Do Butlers Burgle Banks?: Summary & Reading Guide

Mike Bond’s bank needs the most improbable sort of rescue

Mike Bond, owner of Bond’s Bank, faces a financial predicament so awkward that a burglary before the trustees inspect the books begins to look useful. His butler Horace Appleby is an unusually qualified person to ask for help. Horace is actually an American gangster, hiding in the English countryside from rivals who know his former trade. A banker needing a crime and a criminal seeking quiet employment make a beautiful Wodehouse inversion. I enjoy the way each man’s official role conceals a need that the other may be able to satisfy, provided nobody asks the obvious questions at the wrong time.

A bank is normally the place expected to keep money safe. Mike’s desire for it to be robbed turns an accepted public purpose upside down. The coming inspection gives his problem a clock: ordinary delay will not make the accounts improve. A genuine theft might distract attention from an existing deficiency, but bringing criminals into a scheme is hardly a route to dependable control. Wodehouse lets the desperate idea sound briefly practical before the social and professional consequences begin to gather. The reader can see why Mike is tempted while also enjoying how precarious the solution must be.

Horace’s disguise has its own irony. A country-house butler is supposed to be discreet, capable and unruffled. His earlier occupation may have trained him for some of those qualities, though in circumstances his employer would not ordinarily advertise. He has chosen England for safety and a quieter life; Mike’s request threatens to make his refuge busier than the New York streets he left behind. The false identity creates comic pressure because the household sees a servant while the reader knows another set of skills is available. Asking him to use them could reveal the very thing he needs concealed.

The title asks an apparently absurd question and then supplies an answer that depends on what sort of butler one has hired. It would be easy to let the premise remain a single joke, but the novel’s strength is in the practical sequence that follows. Who can be trusted with the plan? What would a burglary make the trustees believe? How does Horace protect his present disguise while drawing upon a past he was trying to leave? Wodehouse makes each answer provisional, so an expedient intended to save the bank can produce fresh vulnerabilities around the house.

Simon and Schuster published the first American book on 5 August 1968. Herbert Jenkins issued the British edition on 19 September. Both use the question as a title. Those dates belong to this late standalone novel, not to an earlier gangster story recycled under a new name. The publisher’s account identifies Mike, Bond’s Bank and Horace’s hidden identity; the specialist bibliography confirms the first books. No narrator, screen cast or current edition claim is needed to explain the premise. The novel can stand on its own without invented adaptation credentials.

The country-house setting becomes an unlikely shelter for an international problem. Horace’s rivals are part of the reason he came there, while Mike’s financial difficulty is thoroughly local to his bank. Their troubles meet because a servant and employer must share a daily routine. That relationship usually demands obedience and privacy. Here the employer may depend upon the servant’s expertise and the servant may have reason to refuse anything that attracts notice. I return for the balance between those two needs: survival for a business and safety for a man whose new life relies on remaining unrecognized.

Choose Do Butlers Burgle Banks? for a later Wodehouse farce that states its peculiar premise in the title and then finds room to complicate it. Mike and Horace are not a Jeeves and Wooster variation; their positions and incentives are their own. The prospect of an inspection keeps the business moving, while the disguised gangster makes the English house a place of unexpected professional talent. It is a light comedy with a clear question at its heart, and I would let the book answer it before looking for a fuller account of the plot.