calls his hotel's room service to order champagne. Characters Montague "Monty" Bodkin – Wealthy 28-year-old Drones Club member, engaged to Gertrude Gertrude Butterwick – Member of the All English Ladies' Hockey Team, engaged to Monty, cousin of Ambrose and Reggie Ivor Llewellyn – President of the Superba-Llewellyn Motion Picture Corporation Mabel Spence – Llewellyn's sister-in-law; falls in love with Reggie Reginald "Reggie" Tennyson – Drones Club member, Ambrose's younger brother, Gertrude's cousin, Monty's friend, and Mabel's suitor Lotus "Lottie" Blossom – Movie star, engaged to Ambrose Ambrose Tennyson – Reggie's brother and Gertrude's cousin, engaged to Lottie Albert Eustace Peasemarch – Steward on board the RMS Atlantic. Style A comic effect is created by the incongruous combination of formal and informal language in Wodehouse's narrative passages, as in the beginning of the novel: "Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty, hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to talk French." Before the first comma, the passage may be the beginning of a serious novel, but the sudden use of two colloquial words, "shifty" and "hangdog", prepares the reader for the semantic incongruity of the last part of the sentence. The garrulous steward Albert Peasemarch combines a colloquial, informal manner of speaking with long, formal words, such as when he discovers highly "copperising" inscriptions on the wall written in "undeliable" pencil. Peasemarch uses malapropisms, such as when he says philosophically, "what helpless prawns [pawns] we are in the clutches of a remorseless fate" (ch. 18), and also mis-stresses words, as when he says "intricket" (meaning intricate). Similarly, Peasemarch makes several attempts to use French phrases. For example, he says "see jewness savvay" (si jeunesse savait) and "fam fatarl" (femme fatale). Publication history The illustration on the first UK edition dust jacket was by "Abbey", and the illustration on the first US edition was by Alan Foster. The Luck of the Bodkins was published with illustrations by "Illingworth" in The Passing Show magazine (UK). Alan Foster illustrated the story in Red Book (US). Wodehouse's earlier 1922 novel The Girl on the Boat also involves a journey on the RMS Atlantic, going from New York to Southampton. Adaptations The story was adapted for radio in 2000 by Patricia Hooker, with Nicholas Boulton as Monty Bodkin, Jonathan Firth as Reggie, Eleanor