After the heartbreak of his ex-fiancée’s sudden departure, Peter Burns, a young and independently wealthy Englishman, thinks he’s making a life for himself with a proposal to the socially ambitious Cynthia Drassilis. Almost at once he finds he must demonstrate his commitment to the match by planning to kidnap the combative, chain-smoking Ogden Ford—known as “The Little Nugget” by the kidnappers—the son of Cynthia’s patron and benefactor Nesta Ford and an American business tycoon.

After Cynthia’s first attempt to return Ogden to his mother is foiled by his father’s underlings, Peter decides that his best chance of success is to attend the boy’s boarding school as an instructor. He knows that while there he must first prevent Bowery Street hoodlum Buck McGinnis and silver-tongued confidence man Smooth Sam Fisher from absconding with the Nugget, but he little suspects how profoundly both his own recent past and Ogden’s obstinacy will tangle his plans.

Along with The Coming of Bill , written around the same time, this is one of Wodehouse’s few non-comedy novels, undertaken for serial publication at the behest of Munsey’s Magazine editor Bob Davis and published there first as The Eighteen-Carat Kid .