Mr Fortune, Please Transcript (Green Penguin Book Club 4)

Green Penguin Music

Caroline: Welcome to Shedunnit. I’m Caroline Crampton.

And welcome back to Green Penguin Book Club, a series within Shedunnit that documents my journey of reading and discussing every crime or green title from the main Penguin series, in order. Our book today is Mr Fortune, Please by H.C. Bailey, and is also our first book of short stories in this series — the previous three have all been novels. The six stories collected in Mr Fortune, Please were first published in Flynn’s Weekly in 1926 and 1927 and came out together as a book first in 1928. It was then added to the Penguin series in March 1936, as Penguin number 34. A fun trivia fact for you: this was H.C. Bailey’s only crime title in the Penguin series, but not his only book to be included. In August 1940, his 1913 swashbuckling historical novel The Sea Captain became Penguin number 275 with an orange, or general fiction, cover.

Henry Christopher Bailey, better known by his initials H. C., was a prolific author and journalist who also worked as a war correspondent during the First World War. He started publishing serialised romantic and historical fiction in his early twenties, and produced his first detective fiction in 1919. For the first decade, he focused entirely on short stories for magazines, but in 1930 he began writing full-length crime novels too, and produced at least a dozen before his retirement from writing in 1950. He had two recurring characters: Reggie Fortune, a surgeon who assists Scotland Yard with tricky cases who is the star of our book today, and Joshua Clunk, a preacher-turned-lawyer who loves to suck peppermints and quote the Bible to criminals. Bailey’s work was greatly admired by his fellow authors in the interwar period, demonstrated by the fact that he was invited to become a founding member of the Detection Club in 1930. Clearly popular in his day, for reasons we’ll discuss later his work has not survived in the same way that that of his contemporaries did, and especially in the UK it can be quite difficult to get hold of copies of his books today. I have linked in the description to a free online version of Mr Fortune, Please at the Internet Archive so you can still read it there if it proves difficult to track down elsewhere. There is also a list of the whole Penguin series linked in the description so you can see what books will be coming up in the future.

Joining me today to discuss this book is Dolores Gordon-Smith, author of the Jack Haldean mystery series which is set in 1920s England. Her other books include Serpent’s Eye, How to Write a Classic Murder Mystery and two WW1 spy stories. And, unlike lots of other expert golden age detective fans of my acquaintance who tend to dislike the Mr Fortune stories because of their protagonist’s speech mannerisms and his eclectic cases, Dolores is, like me, rather drawn to the moral strength that lies beneath this superficially light-hearted character. I’m excited to see what we make of Mr Fortune, Please, together.

Before we proceed, I’ll give my usual spoiler warning here. Until you hear me say that we are “entering the spoiler zone”, you can safely listen without hearing major plot details. The timestamp for that point will also be in the episode description. After that, you can expect to hear major spoilers, up to and including the full solution to the mystery. For maximum enjoyment of Green Penguin Book Club episodes, I recommend that you read the book ahead of listening. And at the end of every episode, I ask my guest to award the book a rating, so stay tuned to the end to hear how many green penguins out of five Dolores gives this one.

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Caroline: Dolores, tell me a bit about your background with crime fiction more generally before we get into this book.

Dolores: I’m a massive Agatha Christie fan, but I was actually brought up by my mum and dad, who dismissed Agatha Christie as a cardboard character writer, and loved Dorothy L Sayers. I always have this split division because discovered Agatha Christie, it was like a secret passion.

It was, my thing. And then when I started try and write to get published it was Agatha Christie’s model I turned to, because Dorothy L. Sayers’ prose is so matchless. You’d have to be very arrogant to think, oh, I can be as good as Dorothy L. Sayers. Christie gives you hope because, she’s a very relaxed writer. She doesn’t use a lot of fancy language and she doesn’t use a lot of classical allusions that you have to go to a dictionary to find out. She’s a very easy writer to think I could model myself on her. And so that’s what I did. And of course, the more you write, the more you read, the more you realize what an enormous library of books are out there from the golden age. There are so many gems out there waiting to be discovered. And of course you come to the big ones of the Golden Age, and I think H. C. Bailey is one of the big ones of the Golden Age and obviously as we’re about to talk about H. C. Bailey, that’s just as well.

Caroline: Yes. Before we embarked on this, what was your relationship with H. C. Bailey? How much of him had you read before?

Dolores: Actually only one story. Going back to mum and dad on their bookcase with Dorothy L. Sayers’ anthology, the Everyman anthology from the Golden Age. She actually wrote a three volume anthology of mystery and horror stories, but then she detached some of the best detective stories, and in that is an H. C. Bailey story called “The Yellow Slugs”, which is absolutely horrific, and I must have read it when I was about 11, and ever since then, I’ve had this thing about slugs. I hate them, but and I think I owe that to H. C. Bailey.

Caroline: Yes, I know exactly the story you mean, and I think about it every time I see a slug.

Dolores: I know.

Caroline: There are certain things from detective fiction that just enter your real life. I’ve got a couple of particular murders that I think about a lot in everyday life, and yeah, the slugs as well. So with just that story under your belt, what were you expecting going into Mr Fortune, Please?

Dolores: The same really. What I like about H. C. Bailey is that he really hates anything cruel. And anybody who’s vulnerable, and it’s often either an old lady, as in the case of The Yellow Slugs, or a child, as in The Little House, which is the last story in Mr Fortune, Please.

You can really feel him being passionate, which is an overused word these days, but it fits how passionate he is about getting justice for them, and I do like that. I do like my detectives to have quite a strong moral sense. It’s why I’m always a bit iffy about Anthony Berkeley, because he definitely obviously sympathizes with the murderer as much as the murdered, most of the time.

Which is fine, and it’s good fun to read, but I actually feel on board with somebody like Bailey or Dorothy L. Sayers, and Agatha Christie, who have the same sort of moral outlook. I do like to feel them on the side of the right guy.

