The first Mr. Fortune stories by H.C. Bailey appeared in book form in the early 1920s at the same time that Arthur Conan Doyle was publishing what would be the final adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Just as Holmes was at his best in the shorter form—with the grand exception of The Hound of the Baskervilles—Reggie Fortune was, for the most part, more successful with readers when taken in short doses. Perhaps no other major fictional detective of the Golden Age appeared in as many short stories as the cherubic country doctor turned detective. Starting with Call Mr. Fortune in 1920 and ending with Mr. Fortune Here in 1940, Bailey published an astonishing twelve collections of Fortune short stories, not counting three omnibus collections of previously published material.

Why Bailey, a successful author of more than thirty adventure and historical novels, whose first novel, My Lady of Orange, was published in 1901 during his senior year at Oxford, waited until 1934 to publish his first  full-length Fortune book, is a question to which we’ll perhaps never know the answer. And, at that, his first two published mystery novels, The Garston Murder Case and The Red Castle Mystery, released in 1930 and 1932 respectively, didn’t even feature Mr. Fortune.

The detective of record in those two books and nine subsequent volumes was Joshua Clunk, a coarse, hymn-quoting attorney who is not above employing extralegal means to clear his own client and suss out the real murderer. Yet, like Fortune (and unlike so many other fictional sleuths of the Golden Age), Clunk is happily married. And, like Fortune, Clunk is extraordinarily fond of children, the protection of whom is a theme that runs through much of Bailey’s work, perhaps because children in the Britain of this era did not always enjoy a happy family life. The upper classes shunted them off to boarding schools and the lower classes forced them into jobs at a young age.

While Clunk and Fortune may move in different social circles, the two  operate in the same world.  They combined their talents to catch a killer in The Great Game (1939) while secondary characters appear in both series. Critics have labeled the Clunk novels whodunits in the deductive style while calling the Fortune stories intuitive crime novels, suggesting that Mr. Fortune relies more on his knowledge of human behavior than on physical evidence in solving his crimes. And while it’s true that Mr. Fortune is convinced, as in Shadow on the Wall, that murderers leave behind shadows of their deeds, he solves his crimes through careful examination of what evidence he’s able to amass and close observation of even seemingly trivial details. The Fortune novels are perfect specimens of the fair-play detective novel of the Golden Age. And, like so many other sleuths of that era (Margery Allingham’s Albert Campion and Dorothy L. Sayers’ Lord Peter spring immediately to mind), Reggie Fortune is a somewhat mannered sleuth, given to odd turns of phrase and eccentric behavior. But we’ll leave it to H.C. Bailey himself to fully describe Mr. Fortune. His 1942 essay “Meet Mr. Fortune” follows this introduction.

While Bailey was considered one of the five most important British mystery writers of the Golden Age (roughly 1913 to 1953), he is perhaps less well-known today than his contemporaries. Born in London on February 1, 1878, Henry Christopher Bailey was the only child of Henry and Jane Bailey. Between 1890 and 1897 he attended City of London School, a highly regarded day school which produced a very large number of nationally known writers, scholars and scientists (it was the first school in England to offer courses in chemistry). The school also enjoyed a unique relationship with journalism and publishing firms. In his last year, Bailey was named Head of School, responsible for out-of-school discipline and representing the school at official events.

Having won a scholarship to Oxford’s Corpus Christi College, he was a classics scholar studying Latin and Greek language, literature and history. Small in stature (his pictures make him look a little like the actor Barry Fitzgerald of Going My Way fame), he was ideally suited to coxswain his college’s eight-man rowing team. In spite of this, his daughter Betty said that he did not make friends easily and was quite lonely while at university, which may explain why he began his solitary work as a novelist as an undergraduate. He took a first-class honors degree and went to work as a correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, a leading Tory newspaper of the time, which, as his great-nephew Geoffrey Guest suggests, may tell us something about Bailey’s politics. He worked there as a drama critic, a war correspondent and as a leader (editorial) writer.

