Piccadilly Jim draws on Wodehouse's New York experience and features Jimmy Crocker, a full-time playboy and object of scandalised transatlantic gossip. After this country-house comedy came the transatlantic novel Piccadilly Jim, that exemplifies his skill at selling a version of Britain to America, and a version of the US to his English readers. The inevitable happy ending restores order to a momentarily disturbed landscape, and the prospect of nuptial bliss to several happy couples.
Introducing the Emsworth family, the plot turns on Freddie Threepwood's engagement to Aline Peters - and the loss of a priceless Egyptian scarab. Wodehouse's comic debut, Something Fresh, appeared in 1915, during his third visit to America. Now, more than a generation after his death on St Valentine's Day 1975, we can begin to see his place in the canon as one of its greatest comic masters, a supreme stylist, with a kind of genius for light entertainment. Later, after the first world war, he would be universally recognised as a contemporary king of the magazine story. By his mid-20s, he had become a master of the serial novel for boys. As a young man he was an avid contributor to the hundreds of magazines that festooned Edwardian news stands. All his life, he never lost a taste for deadlines, or the promise of a cheque. Wodehouse began his literary career as a freelance journalist.
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