Caroline: Yes, I definitely think you feel that with H. C. Bailey and Mr Fortune quite often, I think, expresses the morals that you would like to be expressed by the official establishment of justice, but isn’t necessarily always, but he’s there to fill that in.

So these stories, there are six stories in Mr Fortune, Please. They were originally published over the course of 1926 in magazine format and then collected a bit later in 1928 in this book. What do you make of the actual form that he uses here? Because I think they’re longer than your traditional short story, but they’re not quite long enough to be what you might call a novella. They’re somewhere in between.

Dolores: No, they’re a long, short story, which is a form I like very much, actually because it gives you enough time to actually build a proper sense of character. And give you a decent plot to go with it. But at the same time, it’s probably one of the reasons why Bailey isn’t as famous nowadays as his great contemporaries, Sayers and Christie.

Because although he did eventually write novels I haven’t actually read any of them, but they’re not meant to be as successful as the short stories, so I think this was his perfect form. But, I know that in the modern publishing world it’s quite difficult to get short stories published. And I gather there’s also problems with copyright. He died in 1961, so therefore he doesn’t actually come out of copyright in Britain until 2031. Come 2031, we might see an explosion in popularity. Yeah.

Caroline: Yes, that is always interesting, isn’t it, when you’re looking at a writer who hasn’t had the same republication effort and you start to look for reasons why that might be. And I think often people do focus on the literary and the critical reception when actually it can be also or entirely a legal problem to do with who controls their estate or not being clear who that is.

And yes, I think you pointed out to me when we were writing to each other about this that H.C. Bailey and Mr Fortune is more readily available in America than he is in the UK. I think the copyright situation being structured differently there.

Dolores: It’s $3.99 on amazon. com, Americans. Go and buy it now.

Caroline: Whereas it’s a bit less easy to get hold of in the UK, unfortunately. But let’s talk about Mr Fortune particularly, because all six of these long short stories is entirely focused on him, as are many of Bailey’s collections, although he did write plenty of other types of things as well. What would you say are the main characteristics of Mr Fortune? I feel all detectives have those signature things, whether it’s a moustache or a monocle or whatever. What are Mr Fortune’s?

Dolores: He hasn’t got a moustache, I should say. I can’t understand why Reggie is always fit and slim because he never seems to stop eating. And he also when we first meet him in “The Missing Husband”, he’s actually lying in a hammock.

Now, to be fair, he goes on to say he’s recovering from a severe attack of blood poisoning, but we often see him just lazing around. And I think actually that’s a contrast to Sherlock Holmes, who was either dead to the world or bursting with energy. And Reggie hardly ever bursts with energy. And he does like afternoon tea and muffins and all this sort of thing.

But I think the interesting thing about it, the vibe, when you read the stories, comes over as a private detective. He’s a bit Lord Peter Wimsey ish, but he’s actually a doctor attached to Scotland Yard. Which is good, because although sometimes he actually discovers crimes for himself as a private detective would, he can be handed crimes by Scotland Yard, which means he’s not continually searching for crimes. It’s his job.

Caroline: Yes, and you don’t have to contend with that awkwardness that you get sometimes a bit later in the run of a private detective, where it just seems like corpses fall in front of their feet at all times, or everyone in their social circle is constantly being burgled. You don’t have to deal with that problem of coincidence when he can be called in professionally.

Dolores: Yeah.

Caroline: But he’s also I think I’m right in saying a surgeon rather than a doctor.

Dolores: Yes, that’s why it’s Mr Fortune. Yeah, because that’s the proper title for a surgeon.

Caroline: But yes, I also love his obsession with food. Not a single story goes by where you don’t get either a scene of him eating or him being annoyed that he’s being prevented from eating or wishing that he was back at home eating crumpets or something.

Although he is very, maybe dynamic is not quite the word, but he’s, once he’s on a case, he’s very dogged and persistent.

In the early stages, you do get some grumbles from him about, if only I could retire to the country and be a doctor in peace not constantly be called in to solve all these crimes. But I do think that maybe that was, it’s a little bit of an affectation. I think he does secretly, enjoy the challenge of it and he enjoys being able to put his talents to people’s defence, really.

Dolores: Yes, the other thing is that he’s actually obviously a very skilled pathologist and forensic scientist and this was a big thing for the Edwardian and the 1920s public because it was a new thing and the very first story in Mr Fortune, Please, “The Missing Husband”, Reggie knows immediately that the murder victim wasn’t killed where the body is found. For one thing, there’s no blood on the floor, which most people would guess these days, but there’s sand in the wound and there’s no sand in the area. And so he goes looking for the right sort of sand. And that’s a lovely little detail which picks up this thing about forensic science.

Caroline: He’s interesting in that regard, isn’t he? Because he has that very strong forensic knowledge and the ability to apply it practically as well, which recalls perhaps somebody like Dr. Thorndyke from R. Austin Freeman or even Sherlock Holmes loves to pick up cigarette ash and look at pebbles and that kind of thing.

But that’s not all there is to him. He also has a more psychological, or some critics have even called him intuitive, which is a criticism if you’re after a pure puzzle, fair play mystery, people shouldn’t be deducing things purely from intuition, but I don’t think it’s intuition. I think it’s just a very good grasp of observational psychology. But he has that string to his bow as well, which is, I think, interesting. He’s not a wholly one type or the other.

Dolores: He’s a very good judge of character. What he doesn’t like is when someone’s been bullying. For instance, in one of the other stories, there’s a chief constable who’s an absolute bully, and Reg just calls him out on it. He tells him he’s behaving like a sergeant major, and the chief constable’s desperately offended, but he is being a bully. And Reggie leaps the defense of the bullied, which I like very much.

Caroline: Do you see other characters from this period that, that have that same quality in them, or do you think he stands alone?

Dolores: I’m trying to think actually. Anthony Gethryn, Philip McDonald’s Anthony Gethryn, I think he’s a lot more dashing, Anthony Gethryn, he hardly ever seems to sit still, but he seems to grasp it and of course, Hercule Poirot. He’s always very sympathetic when he considers that somebody’s the underdog.

