Money in the Bank

253+[2ad] pages. Small octavo (7 1/2" x 5") bound in original publisher's gray cloth with brown lettering to cover and spine in original pictorial jacket. (APG indicates that an orange color is called for. This may be a variant binding). First British edition.

Money in the Bank is a novel by P. G. Wodehouse, first published in the United States on 9 January 1942 by Doubleday, Doran, New York, and in the United Kingdom on 27 May 1946 by Herbert Jenkins, London. The UK publication was delayed while Wodehouse was under suspicion of collaboration during World War II. A peer of original ideas, George, sixth Viscount Uffenham, had converted his own and his niece's fortune into diamonds and ingeniously hidden them at Shipley Hall, the ancestral seat. Unfortunately, an accident, due to his opposition to the convention of driving a car on the left, had impaired his memory and, search as he would, he was unable to find his precious hoard. Dire lack of funds compelled him to let Shipley Hall, with himself disguised as the butler, to Mrs Clarissa Cork, the eminent explorer and game huntress, who established there a colony for the propagation of the Ugubu doctrines--which called for high thinking, tribal dances and, above all, vegetarianism. Her assorted guests included Soapy Molloy, a Share-pusher of some distinction, whose ingratiating efforts to sell Mrs Cork a block of bogus shares aroused the ire of his jealous wife, Dolly. She, with the fury of a woman scorned, induced Mrs Cork to seek the services of a professional snoop-one Chimp Twist-ostensibly to keep an eye on the extremely suspicious behavior of the butler but in reality to watch her apparently faithless spouse. The job of hiring this sleuth fell to Mrs Cork's wholly desirable secretary, Anne Benedick, Lord Uffenham's niece, who saw in him a possible secret ally to whom the recovery of the missing gems was but a matter of routine. But Jeff Miller, the sleuth she engaged, was an impostor, who fell head over heels in love with her.

Condition:

Dust jacket corners and head hinge edge chips with closed tears, price clipped. A very good copy in an about very good dust jacket.