It introduces Sir Watkyn Bassett, the owner of a country house called Totleigh Towers where the story takes place, and his intimidating friend Roderick Spode.
Aunt Dahlia sends Bertie to Totleigh Towers to steal it back, but there he comes under suspicion as someone Sir Watkyn had once sentenced for a drunken offence.
To give himself confidence for an upcoming speaking engagement, Gussie has been keeping a notebook in which he writes insults about Sir Watkyn and Spode.
When the notebook is lost, Bertie fears that if it should fall into Sir Watkyn's hands, Madeline would be forbidden to marry Gussie.
The notebook is found instead by 'Stiffy' Byng, Sir Watkyn's niece, who wants approval from her uncle to marry the local curate, Harold Pinker.
Though the club's rules forbid Jeeves revealing it, he informs Bertie that mentioning the name "Eulalie" can control Spode.
[3] When Erd Brandt, an editor at the Saturday Evening Post, criticised the original draft for having too many stage waits, Wodehouse agreed and removed them.
Wodehouse wrote that "when you go to his residence, the first thing you see is an enormous fireplace, and round it are carved in huge letters the words: TWO LOVERS BUILT THIS HOUSE.
This anecdote was later to be incorporated into the novel: Bertie recalls in chapter 3 that he "once stayed at the residence of a newly married pal of mine, and his bride had had carved in large letters over the fireplace in the drawing-room, where it was impossible to miss it, the legend 'Two Lovers Built This Nest', and I can still recall the look of dumb anguish in the other half of the sketch's eyes every time he came in and saw it".
By the time the novel was published, there had already been uniformed fascist organisations such as the Italian Blackshirts, Hitler's Brownshirts, the French Blueshirts, the Irish Greenshirts and the Silver Legion of America.
For example, he uses vivid imagery to make exaggerated comparisons for comic effect: "Have you ever heard Sir Watkyn Bassett dealing with a bowl of soup?
[10] Wodehouse sometimes uses transliteration of ethnic or class-based mispronunciations; The Code of the Woosters features a rural policeman saying "bersicle" for "bicycle" and "verlent" for "violent" (chapter 4).
[14] As in many of the Jeeves novels, Bertie takes time in the beginning of The Code of the Woosters to ponder how much he should summarize previous events.
I mean to say, in the present case, if I take it for granted that my public knows all about Gussie Fink-Nottle and just breeze ahead, those publicans who weren't hanging on my lips the first time are apt to be fogged.
Whereas, if before kicking off I give about eight volumes of the man's life and history, other bimbos, who were so hanging, will stifle yawns and murmur "Old stuff.
[15] Beginning with The Code of the Woosters, in which he is suspected of stealing the cow-creamer and a policeman's helmet, Bertie is accused of a theft in every novel in which he appears, which often constitutes a major plot line.
[18] In a similar vein, the Los Angeles Times welcomed "one more of those amazing novels that Wodehouse turns out with perennial freshness, ringing a change on language and plot but never getting away from the essential Wodehousian manner".
"[20] Charlotte Jones, in a 2013 article in The Guardian, testifies to the novel’s enduring appeal in the same terms: “What makes Wodehouse wonderful, though, isn't the preposterous lunacy of the plots, or even the easy nostalgia of the setting; it is his prose.