Caroline: I think another aspect of these books, which is perhaps more to do with their prose style than the actual character of Mr Fortune, is I’ve seen people say that they don’t like them or that they find them frustrating to read because they’re very light hearted in tone, which I don’t see myself, but I wonder if they’re getting that partly from the fact that Mr Fortune sometimes drops the Gs at the end of his words in the way that Peter Wimsey does or a PG Woodhouse character might, but I wondered what you thought of that. Do you think he’s meant to be funny?

Dolores: You’re definitely meant to find some things funny. Yeah. Not laugh out loud, not PG Wodehouse funny, but witty, in the same way that Agatha Christie isn’t laugh out loud funny, but she’s witty. And you can smile when you’re reading them. But I’ve seen the criticism that they are very fluffy because of Reggie’s mannerisms.

But, actually, I think that’s way overstated. If you actually read the book, yes, of course he has mannerisms, otherwise he’d be just a cypher. But his character, he doesn’t go in saying, I am the great detective. In fact, he’s an extremely modest man in his approach. So yeah, I think the mannerisms thing is definitely overstated.

Caroline: Yes, I don’t find it to be particularly intrusive or even that strongly noticeable. I know there are definitely characters, early Peter Wimsey is an example of that, where the sort of hunting, shooting, fishing vocabulary can grate, I think. But no, I think it’s, I think it’s unobtrusive enough in here that if you don’t like it, it doesn’t spoil your reading.

We touched on this a little bit already, but I’d like to dig into it a bit more. What kind of case does Mr Fortune consult on? We mentioned that he sometimes gets called in by Scotland Yard. Do you see any commonalities between the ones he does in this book?

Dolores: Well, to state the obvious, it’s always mysterious. The solution, which might seem obvious in the first instance, isn’t. There’d be ropey stories if it wasn’t a mystery.

Caroline: Yes, quite. Yes.

Dolores: He tends not to go for gangland stories. It’s usually a fairly classic one person’s guilty and that person will be identified, which is a very satisfying format to read. Apart from that they all tend to be amongst members of the upper classes which is again, it’s fair enough, that’s the milieu in which he works but not exclusively so. Obviously, they have things in common but really it’s Reggie’s passion for justice. I think somewhere in Mr Fortune, Please, someone says to him, what about mercy? And Reggie says, I don’t do mercy, I do justice. And I think that sums him up.

Caroline: Yes, I agree with all of that and I think as well there is often a thread in the stories of the wrong person is being suspected by the police or even arrested in some cases. And Mr Fortune knows better, knows that’s not really the solution. So you come across that a few times where he’s working to get someone out of the dock who shouldn’t be in it. And I like you. I find that very satisfying that he’s a crusader for justice.,

Dolores: Yes.

Caroline: The concept rather than justice as expressed by the police force perhaps. But he does have a relationship with the official police force. He is an expert attached to Scotland Yard.

They do call him in, but he can be quite antagonistic towards them. He doesn’t necessarily agree and he doesn’t have that kind of chummy relationship that you get perhaps between Poirot and Japp or Wimsey and Parker.

Dolores: No, that’s quite true. And I think a lot of this as we said, one of his characteristics is laziness or at least perceived laziness. So when Lomas, who’s the head of the CID, says, Reggie, I’ve got a case for you, Reggie, oh no, oh, not more work. And then he gets into it.

But actually the relationship, although Reggie can be quite rude to the official police he goes on holiday with Lomas on occasion. And there’s one story in Mr Fortune, Please, where it’s Lomas’s auntie who’s worried about what’s happening to her niece. And Reggie, oh, no, don’t say I’ve got to go and look this up and go and sort it out. So it’s an interesting one, but I think a lot of the perceived antagonism is actually more banter rather than actuality.

Caroline: Yes, if he truly despised them, he wouldn’t keep working with them. We know enough about his ethics from his other behaviour to know that he wouldn’t do that, yes. And there is one story in this collection which does focus quite closely on the behaviour of the police, which I found very interesting. So would you, before we get into the story specifically, would you describe Reggie Fortune stories as fair play?

Dolores: Most of the time. For instance, in “The Missing Husband”, the first story Reggie picks off some long hairs from the victim’s trousers and looks at them with interest, but we’re not told what’s interesting about them. Later on, it transpires they’ve come from a dog, and he discovers that there’s two sorts of blood at the scene of the crime.

There’s dog blood. And human blood, so there’s obviously a dog around. And the victim hated dogs, which is very pertinent to the discovery of who actually murdered who. But I don’t think it’s fair play. If we’d been told there were dog hairs. It wouldn’t have made the mystery obvious. I think it would have helped it. Occasionally, I wish we could see a bit more fair play.

Caroline: Yes, I don’t know. I think that’s a very astute observation that there you’ve got a sort of partial clue, but it’s not fully. And yes, to say that it’s dog hair you wouldn’t immediately go, aha, it must be so and so. I don’t know if that’s deliberate or just possibly carelessness on Bailey’s part.

But in other situations though, I do think he does. In general, these aren’t the type of stories where in the last third or the last quarter, suddenly Mr Fortune starts coming out with all kinds of things that the reader’s never heard of before.

Dolores: No, because that’s very unsatisfactory when that happens. By and large, yeah, the rules of fair play are observed.

Caroline: Let’s get into talking about these stories particularly. There’s now going to be spoilers. We are now entering the spoiler zone. Let’s think about the first one in this collection, “The Missing Husband”. Now, one of the things that I like most about this story is not actually a really core piece of it, but it’s this character of the rector’s wife, who Mr Fortune calls back to throughout the story as being this embodiment of village gossip in this story, which is an inheritance mystery. Husband and wife, living in a fairly rural place, enough that there’s a very intense community discussion of everything that’s going on and the husband has gone missing and the wife is suspected. How did it strike you?

