When I read people’s reactions to Jeeves and Wooster books, there’s usually mention of joy, positivity, everything working out, and no one really getting hurt. All this is true. Who am I to spoil a good thing.

But then, would a sense of darker undertones serve to lessen the books? If they were nothing more than frothy accounts of high jinks amongst the 1920s/1930s smart set, would I admire them as I do? Would anyone admire them as they do, without light and shade, whether shade is consciously acknowledged or not?

Now that I’ve got that of my chest we can have a look at Thank You, Jeeves, published in 1934. This was the first novel length Jeeves and Wooster story, and ironically it begins with Jeeves leaving Bertie’s employment due to the young master’s stubborn insistence on practising the banjolele. Jeeves is apparently a servant, but when his wishes are thwarted there is going to be trouble.

After Jeeves resigns, Bertie is left to his own devices. With a replacement valet called Brinkley, he goes off to live in a seaside cottage in Chuffnel Regis. Here Bertie gets tangled up with the affairs of old school friend, and Jeeves’s new employer, Lord Chuffnel, who is hosting American tycoon, J. Washburn Stoker. Chuffy hopes sell his mansion to Stoker, and propose marriage to his daughter, Pauline. When both deals threaten to fall apart, an apparent challenge to Stoker’s inheritance forces through the mansion sale, and removes any objection to the marriage plans. Both concessions are required to keep happy a psychiatrist friend of Chuffy’s, a vital expert witness proving that Stoker’s benefactor was of sound mind. A helpful side effect of all this is the setting free of Bertie from any risk of having to marry Pauline himself.

Bertie thinks the challenge to the inheritance is a stroke of luck. But no – Jeeves reveals that he called one of his American friends and arranged the whole thing as a ruse. Bertie realises Jeeves’s brilliance, and embraces the suggestion of his return.

So Bertie is back in his place, a ‘pawn in the game’ as the young master himself humbly admits. The former cosy arrangement is restored – Bertie as a non-banjolele playing, not very bright bachelor, an ideal employer for Jeeves, easy to dominate with intellect, with no wife around to relegate a powerful valet back into an ordinary servant role, or maybe replace him completely.

After Jeeves reveals his scheming, I couldn’t help wondering whether he has admitted to all his machinations. The replacement valet, Brinkley, turns out to be a drunken revolutionary. He chases Bertie with a knife and burns down the Chuffnel Regis cottage. Such a terrible experience discourages taking a risk on a new valet ever again. And Brinkley’s destructive antics destroy the hated banjolele, which was in the cottage. That’s convenient. It is hard not to question the nature of these events, given the planning of other situations that favoured the all-knowing Jeeves. It’s a testament to the quiet shades of this book that I found myself engaged in such conjectures..

I’m now going to admit that the Jeeves and Wooster books sometimes remind me of Casablanca, written a few years after Thank You, Jeeves, in 1938. Wealthy refugees fleeing wartime Europe are trapped in neutral Casablanca. Do they make some compromises and sit tight? Or do they try to escape? Bar owner Rick Blaine takes the route of acceptance and accommodation, until he eventually works the system to help someone get away.

Struggle against your lot, or accept what you have? Shades of this conundrum don’t just apply to Bertie. Brinkley is a revolutionary causing mayhem. Jeeves, meanwhile, accepts the system, choosing manipulation from within for his own advantage, and sometimes the advantage of others. He is a Rick Blaine whose power to make things better comes from his cynicism.

This book is an easy evening at Rick’s Bar in the 1930s. The band is playing, Sam is tinkling the ivories. But there’s a lot of hidden stuff going on amongst the apparently carefree clientele. Rick is keeping a watchful eye.