This lively comedy follows Erwin Trowbridge, a mild-mannered, endearingly ordinary writer of sentimental greeting-card verse who discovers, to his own bewilderment, that he possesses an uncanny and entirely inexplicable gift for picking winning racehorses whenever he composes his rhymes in a particular hotel room. Word of his unlikely talent quickly reaches a pair of small-time gangsters and racetrack hustlers, who scheme to exploit Erwin's gift for their own profit, alternately flattering, cajoling, and strong-arming the bewildered poet into serving as their unwitting oracle. As Erwin is pulled further from his humdrum home life and loyal wife into the fast-talking, larcenous world of racetrack schemers, the comedy mines constant laughs from his sheer ordinariness colliding with increasingly outlandish criminal scheming happening around him. The gangsters' escalating desperation and Erwin's own growing discomfort with his strange gift build toward a farcical climax involving racetrack cons, mistaken loyalties, and a scramble to cash in before the scheme collapses. Its broad, high-energy farce and colorful gallery of comic gangster types made it one of the most successful stage comedies of the 1930s.

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