Dolores: It’s a lovely description of village gossip in the worst possible sense. That this poor woman, Mrs Brase, her character’s been taken away by the rector’s wife, who’s just a nasty, busy, gossipy woman without a shred of evidence, really. And when Mr Brase is found dead, everybody, because of the gossip and from the rector’s wife, seems to think that it has to be his wife who’s killed him. And this is a spoiler. She didn’t. The murderer is definitely elsewhere.

Village life is often seen as this cozy thing, but very often in certainly in Agatha Christie, you get the non cozy side of British life and you certainly get it in H.C. Bailey as well, every, being far, everybody being part concerned with everybody else’s business.

Yeah. And passing opinions without any evidence or knowledge.

Caroline: Yes, there’s a couple of stories in this collection where I think he explores that. This one, and then the later one, “The Violet Farm”, where the way that people in a small community have made up their minds about people and treat them accordingly, then really has an effect on the way the police investigate it, and so on, which is as you say, entirely evidenceless.

It’s quite scary to think about, how, if that would happen in real life. We also get in “The Missing Husband”, something that I found quite interesting. We get some ballistics evidence.

Dolores: We do.

Caroline: Mr Fortune notices some things about sort of scrapings on the side of bullets, and he’s able to tell the difference between two different guns in this situation.

And this really stuck in my mind, just because I feel like it’s relatively rare in fiction of this period. Guns generally are not that common and then this kind of forensics too.

Dolores: Yeah. And that picks up what I was saying earlier about him being a good forensic scientist. It never seems to occur to anybody in the police to actually check the bullet and was it fired from this particular gun. But as a matter of fact, in real life, that was an absolute staple. Both Spilsbury and Sir Sidney Smith wrote quite a lot about guns and bullets. So it should be better used in fiction. It’s nice to see it actually coming into the H. C. Bailey story.

Caroline: Yes, because this is a really good one for the forensic stuff, isn’t it? Because like you said, this is where bodies discovered in a woodland clearing and he just immediately, sees things that give him cause for doubt that the scene they’re being presented with is actually the scene of the murder.

The lack of blood, the way the grass is bent or not bent, and things to do with the body. Then also the sand and the subsequent evidence of the bullet. As a reader, I find it very satisfying when you are shown a scene in one way and then the expert comes in and deconstructs it. Almost like a really good argument being destroyed only in a visual practical sense. I think it’s really clever.

Dolores: Yes it is. It’s very good. It’s a very satisfying story, that one.

Caroline: Let’s move on to talk about the next one, which is “The Cat Burglar”. So this is a story of theft, as the title might lead you to expect, rather than one of murder in the first instance. And again, this is one I think where Mr Fortune is called in partially through social acquaintance rather than through official police business.

His first contact with it is because a friend of his has been burgled and she brings it to his attention. And he then subsequently says to the police, I want to investigate this. And this takes place in London as well, not in the countryside as the previous one did. So this is Mr Fortune in his metropolitan incarnation. What did you think of this one?

Dolores: I liked it very much because you’ve got the personal element of I think the lady’s called Doris, yeah, Doris Davis says, “Oh Reggie something nasty’s happened, we’ve had a burglary.” And then she’s very upset because the chap who the police actually nab for having done the burglar turns out to be a man who she likes very much, he’s a chauffeur at the local garage.

And she’s very upset about the thought that any evidence that she gives might help to land this chap in jail. She doesn’t want that. Reggie does investigate, and because it’s Doris he does bring it up with the police. He goes and looks at this chap, Jim, who’s on trial, and immediately sees that he couldn’t possibly have done that particular burglary.

Because it involves the use of two hands, and this chap’s got a withered arm, through having had shrapnel in it. Because Jim also has an excellent war record. And that makes Reggie suspicious. The inspector who’s in charge of the case hasn’t looked into this man’s record. Jim previously was a cat burglar before the war, but went to prison and decided to go straight, joined up, had an excellent war record, and has since then not done anything wrong.

Jim’s story is that he was approached by an old crook that he knew. Jim refused him. And the Inspector Pargo, who’s in charge of the case completely dismisses this and Reggie thinks this is very suspicious. And it turns out Pargo is also censored by Lomas, who’s in charge of the CID. He said, you should have realised there was more to this than met the eye. And it turns out that Inspector Pargo is a bent copper, and a very bent copper indeed. And that’s good because usually in Golden Age fiction, the police can be thick, but they’re not usually crooked. Of course in real life they were. You did have crooked policemen. It’s not a trope that we know a great deal about. If you read actual non fictional accounts of the period crooked coppers do turn up, but it’s not something that you often get in fiction, so this is rare.

Caroline: Rare, and I think fascinating for it. When I was reading this story, I was completely gripped by it. I think it’s definitely unusual and I think it’s also handled here very cleverly. Because I think Bailey must have known this and was doing this deliberately. Because we are inclined to trust the police in detective fiction because that’s the expectation that the genre has created for us. So I was quite a way through this story before it even really occurred to me as a possibility that could be the solution.

Dolores: Yeah, me too. Yeah.

Caroline: Yeah. And it really takes you by surprise. And there’s some clever sort of little set piece moments in this story too, like this issue of Jim’s hand, because the cat burglary in question, in order to have executed it, I think Fortune is able to show that the person needed to have been able to hang from a gutter or something in order to get in through a window.

It wasn’t a straightforward climb, but he doesn’t tell Jim the specifics of it. So when he’s giving evidence, he unwittingly acquits himself by making it clear that he’s not physically capable of having done that. He can’t have hung from two arms from a gutter because he’s got this injury.

And I thought that was a very clever thing by Fortune that rather than him insisting on Jim’s innocence, he lets Jim prove it himself without even knowing that he’s doing it, which is very effective. And yes, I think it’s a trope that I would love to read more of if anyone knows of any stories like this where you’ve got the, where you’ve got the sort of outside detective who ends up, it’s almost like Line of Duty or something today. You’ve got the outside investigator who’s then calling out corruption within the heart of the establishment. It’s very good, I think. And it’s a shame you don’t come across it more because as you say, it definitely happened in real life.

