Nothing but trouble can ensue when Bertie Wooster's Aunt Dahlia instructs him to steal a silver jug from Totleigh Towers, home of magistrate and hell-hound, Sir Watkyn Bassett. First he must face the peril of Sir Watkyn's droopy daughter, Madeline, and then the terrors of would-be Dictator, Roderick Spode and his gang of Black Shorts. But when duty calls, Bertram answers, and so there follows what he himself calls 'the sinister affair of Gussie Fink-Nottle, Madeline Bassett, old Pop Bassett, Stiffy Byng, the Rev H.P. ('Stinker') Pinker, the eighteenth-century cow-creamer and the small, brown, leather-covered notebook'. In a plot with more twists than an English country lane, it takes all the ingenuity of Jeeves to extract his master from the soup again.