Leave It to Me

In the velvet-cocooned parlors of Gilded-Age Manhattan, where champagne breathes louder than conscience, Dickey Derrickson—cashmere-clad, irony-soaked, allergic to anything resembling a wage—trades his birthright of leisure for a tarnished badge merely to impress the wasp-tongued Madge Earle. Yet the agency he snaps up is a mausoleum of dusted files and ringing silence; to conjure clientele he stages a city-wide waltz of larceny, commissioning pickpockets to plunder his own coterie so he might swoop in as savior. The prank curdles when old chum Tom Burroughs begs retrieval of incriminating billet-doux penned to man-eater Viola Devore; Viola, stung by dismissal, kidnaps Tom, turning farce into cliffside peril. Dickey, scrambling down fire escapes and across moonlit rooftops, outwits both his paid goons and the velvet-clawed Viola, recovers every monogrammed gift previously pilfered, and drags Tom back to the altar in time for the wedding bells to absolve him. Madge, stunned by the acrobatics, swaps scorn for a ring, and the erstwhile loafer discovers that usefulness, like absinthe, can be dangerously addictive.