Captain Bennett's Folly

Captain Bennett’s Follyis a direct descendant of Fleming’s earlier comic novels,Colonel Effingham's RaidandLucinderella. Like them, there is a narrator—in this case Walker Williams—who reports an adventure replete with rogues and innocents, while making an artful, funny and wistful case about the immorality of our times. Walker spins out a tale of how he and his hedonistic family journey to the Florida Keys during the hurricane season in order to prevent rich Uncle Nolan Bennett—“pushing eighty but not pushing very hard”—from marrying his young housekeeper and supplanting them as his legitimate heirs. The scheming relatives, however, have a tough adversary in the eccentric Uncle Nolan, and his struggles to escape from their manipulation are at the core of Fleming’s yarn.