Something Fishy: Summary & Reading Guide

A butler with information has his own price

Keggs the butler hears enough about a scheme to see how it might be profitable to him. That is a wonderfully Wodehouse sort of beginning: the person who has quietly served the household possesses a fact that the louder people would prefer to control. Percy Pilbeam, now the head of the Argus Detective Agency, enters the affair too. The plot involves promises of money, competing interests and the difficulty of keeping a secret inside a world where servants, relations and investigators all observe more than they admit. I return for the way a seemingly secondary witness can become a leading mover.

Keggs’s professional position is important. A butler may have access to rooms and conversations while being expected to remain discreet. If he decides that discretion has value, the entire balance of a plan changes. Wodehouse often makes the employer’s certainty about a servant’s obedience comic; here the listener can act independently. The title Something Fishy alerts us to suspicion without disclosing whose conduct will be most suspect. This is a book in which knowledge, its timing and the person who holds it matter more than an imposing physical threat.

Pilbeam brings his own history. He first appeared in Bill the Conqueror as an employee of Sir George Pyke and later visited Blandings in Summer Lightning and Heavy Weather. His detective agency gives him a more explicit reason to turn other people’s secrets into work. A returning character can reward a fan without making this story a Blandings instalment. The action partly visits Valley Fields, another place on Wodehouse’s recurring map. It is satisfying to recognize those connections, but Keggs and this particular scheme should keep the focus of the page.

The UK book appeared from Herbert Jenkins on 18 January 1957. Simon and Schuster issued the US book ten days later under the title The Butler Did It. Condensed magazine versions had appeared in 1956, using the British title in both Collier’s and John Bull. The American book title offers a pointed suggestion about agency, but a changed title is not a second novel. If you are comparing editions, distinguish the original books from the earlier abridged serial. A first reading is best served by an identified full book text rather than a condensed appearance mistaken for the whole.

The plot’s pleasures are in people interpreting partial information. A confident planner may think a scheme private because he has spoken only to trusted companions. Keggs’s listening makes that confidence fragile, and Pilbeam’s arrival supplies a professional investigator who may know less at first but has every incentive to learn. Wodehouse can make a conversation perfectly polite on its surface while each participant is calculating what the other has heard. The comedy comes from the mismatch between visible manners and concealed intentions, not from a puzzle requiring the reader to catalogue clues like a police report.

This is a useful late novel for readers who enjoy Wodehouse’s networks. Valley Fields, Pilbeam and Keggs create links in different directions. Yet those links have to be described precisely: a setting recurs, a detective recurs, and a butler drives this plot. They do not combine into a single series with a continuous hero. I would shelve it among the standalones, with cross-links from the character and place guides. That way a newcomer can encounter the story without homework and a collector can still follow Pilbeam’s journey from publishing to private detection.

Choose Something Fishy for a comedy about information in the wrong hands, or perhaps the right hands from Keggs’s point of view. The US title The Butler Did It and the UK title make different promises, both relevant to the atmosphere. Let the details of the scheme unfold in the novel rather than in a spoiler-heavy summary. I enjoy the delicate shift when a person expected to stand silently at the edge of a room reveals that he has been listening closely enough to alter everybody’s plans.