The Butler Did It

by P.G. Wodehouse

Butler Augustus Keggs becomes involved after a group of millionaires devise a plot to invest money in a marital tontine.

Genres: Humor, Fiction, British Literature

222 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1957

About the author

Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, KBE, was a comic writer who enjoyed enormous popular success during a career of more than seventy years and continues to be widely read over 40 years after his death. Despite the political and social upheavals that occurred during his life, much of which was spent in France and the United States, Wodehouse's main canvas remained that of prewar English upper-class society, reflecting his birth, education, and youthful writing career.

An acknowledged master of English prose, Wodehouse has been admired both by contemporaries such as Hilaire Belloc, Evelyn Waugh and Rudyard Kipling and by more recent writers such as Douglas Adams, Salman Rushdie and Terry Pratchett. Sean O'Casey famously called him "English literature's performing flea", a description that Wodehouse used as the title of a collection of his letters to a friend, Bill Townend.

Best known today for the Jeeves and Blandings Castle novels and short stories, Wodehouse was also a talented playwright and lyricist who was part author and writer of fifteen plays and of 250 lyrics for some thirty musical comedies. He worked with Cole Porter on the musical Anything Goes (1934) and frequently collaborated with Jerome Kern and Guy Bolton. He wrote the lyrics for the hit song Bill in Kern's Show Boat (1927), wrote the lyrics for the Gershwin/Romberg musical Rosalie (1928), and collaborated with Rudolf Friml on a musical version of The Three Musketeers (1928).

Reviews

[Leslie · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5*
Originally published under the title "Something Fishy", this stand-alone shows Wodehouse at his best. Hilarious!
Read in the omnibus "P.G. Wodehouse: 5 Complete Novels"

[QNPoohBear · Rating 3 out of 5]

In September 1929 a bunch of millionaires got together to decide what to do with their money. The only non-millionaire in attendance, Mortimer Bayliss, proposes a tontine: each one pays $1 million into a pool and the last one left living gets the lot. The millionaires disliked the scheme, so Bayliss proposed a new scheme to benefit their heirs: the money will go to the last of their sons to marry. This plan met with approval and by 1955 there are two heirs left on the market: Roscoe Bunyan, a thoroughly nasty chap and one other. Augustus Keggs, former butler to Mr. Bunyan, senior, knows of the tontine and tries to use the information to his advantage: he tips Roscoe Bunyan off in exchange for payment. However, Roscoe is notoriously tight fisted and tries to cheat Keggs. Keggs is smarter than he appears and decides that Bunyan will come off the loser if he has anything to say about it. Keggs' former employer, Lord Uffenham and his niece Jane share lodgings with Keggs while Roscoe Bunyan rents their family home. The niece, Jane, is engaged to a poor sculptor next door, despite the fact her uncle doesn't approve. She doesn't need his approval to marry, just money, and how Twine is going to get some money is up to Keggs and Mortimer Bayliss. They will do anything to thwart Roscoe Bunyan and promote the last remaining heir. Meanwhile, Bill Hollist, a frustrated artist, is working for an art gallery and has given up his own work. He has thousands of plans if he had money, but his boss doesn't see his potential. When he falls in love, he knows he needs some money which might come his way, but is he willing to give it all up for love? Roscoe is in a sticky situation and hires Pilbeam to do his dirty work. Will he succeed? Who will end up with the money?

This isn't Wodehouse's best work. It's a longer version of an earlier magazine serial titled Something Fishy. It's unusual because most of the story revolves around the tontine heirs and the love story is secondary. It lacks that extreme crazy screwball scene that Wodehouse was known for. The humor is less zany and not really all that funny. The main characters are two dimensional and downright unlikeable, with the exception of Jane. She's a true Wodehousian heroine: lovely, devoted and deeply attached to the man she loves. However, her love story comes out of thin air. I don't believe love can happen in an instant even if they had met before. Bill is an idiot. He has no brains in his head and everything he says is ridiculous. Same with Lord Uffenham but at least he's funny. He's similar to Galahad Threepwood and Uncle Fred but not as quick on the uptake. I couldn't stand him. I was torn between not liking Keggs and enjoying him. I guess I liked his dialogue because it was funny to have a butler speaking high-falutin' English when Lord Uffenham speaks so casually. I didn't approve of his morals. Roscoe Bunyan may have been a nasty child and is a cheapskate but I actually sort of felt bad for him. I also felt bad for Pilbeam, for all he's an unlikeable worm, he was up against external circumstances. There was plenty of room for Wodehouse to exercise his comic genius in Pilbeam's grand scene but it fell flat.

