Monty Bodkin Books in Order

Monty Bodkin sits in a slightly different pocket of the Wodehouse world. He is a decent, likable young man, not particularly heroic, who keeps getting swept into other people’s plots. Monty wants a stable life and a steady engagement. The trouble is that he has friends, employers, and relatives who treat stability as something to be tested.

Monty’s big through-line is his relationship with Gertrude Butterwick, an athletic, no-nonsense woman who expects him to meet certain standards. Trying to stay in Gertrude’s good graces is hard enough. Doing it while new scandals and misunderstandings keep landing in his lap is almost impossible.

Monty keeps trying to do the right thing, and the universe keeps handing him the wrong assumptions.

In The Luck of the Bodkins, Monty finds himself on a transatlantic voyage surrounded by movie people, nervous lovers, and hidden agendas. Romance, jealousy, and a whiff of smuggling turn shipboard life into a maze. Monty is the sort of character who says yes to a favour, then discovers that three other people believe he has promised them the opposite.

Across the Bodkin books, Wodehouse has fun with show business and the press. You will run into publishers, journalists, and people who care far too much about headlines and reputations. The comedy often comes from the gap between what Monty thinks he is doing, being polite, keeping a promise, helping a friend, and what other people assume he is doing, usually something disgraceful.

Monty also connects to other Wodehouse settings. He appears as Lord Emsworth’s secretary in Heavy Weather, which brings him into the orbit of Blandings Castle, even if his own stories tend to lean more toward travel comedy and the media world than pig worship. By the time you reach Pearls, Girls and Monty Bodkin, the series has the feel of a later-career Wodehouse reunion, with familiar names, new complications, and Monty still doing his best to keep everyone calm.

The tone here is light, romantic farce with a bit of glamour, ocean liners, publishers, and the occasional brush with crime that stays firmly on the comic side. Continuity is loose, but reading The Luck of the Bodkins first helps, since it introduces Monty and Gertrude’s dynamic and the kinds of trouble Monty attracts.

If you like Wodehouse’s plots when they involve more movement, more contemporary settings, and a hero who is basically a nice guy trying to survive other people’s drama, the Monty Bodkin books are a fun change of pace.