Dolores: And of course, this story, which starts off with the theft of some very minor jewelry, moonstones which are semi precious stones and only sentimental value really, ends up with a murder because what happens is that the gang who’s behind it and who are playing Inspector Pargo they want to have somebody to be accused of a spate of cat burglaries.

And once Jim’s released, they pick another poor beggar. And he gets murdered, also apparently in the course of the burglary. And because of his forensic skills, Reggie’s, I will say immediately, this man did not fall. This is not what killed him. He’s had his neck broken deliberately and, sounds so, so harsh and not something that you’d read for entertainment. And I think it’s Bailey’s skill that it is actually an entertaining read.

Caroline: Yes, absolutely. I think if you were to outline this story for someone and say, there’s a theft and then someone with a disability is wrongfully accused, then a corrupt copper tries to pin it all on someone else and throws them out a window, you’d say, that sounds awful.

That sounds like a literal tragedy. That’s probably the case for quite a lot of Golden Age detective fiction, that at its very best, you can summarise them all like that and then still go, and yet I enjoyed reading about this.

Dolores: Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Yeah.

Caroline: “The Cat Burglar” was definitely a standout for me in this collection because of that. Let’s talk about “The Lion Party”. This story takes us to a different setting again. We’re out of London, we’re at a country house party, and again, it’s concerned with theft and with some added blackmail mixed into it. But the concept of the lion party was a new one to me.

This is the idea that the hostesses has. She’s trying to assemble the most interesting possible mixture of guests and having some notoriety sprinkled in there is all to the better. It all creates sort of fashionable gossip for her. So Mr Fortune is one of the people in that lineup and he is attractive for his connection to Scotland Yard and his reputation for solving cases.

But we’ve also got fashionable debutantes and a spiritualist fortune teller type person which when you look at it from the point of view of a reader of detective fiction, it’s just an obviously volatile mixture in which something is going to go wrong. I’m not quite sure where the pleasure comes in to it for the hostess, but anyway, she’s decided she wants to host a lion party. What did you think of it?

Dolores: Well, I think this is the most lighthearted story in the book, because there aren’t any murders, which is nice, because you can actually just enjoy what’s happening. And what’s happening is that these jewels get stolen, and it seems to be a case of hunt the slipper, really, for these jewels. There’s an Italian opera singer who apparently has got this gorgeous voice, and also this vast collection of jewels, which get swiped, and then they turn up again.

And the wrong person is accused and Mr Fortune comes to the rescue and finds the right person. And I’m glad to say the villain, who’s planted the jewels in the poor woman’s bedroom so she’ll be accused, the villain gets knocked over and everybody’s happy.

Caroline: It is very much a bit of a drawing room comedy in a way, isn’t it? And although the jewels are clearly worth a lot of money and it’s not nice that someone’s had their property taken away from them, you don’t feel any imminent sense of peril in the way that you maybe do in the previous story, which is also about theft, where working class people are going to go to jail wrongfully for this, and so on.

Whereas that’s not the case in this story at all. It reminds me a little bit of that Dorothy L. Sayers’ story, “The Necklace of Pearls”, which is also a drawing room, closed circle, and then somebody’s necklace goes missing. And it’s similarly light hearted in tone. There’s not really much of a suggestion that they’re going to call the police in.

Dolores: No, it’s definitely a much more fun light hearted, let’s have a change of pace. And it comes halfway through the book, and I think it, all of a sudden it’s a bit like the yeast in a loaf. It makes everything rise. And yeah it’s just there for fun.

Caroline: Yes, exactly. It’s light relief. Next we have “The Violet Farm”, which is one I particularly like. I do really like the kind of puzzle, where the puzzle is actually in the story as well as the story itself, where there’s an element to be solved for the characters. And in this case, there’s a mysterious piece of furniture that that has a code to be decoded and a little treasure hunt attached to it. Even if it’s not remotely realistic, I enjoy that kind of thing greatly. What did you think of this one?

Dolores: I liked it ever such a lot because like you I’m very fond of mysterious messages and this is a 15th century wooden chest which has an odd inscription on it which Reggie eventually finds out is part of a defaced Greek inscription from Homer and it gives him the location to buried treasure.

But the interest of the story in the first instance, this is the one I mentioned earlier, where the head of CID, Lomas, his auntie is very worried about the behaviour of her niece. Her niece is a very much free spirit. She’s not a debutante, or she certainly could be. But what she rather prefers to do is live a quite simple life.

And you get these sorts of characters turning up in Dorothy L. Sayers as well. Where they don’t want to be part of society. They want to go off and do their own thing. And this woman goes off with a friend and they decide to start a violet farm. And when Reggie sees this violet farm, Reggie loves plants. He’s a very keen gardener and he thinks he’s never seen a worse garden. As well as being sympathetic characters, they’re delightfully incompetent, these two girls.

And again, this also comes in with the idea of village gossip, because a lot of malicious gossip has been spread about the two girls in the village, which turns out to be untrue. And Reggie finds that out, it is just malicious gossip, and he finds the people who are doing it. He finds the reason why.

And the reason why is that a local antique dealer has suddenly worked out that there is a clue to hidden treasure in the cottage and he wants the girls out of the cottage so he can find the treasure. Anyway, I’m glad to say the villains get soundly defeated and the girls triumph.

Caroline: Yes, it recalls, did you watch that I think it was on, it was in the 90s, that TV series Lovejoy, which was a, detective series, sort of antiques based. That came to mind when I was reading this story. It seemed like the kind of plot you might find in Lovejoy. I really enjoyed this one. The chest and the treasure hunt, definitely.

