Rupert Baxter

Who they are

Rupert Baxter is Lord Emsworth’s efficient secretary and a comic danger to everyone at Blandings who wishes to proceed without supervision. Something Fresh introduces him in 1915. His loyalty to orderly work is sincere; he is not simply a villain dropped into the castle. Unfortunately, a castle full of guests with private motives is exactly the wrong place for a man who responds to an odd noise with investigation. Wodehouse gives him energy and a capacity for suspicion that can make perfectly ordinary conduct look like a plot. Often there really is a plot, but his method of proving it produces a second comedy of its own.

The pleasure of Baxter is the reader’s double vision. One can see why Lady Constance wants a secretary who notices what Clarence misses, and why Lord Emsworth would rather be left with his flowers and his pig. The secretary has a proper job to do; the narrative sets his standard of competence against the castle’s rather different standard of happiness. He returns across the Blandings books without making each of them a sequel about his career. Treat the linked volumes as appearances in a shared world, and read their separate notes on regional editions and collection contents.

Personality and relationships

Baxter’s alliance with Lady Constance is natural: each values a household kept under control. Clarence resists having every hour arranged for him, while Galahad knows that orderly appearances can hide a less kind reality. Psmith meets Baxter in Leave It to Psmith, a collision between an improvised identity and a man determined to identify every suspicious detail. The two are not interchangeable clever men. Psmith plays with the rules of the room; Baxter insists that rules must account for what is happening in it.

Baxter works best when the reader is allowed to recognise his grievance while hoping that he will fail in a particular intervention. No household could operate indefinitely on the assumption that everyone may borrow a name and wander into a corridor at midnight. Yet Blandings would cease to be Blandings if every visitor filled out a form. His spectacles and sleepless watchfulness become signs of a temperament, not an explanation for every mishap. The danger of perfect administration is part of the joke.

Best books and memorable moments

Begin at Something Fresh to see his first appearance alongside the scarab affair. Leave It to Psmith gives him a very different adversary and an excellent route from the Psmith shelf into Blandings. Summer Lightning and Heavy Weather make his place in the wider household company clearer. A later appearance should be checked against the book’s actual plot, not inferred merely from the word Blandings on a cover. The individual guides offer spoiler-controlled reasons to read each volume.

David Walliams portrayed Baxter in two episodes of the 2013 Blandings television series. The cast record is a useful production source; a television scene, however, cannot settle a character’s first appearance in print. The bibliography and the novels do that work. I like Baxter most when he is almost right, because the final increment between justified concern and ruinous certainty is pure Wodehouse.

On screen

David Walliams played Rupert Baxter in two episodes of BBC One’s Blandings (2013). Cast and production record. Compare Wodehouse screen, stage and radio versions.