[Joe Boenzi · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a child I often heard the phrase "The Butler did it", as referring to a unsolved problem (or unsolved mystery over a "dastardly deed"). The phrase itself is hilarious, and now I wonder if it came from this book by P. G. Wodehouse.

The plot follows a lot of strains that Wodehouse explored in other novels that he wrote during the immediate Post-War period: British nobility facing lost fortunes, elderly people adapting to a post-privileged position in Society, a love story (often a triangle) among young adults trying also to secure a better future financially, and multiple role-reversals. Wodehouse mixes these ingredients into a hilarious comedy (can it be a comedy of manners?) that reads like a screenplay (but then, Wodehouse also wrote movie scripts).

The "butler" in question appears early in the story as arrogant and antagonistic, yet in the end is seen as working competently to ensure a good outcome for several families. Yes, and I said "role-reversals" - the reversals are ongoing so that the story is unpredictable from start to finish, making it a great deal of fun as it gives the reader a glimpse into the post-war period when the tragedies of a terrible war needed to be put behind and people wanted to look forward with optimism to a new hopes for the future for themselves and for their countries. Maybe the Butler was responsible for that as well.

[Jeff Crompton · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the better Wodehouse novels not associated with a recurring series (such as the Jeeves & Bertie books or Blandings Castles novels). Keggs, a retired butler, manipulates the results of a tontine for the benefit of the good guys (and himself). Roscoe Bunyan, as thoroughly an unpleasant character as Wodehouse ever drew, comes up on the short end, and probably deserves it. There are some typical Wodehouse subplots here, with young people engaged to the wrong other young people (it all works out, of course), but the main plot is something new for Wodehouse - not bad for a writer in his 75th year.

[Tom · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well written, of course, and exceedingly pleasant but not the laff riot one hopes for when reaching for a Plum.

[Mark Isaak · Rating 4 out of 5]

An art critic, Mortimer Bayliss, suggests to a group of millionaires that they form a tontine that pay the last of their sons to remain unmarried. The rest of the book details what happens when that list dwindles to two. Not one of Wodehouse's funniest, but still pretty good. The characters are (I think) unique to this book, but I wouldn't have minded seeing more of Bayliss and Lord Uffenham in other stories.

[Ann · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like all PG Wodehouse's books, except perhaps the golf stories, but this is one of my favorites. It is less formulaic than some of the Jeeves books, and although it was written in the late fifties, it isn't as anachronistic as some of his other books from that period.

The plot, as usual with PG Wodehouse, is too rocambolesque for a review. Suffice it to say that right before the 1929 crash, a group of inebriated American millionnaires make a wager that will result in about a million dollars going to the last bachelor standing among their sons. Fast forward twenty-five years later and the only two people in England remembering the bet are a retired butler and a sardonic art expert. The only two remaining bachelors among the millionnaires' offspring are the revolting Roscoe and our hero, Bill. Te former is a capitalist, the latter a penniless artist, now cheerfully scraping by an existence as assistant in an art gallery. On the other side, there is the impoverished and eccentric Lord Uffingham, his spunky niece Jane (our heroine) and a rather nasty aspiring sculptor. Bring all these elements together and ...boom... mayhem ensues. Engagements are broken, compromising letters are purloined, knockout drops are administered and more than a little polite blackmail is committed. All good fun.

My favorite line of the book occurs when Lord Uffingham complains after tussling with a burglar in the middle of the day, that he thought these folks only came out at night. A bystander observes casually :" You must be thinking of dramatic critics".

[Joe Stevens · Rating 3 out of 5]

If your next door neighbor hiked up a smallish mountain on the edge of town you would say "Well done, Wilberforce." On the other hand if you read that Sir Edmund Hillary had hiked up a smallish mountain on the edge of his town you would yawn. So it is with PG Wodehouse. When he writes a moderately humorous but unremarkable novel you toss it 3 stars and move along.

The plot is fairly interesting as it details a bet between some fabulously rich men just before the great crash of 29 who form a pool to be given to the son who marries last. A few decades later there is some in and out running to acquire this fortune. Sadly while the plot is solid, the actual humor of the piece is a sort of rippling stream rather than the full Mississippian flow of laughter than the great Wodehouse novels bring.

