Frozen Assets: Summary & Reading Guide

One arrest could transfer Biffen’s inheritance

Edmund Biffen Christopher stands to inherit a fortune from his godfather if he can avoid arrest until his thirtieth birthday, only a week away. Lord Tilbury would receive the money if Biffen fails the condition, and he has engaged Percy Pilbeam to arrange precisely that failure. It is a compact Wodehouse premise: the apparent beneficiary must behave impeccably for a very short time, while an experienced publisher and a private detective have a financial reason to make him do the opposite. I enjoy how a legal condition can turn an ordinary week into a battlefield of invitations, provocations and witnesses.

Biffen’s past has included enough encounters with the police to make the condition meaningful. He cannot dismiss the risk as wholly imaginary, and Tilbury has no need to persuade him openly to misbehave. Pilbeam can contrive circumstances in which an impulsive choice looks dangerous. The competition is therefore over behaviour and appearances, not merely over possession of a document. Wodehouse’s farce thrives on people acting with one understanding of a situation while another participant has staged it for a very different result. Seven days are long enough for a great deal of that staging.

Tilbury’s role is especially satisfying to a reader following the author’s recurring characters. Sir George Pyke first appeared in Bill the Conqueror and later became Lord Tilbury; this is his final appearance. Pilbeam also began in that earlier book, and by now has his own detective agency. Seeing the former employer and employee working towards an unpleasant goal brings their long history into a new plot. Their appearances do not make Frozen Assets a direct sequel to Bill. The inherited money and Biffen’s probationary week belong to this novel, whose action is mostly in Valley Fields.

The suburb is again useful for a story in which people need to know who has been seen where. A neighbourhood with familiar houses and routes provides social evidence as well as scenery. Tilbury’s agent must operate near Biffen without advertising the real purpose of the operation. Biffen, meanwhile, cannot simply lock himself away and wait for a birthday if other relationships and claims intrude. I return for the asymmetry: the man who stands to gain has to remain careful, while the wealthy antagonist can hire somebody else to risk an attempt at sabotage.

The US edition appeared first, on 14 July 1964 from Simon and Schuster, under the title Biffen’s Millions. Herbert Jenkins published the UK book as Frozen Assets on 14 August. An abridged Playboy serial preceded both, using the American title. These are alternate regional book names and a condensed magazine version of one novel. The British title emphasizes money that cannot yet be touched; the American title emphasizes the young man whose conduct determines who receives it. Both convey the wager without giving away the sequence of encounters that tests him.

A detective employed to manufacture trouble has a different function from a detective hired to reveal truth. Pilbeam’s professional resourcefulness is directed by Tilbury’s interest, which makes every appearance of ordinary inquiry suspect. Biffen’s condition also invites a moral question of comic scale: avoiding arrest is not necessarily the same thing as becoming virtuous, and being arrested would not necessarily tell us everything about his character. Wodehouse uses the legal formula as machinery, then lets people’s motives complicate what the formula seems to measure. The result is a farce with a deadline rather than a courtroom drama.

Choose Frozen Assets when you want a late Valley Fields novel with a clear clock, an inheritance and two veteran schemers returning to the stage. You can read it cold; follow Tilbury and Pilbeam’s earlier books if their shared history interests you. I like the short interval before the birthday, the contrast between Biffen’s need for restraint and Tilbury’s appetite for manipulation, and the way the two titles frame the same contest differently. The exact stratagems are better encountered as the week unfolds.