But also, yes, just the idea that these girls are trying to live a different way. They’re living in this little remote converted barn and growing their violets for sale. And that’s the choice they’ve made, and that they are being treated very badly by the local people. The grocer won’t serve them so they’re having to eat everything out of tins. Little details like that all help to build up the picture.

I also really like the bit where I think Lomas and Fortune first go into their barn into their cottage and I think Lomas says, “Oh it’s awful, someone’s been in here and turned it all over!” And Fortune says, “No, I think that’s just how it is, I think they’re just really messy.” I enjoyed that because I feel like someone might say that about my house if they came into it.

Dolores: There’s a very funny description when Reggie, apparently, his car broken down and he goes to the girl’s cottage so he can do it without him telling them who he is. And he’s invited to the worst afternoon tea he’s ever had. And these items are itemized. Butter from a tin, it’s milk from a tin, and everything seems to be old because nobody will deliver them food. And, oh, but it sounds absolutely awful. Then poor old Reggie has to go and console himself with a really good meal afterwards.

Caroline: Yes, he has to go to a pub, doesn’t he, and have a really good dinner to make up for it. Yes, so there are nice little humorous touches like that, that are very rooted in the details, but the overall plot against these girls is quite sinister, and you can see how, they’re two young women living alone in the middle of nowhere, and they’re being persecuted by this antiques dealer, basically, who has got lots of allies, who’s making their life hard.

Again, it’s another example of where you can look at the story in two ways. You can see it as quite a sinister attempt to harm people and subvert justice and get hold of goods you’re not entitled to. And also there’s little comedy moments like Reggie and the butter in the tin and seemingly innocuous details like the fact that their garden is being done very badly by this suspicious character, and so on.

Yes, I think one of the criticisms I have seen of the Mr Fortune stories is that they’re quite surface level. They’re quite superficial. And I think they’re anything but. I think if you pay attention, they’ve got some quite deep themes about justice and who is believed and who gets to live in peace and that sort of thing.

Dolores: And again, we’ve got a non-cosy village. Agatha Christie says somewhere, she has Miss Marple say, our villages are not friendly places. Evacuees found that out in the war. This is a post Second World War Miss Marple story. But I don’t think Reggie ever does a cosy village, so that’s a cliche that we can put to rest.

Caroline: Yeah, I think that’s certainly something that you get from the variety of settings in this collection, that there are malicious people everywhere and there are good people everywhere, which I think is much more true to reality. just because this place is a charming cottage in the middle of a field doesn’t mean that life can’t be hard here and that people can’t be awful.

Dolores: I would like to emphasize, though, that these stories are actually fun to read,

Caroline: They are, yes.

Dolores: As if it might be one grim thing after another grim thing, but they are actually entertainment.

Caroline: They are, yes. They’re entertaining both because of Mr Fortune’s antics and also because of the satisfying way in which he unravels the mystery. I think that, especially if you’re someone who likes reading puzzle mysteries in the first place, I think these are a really satisfying example of it.

So let’s move on to talk about the next one, which again you can read it in a sinister way, but is also still entertaining. So this is “The Quiet Lady”. When I first read this, I felt like it had quite a lot in common with a Chesterton story. The image of a man who’s died of poison out in his garden, seemingly I think it’s set up as a little bit of an impossible crime, like he’s drunk this poison in the barley water but it can’t have got into the barley water, no one had the opportunity to put it there, all this sort of thing.

That to me read a bit Father Brown in a way. But this is one I think where Mr Fortune is not called in by the police, he just happens to be passing with a doctor friend of his on his rounds and a sudden call for a doctor comes and off they go. And what is revealed is really quite a dark plot and a dark sort of household situation. What did you make of this one?

Dolores: I mean I must admit, I didn’t actually like the solution. It turns out, and this is a massive spoiler, that the bloke’s killed himself in order to incriminate his ward who has got the effrontery to go and get engaged instead of doing everything that this chap, Wissenden is his name, being at his beck and call and he’s so angry with her that he decides to kill himself so that she will be done for murder. And Sherlock Holmes did the same thing in “The Problem of Thor Bridge”. I just find it so incredible that anyone would actually kill themselves in order to get somebody else It’d be much simpler just to bump the person off if you didn’t like them, but as a story, it’s very well done. The evidence that Reggie collects quite by chance he’s on the scene, as you said. And it’s just as well he is there because the local constable and the local police take it as open and shut that the ward is called Lily she’s the quiet lady of the title, is the obvious culprit because all the evidence against her has been manufactured by this nasty guy, Wissenden. She’s in line to inherit a lot of money under his will. And then he writes the solicitor and say, Oh, I want to change my will.

And she murders him, apparently in the interval between having the will made and having the will changed. It seems a very open and shut case. But it’s because of the forensic stuff that Reggie does on the scene. I mentioned picking up hairs from a trouser leg. This is the story in which it occurs.

He knows that there’s been a dog there. Now, this Wissenden hated dogs. And the dog belonged to Wissenden’s sister. And this is where I can’t really handle it because Wissenden obviously kicked the dog, which is a vile thing to do. And broke two of the dog’s ribs and hurt his jaw, and so the poor dog bleeds on the ground.

But Reggie finds that blood and realizes there’s something else going on here. There’s another factor. And he knows that Wissenden had a sister who used to live with him. And she has a dog, and the dog must have been there, so presumably the sister was there too. So he calls for the sister to come and say what happened.

And she says, I actually saw my brother pour stuff into his barley water, and that just proves it, that he’s killed himself. As I said, I enjoyed the story very much, apart from the fact I think the solution is absolutely bonkers. If I wanted to make sure that someone got done in, I’d just go and do them in. I wouldn’t manufacture a load of evidence so the police would do it for me.

Caroline: Yes, I agree. It’s a really improbable and psychologically improbable solution, but the story definitely still has interest and has redeeming features. The abuse of the dog is such a huge tell. I hate reading about cruelty to animals. Edmund Crispin always has dogs being kicked or harmed in his stories, and I really don’t like it. I think it’s unnecessary, but I can see what he’s doing with it here. It’s there to give Fortune the clue that this scene has been staged, that it didn’t happen the way that it looked, and also to indicate that this man is awful because he kicked a dog hard enough to break his ribs. So yes, I suppose you could say it’s cruelty with a purpose. It’s not there for titillation or entertainment.

