Mr. Fortune, Please

As successors to Sherlock Holmes there are no more than a handful of detectives in the great tradition. Mr Reginald Fortune is certainly one of them. Mr Fortune, attached in a loose sort of way to the Home Office and Scotland Yard, is utterly independent, utterly fearless, and with a cold astuteness belied by his cherubic appearance. His speciality is medicine, although he does not practice, but for expert opinions on such matters as recently deceased bodies, the more difficult poisons and the like, the Yard would be hard pressed to do without him. Mr Fortune, Please is the fourth of his casebooks and includes six ingenious, bizarre and murderous crimes which Reggie investigates through minute and forensic, scientific detection.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Henry Christopher Bailey was an English crime novelist and one of the Big Five writers of detective fictions in the ‘Golden Age’ which also included Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, R. Austin Freeman and Freeman Wills Crofts. Hugely popular at the time and adored by critics he is today unjustly rather forgotten. This was at least partly due to tortuous issues regarding his literary estate. His best-known creation was the plump and drawling Reginald Fortune. The medically trained ‘Mr Fortune’ was a scientific adviser to Scotland Yard’s Criminal Investigation Department and starred in twenty-two novels and short story collections. Much praised for his puzzles and characterisation, the Mr Fortune stories have echoes of Lord Peter Wimsey but are much darker, tackling subjects not touched upon by other major writers, including police corruption and murderous obsession. Bailey’s other series character was Joshua Clunk, a sanctimonious lawyer who exposes corruption and blackmail but also manages to profit from the crimes he investigates. H.C. Bailey died in 1961.

PRAISE FOR H.C. BAILEY’S ‘MR FORTUNE’

‘Fortune is a super sleuth who solves problems that are too much for Scotland Yard’
New York Times

‘The most engaging detective of fiction’
The Observer

‘Clever and entertaining’
Boston Transcript

‘Mr Fortune is not only brilliant but lovable’
New York Times

‘The most engaging detective invented since Sherlock Holmes’
Alexander Woolcott, The New Yorker

‘Brilliant… his plots have an immense and admirable ingenuity’
Times Literary Supplement

‘It is difficult to find in modern detection, puzzles more elaborately conceived and mystifying’
Howard Haycroft

‘Mr Bailey is always readable’
New Statesman