The really sad thing about the novel is the fair waste of two quite lovely characters. Keggs is a fine mostly ex-butler while pear shaped Lord Uffenham was a riot in Money in the Bank. It felt like the author had a lovely drive to the green with plot and characters to spare and then four putted. Here funny rather sputters, the descriptions lie unexplored and the two splendid characters are just pleasant companions on a summer eve as is the novel.

[William Leight · Rating 3 out of 5]

(Perhaps better known by its English title, "Something Fishy", but for whatever reason I've only ever read this one under the U.S. title.) Late-ish Wodehouse that has a good idea -- a tontine in which the winner is the last to marry, rather than the last to die -- and some snappy dialogue. Unfortunately, it suffers from the usual Wodehouse repetitiveness -- in addition to recycled characters, the early description of Valley Fields was first used in "Big Money" 26 years before, and the plot point in which the young couple is brought together when the male half is knocked out was already pretty stale before Wodehouse started using it once every few years -- as well as the usual late Wodehouse tendency for the plot threads to sort of peter out rather than finding a real resolution. Still recommended for Wodehouse fans, thanks to the aforementioned dialogue -- Bill Hollister is not original, but Wodehouse does him about as well as he has ever done heroes of his type, and Mortimer Bayliss's acerbity is a delight -- but definitely not for newcomers.

[Paula · Rating 3 out of 5]

I could tell you the plot of this book, but why bother? His plots are as insubstantial as a spider's web - although sometimes just as intricately woven - and his characters are as deep as a puddle after a light April shower, but nobody writes like P. G. Wodehouse. If he's not your cup of tea so be it, but in my fantasies there's nowhere I'd rather be than in the idyllic, sunny, not-based at-all in-reality world of between-the-wars England that he creates in his books*. Dignified butlers; pudding-headed chaps with too much money - or not enough; grand estates shimmering green and lush in the sunshine; prize pigs; bright, charming young women who so often seem about to marry the wrong man, but don't in the nick of time; it's all lovely. Not at all deep, but so fun.

(*This book actually takes place in 1955, but there's really not much in it to place the story in any given time - I think Wodehouse mentions the year, and television antennas, once, and that's about it).

[Liz · Rating 5 out of 5]

How can any mystery-lover resist a book on the library shelf called The Butler Did It? It proved to be witty and entertaining, with no murders at all! Instead, the mystery centers
around a pact, a tontine, in which several millionaires had put up money, and it goes on accumulating until the last of their sons marries, and he gets the lot. Of course, the sons don’t know this – more’s the fun – and the tontine will now go to either Bill Hollister (our hero) or Roscoe Bunyan (our villain). Mixed up in this are an art-expert friend of the now-dead millionaires, Mortimer Bayliss; an impoverished lord, Uffington, recently forced to let out the ancestral home to the villain Bunyan; Uffington’s lovely niece and ward, Jane; and, of course, the butler, one Augustus Keggs. Lovely!

[Arthur Pierce · Rating 3 out of 5]

A pleasant enough Wodehouse novel from his late middle period or early late period. It is typical in characters and incident (with a couple of characters who appear in other stories by the author), and, Wodehouse being Wodehouse, nothing startling or surprising happens. That said, this book is consistently entertaining and, even in his mid' 70s, Wodehouse was still one of the worlds greatest humorists.

[Joyce · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Most of his acquaintances would have preferred far less of this singularly unattractive young man, but he had insisted on giving full measure, bulging freely in all directions. His face was red, the back of his neck overflowed his collar, and there had recently been published a second edition of his chin."

[Kris Ivy · Rating 4 out of 5]

A hysterical look at society through the eyes of the romantic and the greedy with a side of comically steaming plot.

[Tollula · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was my first novel by P. G. Wodehouse and enjoyed it immensely. Definitely going to read other titles by him.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of Wodehouse's lesser known comedies, but well worth the read.

[Elian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Convoluted and delightful. :) A plethora of personalities and accents written in the characters!

[Vicki · Rating 4 out of 5]

Complicated comic plot involving a marriage tontine.

[Joseph · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this one very much.

[Becky Osmon · Rating 3 out of 5]

My first Wodehouse, dug it.

[Joanna · Rating 4 out of 5]

A particularly delightful plot.