Money for Nothing is a novel by P. G. Wodehouse, first published in the United Kingdom on 27 July 1928 by Herbert Jenkins, London, and in the United States on 28 September 1928 by Doubleday, Doran, New York. Immediately prior to publication it appeared as a serial, in London Calling magazine (UK) from 3 March to 28 July 1928 and in Liberty magazine (US) between 16 June and 22 September 1928.
The action is mostly set at Rudge Hall, home to miser Lester Carmody, and at Healthward Ho, a health farm run by "Chimp" Twist, along with his cohorts "Soapy" and "Dolly" Molloy, who all previously appeared in Sam the Sudden (1925), and returned in Money in the Bank (1946).
Hugo Carmody, Lester's nephew, and his friend Ronnie Fish also appear at Blandings Castle, home of Ronnie's uncle Lord Emsworth, in Summer Lightning (1929) and Heavy Weather (1933).
As well as Lester and Hugo, John Carroll, another nephew of Lester's, also lives at Rudge Hall; he is the manager of the estate. A diffident fellow, he is in love with Pat Wyvern, the daughter of the irascible Colonel Meredith Wyvern. Pat likes John but deplores his lack of backbone. In any case, the Colonel would not hear of their marrying because he is at daggers-drawn with Lester due to an incident involving an explosion.
Lester, who is a devoted trencherman, despite his miserliness, has enrolled on a fitness course at Healthward Ho. Hugo travels over there with the aim of touching his uncle for £500 to start a nightclub with his friend Ronnie Fish. Predictably he is rebuffed.
John travels up to London to meet Pat, who has just returned from France. Hugo hitches a ride. They all go out to a nightclub, The Mustard Spoon, where they are joined by Ronnie and by Soapy and Dolly Molloy, whom Hugo has just met at a boxing match. Soapy and Dolly are a pair of fraudsters, and partners in crime to Chimp. They are a married couple, but are pretending to be father and daughter. John proposes to Pat, but she rejects him. The club is raided by the police and they flee.
They all end up at Rudge Hall, where Soapy tries to sell Lester some oil stocks. It emerges, to Soapy's dismay, that Lester is not the wealthy landowner he thought he was; in fact he is broke. Dolly comes up with the idea of stealing Lester's family heirlooms and claiming the insurance (the heirlooms do not legally belong to Lester, so cannot be sold). She describes the scheme as “Money for Nothing”. Lester initially attempts to steal the heirlooms himself, with disastrous results, so they rope in Chimp.
Chimp is caught in the act by Hugo, but gets away. In order to get rid of Hugo, and stop him foiling their scheme again, Lester gives him and Ronnie £500 to start their nightclub (we learn in Summer Lightning that the venture is a failure). Chimp is persuaded to have another go, and this time the burglary goes smoothly, or so it seems. But Chimp has been seen and recognised by the butler, Sturgis, who informs John.
John travels to Healthward Ho to confront Chimp. Dolly goes with him and puts knock-out drops into his drink when they arrive. Chimp locks John up in a room with bars on the window, but eventually John turns the tables on the conspirators, and learns to his horror that Lester is in on the plot.
He dashes back to Rudge Hall and confronts his uncle. As a penance, Lester agrees to make it up with Wyvern. In the meantime, Pat, thinking that John has run off with Dolly, has accepted Hugo's proposal of marriage. When she learns of John's heroism she realises the error of her ways and sweetness and light reign.
Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, KBE (/ˈwʊdhaʊs/ WOOD-howss; 15 October 1881 – 14 February 1975) was an English writer and one of the most widely read humorists of the 20th century. His creations include the feather-brained Bertie Wooster and his sagacious valet, Jeeves; the immaculate and loquacious Psmith; Lord Emsworth and the Blandings Castle set; the Oldest Member, with stories about golf; and Mr Mulliner, with tall tales on subjects ranging from bibulous bishops to megalomaniac movie moguls.
Born in Guildford, the third son of a British magistrate based in Hong Kong, Wodehouse spent happy teenage years at Dulwich College, to which he remained devoted all his life. After leaving school he was employed by a bank but disliked the work and turned to writing in his spare time. His early novels were mostly school stories, but he later switched to comic fiction. Most of Wodehouse's fiction is set in his native United Kingdom, although he spent much of his life in the US and used New York and Hollywood as settings for some of his novels and short stories. He wrote a series of Broadway musical comedies during and after the First World War, together with Guy Bolton and Jerome Kern, that played an important part in the development of the American musical. He began the 1930s writing for MGM in Hollywood. In a 1931 interview, his naive revelations of incompetence and extravagance in the studios caused a furore. In the same decade, his literary career reached a new peak.
In 1934 Wodehouse moved to France for tax reasons; in 1940 he was taken prisoner at Le Touquet by the invading Germans and interned for nearly a year. After his release he made six broadcasts from German radio in Berlin to the US, which had not yet entered the war. The talks were comic and apolitical, but his broadcasting over enemy radio prompted anger and strident controversy in Britain, and a threat of prosecution. Wodehouse never returned to England. From 1947 until his death he lived in the US, taking dual British-American citizenship in 1955. He died in 1975, at the age of 93, in Southampton, New York, one month after he was awarded a knighthood of the Order of the British Empire (KBE).
Wodehouse was a prolific writer throughout his life, publishing more than ninety books, forty plays, two hundred short stories and other writings between 1902 and 1974. He worked extensively on his books, sometimes having two or more in preparation simultaneously. He would take up to two years to build a plot and write a scenario of about thirty thousand words. After the scenario was complete he would write the story. Early in his career Wodehouse would produce a novel in about three months, but he slowed in old age to around six months. He used a mixture of Edwardian slang, quotations from and allusions to numerous poets, and several literary techniques to produce a prose style that has been compared to comic poetry and musical comedy. Some critics of Wodehouse have considered his work flippant, but among his fans are former British prime ministers and many of his fellow writers.