After he retired from journalism in 1946, Bailey and his wife Lydia (née Guest) moved to North Wales and took up residence at Bernina, a house built as a  holiday residence by Lydia’s father, a Manchester physician. It was at Bernina that the two had first met, in 1905, when Bailey visited as a boarder. The Guests had moved to Wales in 1904, taking in boarders to help make ends meet since it had cost so much to “launch” Lydia’s elder brothers, Leslie and Austin, their father having died at 56 in 1897. Eighteen-year-old Lydia was already familiar with the 27-year-old journalist and author from  his books and through Austin, who had met Bailey through a mutual friend from Bailey’s days at day school. In a letter to her daughter Mary, Lydia remembered that fateful meeting: “Well—then Father came next year, in 1906, and we were engaged—and married in 1908, lucky me.” The two took up residence in London where their two daughters were born, Betty in 1910 and Mary in 1913. Betty studied archaeology at London University and excavated Greek temples while Mary took a degree in math from Oxford and worked as an accountant for a London firm. Mary never married and Betty had no children. Like their parents, both girls enjoyed tramping in the Swiss and Austrian Alps where the family often vacationed.

Indeed, part of the reason that Bailey and Lydia moved to Bernina was because that part of Wales reminded them so much of the Alps. Lydia described Bernina as a “lovely house, high on the mountainside facing south to hills across the valley with the sea to the west.” The house was quite isolated. The small village of Llanfairfechan was located in the valley below Bernina. Villagers there described their famous neighbor as “a small shy man who continued to dress formally and collected postal cards.” His great-nephew suggests that this was an imperfect summation of an accomplished man who probably did not interact with the locals on more than a superficial level.

Geoffrey Guest recalls visiting Bernina as a young boy with his brother. “I was struck by the beauty of the house and its surroundings. On the first floor there was a central hall which was large enough to contain a dining table on which all meals were served. On each side of this hall were two large rooms. One of them was HCB’s study. Its large windows gave him views of the encircling mountains and valleys. Two quite large hulls of rowing shells he coxed at Oxford stuck out of one of the study walls. On the other wall was a photograph of a biplane, the first to cross the English channel. HCB had accompanied the pilot on that first flight as a reporter for the Daily Telegraph. Across from his study was the living room whose french windows led to the garden.” The two boys were shepherded about the house and surrounding area by Lydia and her daughter Betty, “two very gregarious and vivacious women.” Bailey himself did not interact much with the two boys.

“At night there was the ritual of the lighting of the oil lamps,” Guest remembers. “The house had no electricity so twelve or so oil lamps were lit as darkness fell. When we went to bed we took an oil lamp with us. The only source of heat in the living quarters was an open fire in the living room on the first floor. On chilly nights our Aunt Lydia would place a large ceramic bottle full of very hot water at the bottom of each bed.”

It was at Bernina that Bailey died on March 24, 1961, at the age of 83, having published his last novel, Shrouded Death, eleven years earlier. What was remarkable about his career was not just the sheer number of novels and short stories that he published in his lifetime but that most of his output was produced while he was working full-time as a journalist. Given his  prodigious output, it’s a bit surprising to note that he produced only three books after his retirement from the Daily Telegraph in 1946 at the relatively young age (for a writer) of 68. It just might be that he took retirement seriously. He and Lydia loved hiking the hills of Wales and no doubt this was a fine way for a private, solitary man to fill his final years, content in the knowledge that he would be remembered as one of the finest of the Golden Age mystery writers.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, Stephen Vincent Benet, may have summed up Bailey’s career as a mystery writer best when he wrote: “Perhaps Mr. Reginald Fortune comes nearest to the dream of all good detective-story readers—the dream of the lamp lit again in Baker Street, the fog settling down outside and Watson smoking his pipe by the fire when the knock comes at the door. Not that Fortune is in any sense an imitation of Holmes—he is a distinct and admirable creation, with his individual mannerisms and methods. When he says, as he sometimes does, ‘not a nice murder, Lomas,’ one feels the cold and authentic shiver in the spine.”