Dolores: Yeah. Definitely not. And I’m glad to say that we know from the sister that she immediately took the poor dog, who’s called Dodo, to the vets and the dog’s going to be fine. And Lily is going to be fine. She’s marrying a nice young man and she also gets all the money, so everyone’s going to be fine. And the nasty man who orchestrated all this is dead, which is good.

Caroline: Which he did to himself, so no one else is going to, be harmed or bear any guilt for that. Yes, he’s dead of his own hand and his own awfulness. So yes, I suppose in that way it, it is a very satisfying story, even if the plot mechanism isn’t quite all that we would have hoped.

Well, let’s move on to talk about the last story in this collection, which I think we both agreed was the absolute highlight. I’ve definitely not read all of the Mr Fortune stories, but this is by far my favourite of those that have read. And this is “The Little House”.

And this is, you’d call it an abduction plot in the end, but it all begins just with a missing cat. Mr Fortune is consulted by an old lady who’s very distressed because the little girl that she looks after had a cat and the cat has gone missing and initially Mr Fortune and his police colleagues are like, oh you can’t waste your time just looking into missing cats, out of the goodness of his heart.

And also there are some peculiar features about the way the cat has gone missing. He’s fine, I’ll come and have a look. And in pulling on that thread, he unravels this much, much greater crime which I think I always admire that as a structure for a mystery, starting out with something small that leads to something big.

I think it’s really clever and can be really good when it’s pulled off. And what we end up with is, a horrible situation where a child is being held prisoner. by these two awful drug experimenter-pusher people in order to punish her parents. So she’s been abducted and withheld from them for that reason. And I think we get to see a really tender and kind side of Mr Fortune in this story in the way that he goes to the defence of this child. What was it about it that really struck you?

Dolores: I think this is an absolutely stunning, stunningly good story. It’s actually reprinted in the British Library of Crime Classics the collection called Capital Crimes. And it’s, to my mind, it’s up there with the very, very best that the Golden Age can do. It’s up there with the best of Agatha Christie.

And I can’t say any higher praise than that. As you say, it starts off with innocuous beginnings. This nice, gentle, little old lady, Mrs Pemberton, comes to Reggie and says, Oh dear, my granddaughter’s lost a kitten. And they go, Oh my God, I’m a, what am I? I am this foremost police surgeon, and people are talking to me about lost kittens.

But as she talks, you realise there’s something very odd about the whole thing. And then when he brings it up with the local police, they also laugh at the idea that this should be an organisation to find lost kittens. And then she says to them, look, there was a little girl in the little house next door.

But nobody seems to know anything about this little girl. Who is this child? And then a mysterious piece of paper that a child has drawn a picture of a cat is flung over the wall to Mrs Pemberton’s, and she picks it up, shows it to Reggie, and he realises immediately, and we’re told immediately, which is nice that it’s actually packing from sophisticated laboratory equipment, it’s glassware.

So what are they doing in this little house with sophisticated laboratory equipment and this mysterious child who nobody ever seems to have heard of? And there’s a very good scene where Reggie and an inspector, Avery, who also thinks there’s something very much not right dress up as waterboard inspectors and go around testing the pipes, the water pipes in the little house. Reggie finds the child. At that point, he can’t take her away. And there’s genuine tension, where you realise it’s a real race against time to get the little kid out of it. And I’m glad to say they do get the little girl out of it, and their parents are found, and everybody’s reunited, and all the nasty people get properly killed at the end. And it feels very satisfying.

Caroline: Yes, they do. And you’re right that it is one of the things that I think makes this one so good is that even though you’ve just read five stories in which Mr Fortune always saves the day and the bad people always get what’s coming to them, you do feel genuine tension when you’re reading this.

You do feel the possibility that he’s not going to be able to manage it this time. And I think that’s definitely testament to the way Bailey structures it and the way he orders the plot that you have that impression. I think the way that Fortune as well, obviously cares about the welfare of the child right from the start, in a way that some of the other adults involved that he tries to tell just don’t seem to care very much when he, as you say, he just asked some basic questions of the local bobbies on the beat to say did you know a kid lives here?

Have you come across her? And they have never heard of it and he thinks that’s weird. And the fact that, when he gets her out of there, he’s already engaged a nanny to look after her and to make a really nice safe place for her to go to. And he’s doing that himself. That’s not coming from the police.

I think you don’t often get children in Golden Age detective fiction. It’s not something the genre is that interested in. And when you do, they tend to be more passing background characters than protagonists. And so I think this is a really interesting example of doing something different and doing it really well.

Dolores: Yes it very much is. And there’s one remark that when Reggie’s trying to find out if anybody knows anything about this little girl, he says to one of the policemen, have you ever lived next door to a house with a child? You know it’s there, and this is just real life coming into it. Of course, they’re there. You hear them all the time. H. C. Bailey himself had two daughters. And he was obviously, judging from the evidence of the stories he seems to have been a very nice, kind dad, which is something I appreciate. Because he’s very sympathetic to kids. Whenever kids turn up in the story, they’re always realistic, but excellent children.

Caroline: Yes, I came across one critic saying that one of the things that people haven’t historically liked about the Mr Fortune stories is his “mawkish attitude to children”. And I think if this is mawkish, then I don’t really know what that is because I think what we see here is just kindness and concern, and a proper attention to welfare would be my impression.

I’m not sure that I would characterise it as mawkish or over the top, and I think perhaps it’s more the case that in other stories where children do turn up, very little consideration is given to them by author or characters. And so maybe some people read this as excessive by comparison, but that’s definitely not how it struck me.

