Review: Sam in the Suburbs

Sam in the Suburbs by P.G. Wodehouse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A charming and amusing romantic comedy fairly typical of early Wodehouse (and mostly none the worse for that).

As with most of his early books, the plot is firmly based on a foundation of blatant coincidence, which enables him to have a cast of about a dozen people who keep bumping into each other in three or four locations. For example, the eponymous Sam, before the story starts, has spent some time in a fishing shack in Canada, where a previous inhabitant had pinned up a picture, torn from a magazine in a way that removed the caption, of an attractive young woman with a horse. Sam falls in love with this woman purely through gazing at her picture, with no idea who she is. Having read a number of early Wodehouse books recently, I was barely surprised at all when, sacked from his uncle's firm in New York and sent to London, Sam almost immediately connects up, by complete chance, with an old school friend of his who is, on that particular day, staying in the house where the same young woman lives, having known her all his life (they were neighbours growing up). Why the school friend is staying there, and not at his house in Mayfair (which is much closer to where he is giving a speech that same night), is never clarified, though perhaps his fear of his housekeeper and the fact that he is likely to drink too much at the event and come home drunk (which he does) may be relevant. The important thing is that Sam is almost immediately connected with his beloved in two different ways (her uncle, who she lives with, works for the same firm that he's been sent to London to join, and Sam asks to work under him - so protagonist agency does at least play some role), and then moves in next door to her.

This is where the second plot comes in, because the house he takes was once the residence of a bank robber, who stashed his take there and never got back to pick it up. Dying, he has given the address to one of his old colleagues, Soapy Molloy, who has shared it with his new wife Dolly, and has given the location within the house to another old colleague, Chimp Twist, forcing them to work together. Twist, by another coincidence, has set himself up (for obscure reasons) as a fake private investigator and taken offices directly opposite where Sam works. This gets the plot moving into a series of tangles, along with the coincidence of Sam happening to mention in a pub that he's taken the house, and Soapy Molloy (out of all the people in London) being in the same pub (out of all the pubs in London) at the time.

Cue multiple romantic misunderstandings, comic blundering by the criminals, various disapproving elders who threaten the happiness of the young people, an amusing dog, and in general a fun time for the reader, though rarely for the characters.

Wodehouse has a knack of creating a memorable character in just a few words, a knack he shared with Charles Dickens. Unlike Dickens, though, his characters tend not to get much deeper on longer acquaintanceship. They remain a quick caricature sketch, rather than a portrait in oils. If you don't mind that, and his tendency to rely far too much on ridiculous coincidence, his early works can be a lot of fun. This is one of the better ones, for me, up there with Uneasy Money , Something Fresh or A Damsel in Distress . The romance plot is a little more developed than was often the case with Wodehouse, the couple is appealing, the B plot of the criminals is hilarious, and the minor characters (like the vicar and the charity-promoting policeman) shine.

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