Tom & Enid Schantz
April 2008

Meet Mr. Fortune
An introduction to a character by his creator
by H.C. Bailey

Mr. Fortune has a modest nature—or that kind of vanity—which avoids personal advertisement.

Continual and growing curiosity about what he is really like, his private life, his training, the early, obscure years of his career, and his way of thought upon crime and the world has, however, produced so many misleading statements that he has been persuaded to allow a brief sketch of a biography.

Reginald Fortune was born less than fifty years ago, the only son—there were several daughters—of a doctor of moderate means in good general practice in one of the wealthier suburbs of London. Reginald was educated at Charterhouse and University College, Oxford. Neither at school nor university had he any particular distinction but a general popularity. Schoolmasters and tutors pronounced him the most ordinary of amiable youths, though one or two remarked that he had an abnormal capacity for being interested in any subject, from prehistoric religion to the new physics. Men who were boys with him report that the only uncommon thing about him was his interest in everybody.

It was always understood that he should become a doctor and succeed to his father’s general practice. Reginald accepted this destiny with cordial satisfaction. Yet when he went on from Oxford to a London hospital he found, to his mild annoyance, that he was developing a certain specialized ability, first as a surgeon, then as a pathologist. Rather plaintively and against his will he accepted this call and proceeded to study in the clinics of Vienna.

His own statement is that there were two formative educational influences in his young life, first the professor who had amassed a larger amount of useless knowledge than any man in Oxford, secondly Sir Lawson Hunter whose “European reputation as a surgeon has been won by knowing his own mind.”

It was agreed by his contemporaries and his seniors that he might have done very well either in surgery or pathology. He became uncommonly sound in diagnosis and had the poise and the manual dexterity which make a surgeon. The love of investigation, the patience in scientific method, the flair which the pathologist requires were equally well developed in him. Nevertheless he went back to the suburb of his birth and took an assistant’s share of his father’s placid family practice.

He will always maintain that this is what he was made for, the cure or care of the common ills of life, the children’s measles and the parents’ rheumatism. It is his opinion that the specialist is inevitably a rather absurd and unhappy person, doomed to narrow thought and incomplete appreciation of the world. In pensive moments he will mourn the fate which made him one. But against specialization he has steadily protected himself, keeping touch with all kinds of knowledge and everything which the natural man enjoys.

What compelled him to specialize was two cases of crime in his suburban practice. The speed and certainty of his apprehension, his insight and power of inference from slight, obscure facts commended him as the ideal expert to the chief of the Criminal Investigation Department, who, as he complains bitterly, would never let him alone afterwards. Yet Reginald cannot have been wholly unwilling. There is no doubt that the real forces which determined his career were his quick and deep interest in the drama of humanity, his consciousness of power to divine and deal with human motives, and his affection for the victim, the “underdog,” in the strife of the world. He would smile away the notion that he has any ambition to “ride abroad redressing human wrongs.” He dislikes philanthropists. But it is a fact that the suffering of the weak is apt to excite him to his most ruthless efficiency.

Nothing of that is suggested by his looks or his habits of life. He continues, in spite of years which must be called middle age, to look about twenty-five, a rather plump twenty-five, but of a fresh and innocent face which might be younger. An irreverent damsel christened him “Cherub,” and the name has stuck. His fair hair is ample and unfaded still. His blue eyes have still a simple candor, or a wistful childlike surprise at this wonderful world. His round cheeks keep a schoolboy complexion.

He lives at his ease. No human pleasure, from the higher poetry or the profounder speculations of science and philosophy to chocolate cream, is alien to him, except the sport which consists in killing creatures and the social ceremonies which draw crowds. He has been accused of an excessive interest in food and drink, and his appetites of this kind are hearty and, apart from an absolute refusal to take any interest in port or whisky, of a catholic extent. But it is believed that, after the presence of his wife, his garden and his laboratory give him his dearest delights.

