This book, although published in 1913/1914, after the early Psmith books and A Gentleman of leisure, doesn't read like mature Wodehouse, and is only really of interest to hardcore enthusiasts who want to know more about Wodehouse's early development as a writer.

It is a strange mish-mash: it originally appeared as a sensational boys' adventure story, 'The eighteen carat kid', serialised in The Captain in 1913. Wodehouse then bolted on a love interest and tweaked the thing to read as an adult novel, but it doesn't really come off.

Ogden Ford is an unpleasant, spoilt teenager whose father's wealth has made him a popular target for kidnappers (we later meet him again in Piccadilly Jim); his mother has lost him in a custody battle and is also trying to get him back by force. The only real comic elements in the book come from Wodehouse's rather cruel depiction of the mother-son relationship. Mrs Ford has a cynical, money-grubbing hanger-on, Cynthia Drassilis (one of the very rare examples in Wodehouse of a bad, or at least amoral young woman), who gets her fiancé, Peter Burns, to sign up as a schoolmaster with the intention of lifting Ogden from his prep school, Sanstead House in Hampshire.

The school is obviously based on Emsworth House, where Wodehouse's friend and sometime collaborator Herbert Westbrook taught. Wodehouse lived in Emsworth village for some years and seems to have been involved in school activities.

The main part of the story is told in the first person by Peter Burns, but for no apparent reason (apart from the author's convenience), the first thirty-five pages are in the third person, describing events Burns does not know about. This transition, together with the rather abrupt resolution of the love story in the last couple of pages, rather adds to the cobbled-together feel of the book as a whole.

There are a few truly Wodehousean elements to treasure. There is a splendid butler (who is not, of course, all that he seems); Audrey Sheridan is a Wodehouse Girl in spe, although her late addition to the story means she doesn't get much to do. Burns is endearingly incompetent as an action hero (he empties his revolver at the villains, then discovers that he has omitted to bring any ammunition with him). Burns has a supremely competent valet, Smith, who doesn't actually have any lines in the story, but certainly foreshadows Jeeves. The headmaster, Mr Arnold Abney, is sent up mercilessly ("...headmasters of private schools are divided into two classes: the workers and the runners-up-to-London. Mr Abney belonged to the latter class. Indeed, I doubt if a finer representative of the class could have been found..."). Evelyn Waugh's Dr Fagan obviously owes something to him, as does Bertie Wooster's nemesis, the Rev. Aubrey Upjohn.

Ultimately, however, Burns isn't really interesting enough as a personality or as a narrator to make us care very much whether he gets the correct girl in the end. The kidnapping story could be more interesting, and Wodehouse treats it seriously as an adventure story, but the comic ending undermines this. ( )