The Little Nugget

After the heartbreak of his ex-fiancée's sudden departure, Peter Burns, a young and independently wealthy Englishman, thinks he's making a life for himself with a proposal to the socially ambitious Cynthia Drassilis. Almost at once he finds he must demonstrate his commitment to the match by planning to kidnap the combative, chain-smoking Ogden Ford-known as "The Little Nugget" by the kidnappers-the son of Cynthia's patron and benefactor Nesta Ford and an American business tycoon. After Cynthia's first attempt to return Ogden to his mother is foiled by his father's underlings, Peter decides that his best chance of success is to attend the boy's boarding school as an instructor. He knows that while there he must first prevent Bowery Street hoodlum Buck McGinnis and silver-tongued confidence man Smooth Sam Fisher from absconding with the Nugget, but he little suspects how profoundly both his own recent past and Ogden's obstinacy will tangle his plans. Along with The Coming of Bill, written around the same time, this is one of Wodehouse's few non-comedy novels, undertaken for serial publication at the behest of Munsey's Magazine editor Bob Davis and published there first as The Eighteen-Carat Kid. Equal parts caper and character study, The Little Nugget finds Wodehouse trading pure farce for a sharper, more suspenseful edge without ever losing his gift for wit and sparkling dialogue. The source for this public-domain ebook is Standard Ebooks (standardebooks.org). Ebooks from other sources often have typos, inconsistent spelling, missing accent marks, and missing punctuation. Ebooks from Standard Ebooks are proofread line by line against a scan of the original printed pages, then proofread again from cover to cover. They are also formatted and typeset following a professional-grade style manual, resulting in new editions supporting state-of-the-art ereader technology: automatic hyphenation, popup footnotes, complete and consistent metadata, high-resolution and scalable vector graphics, and ereader-compatible tables of contents. All of this makes the finished ebooks accurate, functional, and beautiful, a pleasure to read. (Waking Lion Press is not affiliated with or endorsed by Standard Ebooks.)