Something Fresh

Something Fresh is a novel by P. G. Wodehouse, published in 1915. It is the first of the Blandings Castle books, and it introduces the household that would occupy him for the rest of his career.

Lord Emsworth is the distracted owner of Blandings, and somewhere among his possessions is a valuable scarab that he came by without fully understanding the transaction. The American collector who lost it wants it back and sends his son across the Atlantic to retrieve it by whatever means are practical, which accounts for the first impostor on the premises. The second is a young woman who arrives at Blandings under a false name for reasons of her own, and the two of them spend much of the novel circling the same object and, gradually, each other. Around them Wodehouse assembles the cast that would keep him supplied with material for decades: Emsworth's bone-headed younger son Freddie Threepwood, the long-suffering secretary Baxter, and Beach the butler, who has seen everything and is surprised by nothing.

Wodehouse wrote that Blandings Castle is never itself without at least one impostor in the house, and this novel establishes the arrangement along with a romance that neither party planned.