Dolores: I think you’re absolutely on the nail there. The little girl is a perfectly ordinary little girl and poor child, she’s been traumatised, and Reggie knows that and treats her excessively well, but kindly, it’s not remotely creepy, it’s just kind, and it’s very nice to read,

Caroline: Yes. So yeah, this, I think this collection of these, so it’s six longer short stories. I think it ends on a very high point. And. I also agree with you that I think it’s been put together with quite some care, the way the stories they contrast in tone between that you don’t ever read two of the same type right next to each other.

So I think it’s been assembled with great care. And and overall I had a really nice time reading it and I think it’s always difficult, isn’t it, when you embark on something that where you’ve, I, I’ve read what Julian Symons had to say about Reggie Fortune and he wasn’t a fan.

Dolores: Bless him. What a sweetheart, Julian Symons was. Good lord.

Caroline: I think when you read something that’s got something of a reputation attached to it, whatever that reputation might be it’s really nice to find that I didn’t feel like that at all, to have a completely different reaction.

Dolores: At the time Bailey was very much like Dorothy L. .Sayers. She was a cracking critic as well as being an excellent writer. She loved him. She loved his stories. In one of the other stories, not in this book, he meets his future wife, who’s an actress called Joan Arbor, and when he’s looking for a clue to where a missing person should be and she turns up and says, Oh, I know who you’re looking for.

And she comes from a place called Llanfairfechan in North Wales. And he also has a nice little detail that if you go from Manchester or Liverpool to North Wales, you will pass Llanfairfechan. And whenever I do go to North Wales from Manchester, I always give it a wave because Bailey actually ended up living there. And if there’s not a blue plaque up to him, there should be.

Caroline: There should be!

Dolores: I very much hope that he has a big revival. I think most readers are missing out because there’s not more Bailey available.

Caroline: Yes. Do you have any thoughts about why he hasn’t endured in popularity? Because as you say, he was very popular both with his fellow writers and with the public in the time that these stories were first being published. You can see by the sheer number of them that magazines were taking from him that readers wanted them, but Mr Fortune hasn’t attained the pop culture status of some of the other detectives of that time. Do you have any theories as to why that is?

Dolores: I think it’s just simply because they are short stories and they’re not novels. and as I said publishers don’t tend to go for short stories. They’d rather have a novel and Bailey was unusual in that he kept to the short story format long after Agatha Christie, say, had gone from short stories to full length novels.

That is one of the only few reasons I can think of, and the difficulty of actually getting hold of the material, I’m sure if it was widely available, he’d be more widely known. So we can just hope there is a revival coming out when he comes out of British copyright. And if you are in America, get the book. It’s $3.99 on Kindle.

Caroline: I wonder as well, building on that, that the fact that the short stories are generally a bit longer than your average short story might have an effect as well. Because although, as you said one of them has been included in a British Library anthology. I think that’s the exception.

I think other multi author collections like that, I think they pass over him because you have to give over more space in the book to it, and it means you can’t have as many authors or something. So I wonder if it is sometimes just little practical things like that prevent readers from encountering him.

Because otherwise I feel like all the ingredients are there. I think the prose is enjoyable. I think the mysteries are, by and large, they play fair and they’re satisfying. I think you’ve got a consistent character with several attractive elements. And something that I think you don’t get so much that is rare that you get in these stories is this quiet crusade for justice and this championing of the unjustly accused and the underdog and all of that, which is a really welcome addition to the Golden Age story that you don’t get quite so much of.

So I think there are lots of excellent reasons why people should be reading H. C. Bailey and not very many good ones where they aren’t. But the availability is obviously a very practical concern. And yes, hopefully, there are so many republications going on at the moment. Hopefully whatever is preventing Bailey, whether it’s a copyright issue or a concern that he doesn’t have fans or whatever, I hope that we can go some way to dispelling that.

Dolores: I would love to see much more Bailey available in print.

Caroline: So the last thing I always ask my guests to do for this is to ask how many green penguins out of five would you award this book?

Dolores: Four, I think.

Caroline: Four out of five. A very respectable rating. Thank you very much, Dolores, for joining me. It’s been a great pleasure to talk to you.

Dolores: Thank you very much for inviting me.

Caroline: You’re welcome. Thank you.

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I hope you enjoyed our discussion of Mr Fortune, Please. This is usually where I have the postbag section, where I catch you up on the correspondence I’ve received since our last Green Penguin Book Club episode, but I’m afraid I didn’t get any emails or voice notes this time to share! Perhaps our last book, The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett wasn’t especially inspiring to listeners, but I do hope that you are itching to write in and tell me what you made of this episode. The next book we cover for Green Penguin Book Club will be The Poisoned Chocolates Case by Anthony Berkeley, which is Penguin Number 58. I’m doing green penguin book club roughly every other month, so listen out for that episode in October. And make sure you’re following the show in Instagram @shedunnitshow to see pictures of the books I discuss and other green penguin updates.

Music

This episode of Shedunnit was produced and hosted by me, Caroline Crampton. My guest was Dolores Gordon-Smith. You can find out more about her and her books at her website, doloresgordon-smith.co.uk.

You can find a full list of the books we mentioned in this episode at shedunnitshow.com/mrfortuneplease. I publish transcripts of every episode including this one; find them all at shedunnitshow.com/transcripts.

Shedunnit is edited by Euan McAleece. Production assistance from Leandra Griffith. Member support for the Shedunnit Book Club from CC McLoughlin.

Thanks for listening.

One Response to Mr Fortune, Please Transcript (Green Penguin Book Club 4)

  1. Mr Fortune’s banter is standard 20s fare, plus it’s a way of concealing what he’s worked out from the police and from us, the readers. I don’t mind it. However, I find the novels and stories strangely unmemorable. And every so often Reggie can’t wait for the law to take its course, and simply despatches the perp himself. This could explain the lack of reprints. It’s something he has in common with Mr Moto, but I still love Mr M – either because the books are so well-written or because he was played on screen by Peter Lorre.

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