Concerning the principles and methods of his work in crime, there seems to be some misapprehension. Some of his most studious and appreciative critics have classified him as an “intuitionist detective.” This is, for example, the decision pronounced in the introduction to the Oxford University Press selection of detective stories in the “World’s Classics” series, where the late E. M. Wrong thus amplified it: “Mr. Fortune feels atmosphere more keenly than any other detective, and is marvelously accurate in his judgment of character.”

In accord with this is the Scotland Yard estimate of Superintendent Bell, “wonderful how he knows men,” which ascribes to him something like a sixth sense for the perception of the motive and personality behind actions.

Reginald would disclaim with a plaintive protest this abnormal power or any other abnormality. His piercing judgments of character he explains as purely rational inferences from the facts of a case. A slight, apparently insignificant piece of evidence, he is wont to argue, may often be decisive as to the nature of the unknown person who has been active. The accuracy of his inferences, in his interpretation of his mental processes, is due to the fact that he is wholly and intensely the ordinary man, feeling about things and people and reacting to them in the natural way.

He is wont to say that he has an old-fashioned mind. Insofar as this refers to morals it means that he holds by the standard principles of conduct and responsibility, of right and wrong, of sin and punishment. Modern theories that the criminal is the product of a wicked society, that he should be treated as the unfortunate victim of illness, that retribution is unjust and so forth, are for him the perversion of a fraction of the truth into an absurd general rule.

For general rules of any kind he has small respect. The maxim that the only general rule is: There are no general rules—is a favorite of his. He does not always accept the law of a case as justice and has been known to act on his own responsibility in contriving the punishment of those who could not legally be found guilty or the immunity of those who were not legally innocent. In his capacity to judge each case he has the absolute confidence of the surgeon called in to decide how a patient should be treated, when the choice of treatment will determine life or death, happiness or misery. And Reginald’s standards of justice and right are those which the common sense of the common man has shaped.

On the conviction of a criminal he has sometimes been heard to repeat the phrase of the old divine “There, but for the grace of God, go I.” But this does not proceed from the comfortable philosophy that anybody may be a rascal if circumstances impel him that way. Mr. Fortune’s theory is that the original impulse in a great deal of crime is a motive which many or most people feel. The distinction of the criminal is that he indulges it to extravagance. For that extravagance, when it wrongs others, Mr. Fortune finds no excuse in difficult or tempting circumstances. A cruel crime is to him the work of a pestilential creature, and he sees his duty in dealing with such cases as that of a doctor in treating illness. The cause must be discovered and extirpated. There is no more mercy for the cruel criminal than for the germs of disease. Both must be made innocuous. The measures taken against both must be such as to diminish the danger of further infection. That the criminal may be born to commit crime as a bacillus is born to cause suffering and death, Mr. Fortune agrees with his whole mind. For that mystery he has no explanation, but his philosophy is that the business of the human reason is to make the world safe from both. He is pained at the admiration which finds anything mysterious in his success. All his investigations, he will insist, proceed by the tried and proved methods of science, careful and minute and exact observation, interpretation of the facts by scientific knowledge, formation of a hypothesis and the testing of it by further investigation and experiment.

The modern specialization which exalts criminology into a separate science he smiles at as a pedantic and delusive arrangement. All the sciences from astronomical physics to paleobotany, he will maintain, are required in criminal investigation, and in addition every other department of human knowledge, millinery or mountaineering, from the garden of Eden to Russian films. The real specialist in criminology would be omniscient. The effective practitioner, he says modestly, is the ordinary man who knows enough of everything to know his way about in anything and can use his mind in a scientific way.

Not that he has any superstitious faith in science. He takes all its present conclusions as provisional and trusts them only so far as they will do the day’s work for him, with a perfect faith that they will be superseded by something more effective tomorrow. On each new theory which comes forward to supersede them he turns an impartial and critical eye. So he will smile at the newer psychologies, as putting the oldest religions into a fresh and inconvenient jargon, and go his hopeful and ruthless way believing heartily in God and the devil and the power of the human mind to know which is which and give an effective hand to either.