanies the power couple and, once in London, quickly tracks down the love of her life.  Sandy immediately does Monty a good turn: Grayce is badgering her husband into writing a history of his film studio, Superba-Llewellyn, and Sandy fixes it up so Grayce orders Ivor to hire Monty as his secretary for this project, which Ivor has no interest in doing and to which Monty has no ability to contribute (in The Luck of the Bodkins he proved unable to spell "inexplicable.")

There is a high volume of odd discrepancies between The Plot that Thickened, which was written at the dawn of the disco era, and The Luck of the Bodkins, written in the Thirties.  The Luck of the Bodkins was very much set in the 1930s--the Depression and Prohibition are mentioned, for example, and Sir Stafford Cripps gets a shout out.  But, even though it takes place just a year later, in The Plot that Thickened, we get mentions of TV studio audiences, Playboy magazine, and the stereotype of the Texas oil millionaire, things which I'm pretty sure did not exist in the 1930s.  It seems crazy for Wodehouse to have set this sequel. in which his characters are only a year older, in the 1970s, but he did it anyway.

Other discrepancies have nothing to do with the date but are changes to the characters which seem to have been made to accommodate the plot Wodehouse wanted to run them through.  In The Luck of the Bodkins, Grayce was described as "young and lovely," but here in The Plot That Thickened we find she has a daughter from a previous marriage who has already graduated from Vassar.  This daughter, Mavis, is even more domineering than Grayce.  In The Luck of the Bodkins, Ivor Llewellyn had never heard of Alfred Lord Tennyson, but in The Plot That Thickened, when describing the customary tyranny of woman, he says he fell in love with a schoolteacher when he was young and she forced him to study English literature.  There are additional jarring incongruities, in particular regarding Monty and Gertrude, that I won't list here. 

Anyway, Ivor and Grayce have rented an English country house, and they take up residence there along with their assistants Monty and Sandy.  Mavis is worried that burglars will steal a pearl necklace (a different necklace from the one smuggled in The Luck of the Bodkins), so Mavis insists her mother hire a private detective to guard them; this detective will pretend to be Ivor's valet and also serve as Grayce's spy, reporting to Grayce if her obese husband goes off his diet.  The private dick Grayce hires is none other than thief Chimp Twist, who appeared in Ice in the Bedroom, a Wodehouse book I read back in 2015.  Ivor and Grayce have also foolishly befriended the other thieves from Ice in the Bedroom, the married couple Soapy and Dolly Molloy, and invited them to come stay in the country house.

One thread of the plot concerns the thieves' efforts to seize the necklace; Monty's life is complicated by the fact that Mavis suspects Monty of being in league with the thieves and Ivor actually hopes the necklace will be stolen, because it is an almost worthless string of "Japanese cultured" pearls, he having sold the real ones given Grayce by her first husband so he might have some ready cash--he needs cash because his bank account is a joint one and Grayce watches it like a hawk and would never approve expenditures on Ivor's hobbies, like gambling and drinking.  And Monty's life is already complicated, because the other main plot thread is how he has fallen in love with Sandy and lost interest in Gertrude, but feels he has to go through with his marriage to Gertrude because a Bodkin must keep his word.  In the end the criminals end up with the almost valueless pearls, Ivor is liberated from his oppressive marriage to Grayce when she demands a divorce (in The Luck of the Bodkins Ivor feared divorce but in The Plot That Thickened he welcomes it) and Gertrude calls off her engagement to Monty and he immediately gets engaged to Sandy.  Don't worry about Mavis and Gertrude; they also get engaged (to offscreen characters.)

The Plot That Thickened is not bad; I laughed and the style is pleasant.  But it is not as good as The Luck of the Bodkins--I am not terribly interested in crime story shenanigans being played for laughs, and Sandy, Mavis, and the three thieves are not nearly as fun as Lotus Blossum and Ambrose Tennyson, and there are none of the silly little touches like the pet alligator and the Mickey Mouse plush toy that enlivened The Luck of the Bodkins.  I also found the changes to the characters and setting kind of annoying.  Oh, well.  I'll probably be sticking to Wodehouse's earlier work in the future.