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Wodehouse was huge on Broadway in the earlies with several big musicals, wrote school stories which evolved into Mike and Psmith, and wrote absolutely straight detective short stories (yes! he was a fan of detective stories). Bertie Wooster evolved out of the "knut" stock character of the stage, via Reginald Pepper. If you can find it, an original version of "My Man Jeeves", 1919, might be what you want. The first few stories are Reginald Pepper, and then Bertie and Jeeves appear.
The Wooster/Jeeves stories, by the way, have inspiration in the Holmes/Watson characters: Bertie is Watson to Jeeves's Holmes. Bertie's unique "voice" has elements from Wodehouse's experiences with New York Broadway musicals around 1915-1919 with Jerome Kern: snatches of forgotten songs which Bertie can't quite remember, obsolete American slang, and so on.
Probably "My Man Jeeves," is the one to start with. I have a very tatty 1930s Penguin of it. It has the "plus" of being PD in the USA as it was published before 1925. Unfortunately the Gutenberg USA edition leaves out the Reginald Pepper stories. I don't know why.
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