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More vintage-mystery news: a few days ago I finally located some of H.C. Bailey's Reggie Fortune stories online -- the first collection, as it happens. Apparently the character appeared in around eighty stories, but all I've ever been able to find in hard copy is one short story in an anthology many years ago, and a reprinted novel (Black Land, White Land) some time in the past decade. I've finally been able to read a sizeable chunk of the stuff, and I'm not sure just how to describe it.
Mr. Fortune (a doctor who keeps getting consulted by the police, often to his annoyance) is usually described, when the stories are remembered at all these days, as a Lord Peter Wimsey knock-off, usually by people who hate Wimsey. I don't see the resemblance myself, except that he speaks in the odd slang of a certain type of 1920s upper-class character. YMMV, but for me this dialect is sufficiently removed in time that I can view it as period detail rather than an annoying affectation (casual racism is pretty much a given for this period, though the character who keeps being described as "the little Jew" becomes a trusted ally, and almost everyone lower-class or flamboyantly foreign turns out to have been wrongly suspected, which makes me wonder if Bailey was deliberately subverting cliche, or if I just got lucky in this collection).
Fortune's age in the first story is given as thirty-five. He is interested in wide variety of subjects; two that frequently come up are the theatre, and archeology. He is frequently described as neat and placid, almost too much so; he claims to have no imagination. Under his bland surface, he's got a rather fierce passion for justice. He doesn't put it into words until the novella that concludes the collection, but by that point we've seen him kill the murderer himself in one story, and possibly in a second one. Without being supernatural, there's something faintly numinous about the stories which escalates as they go on; by the last one in the book, Fortune is up against a killer he suspects is both methodical and profoundly unhinged, yet somehow the creepiest section is that in which he examines the victim's flat, a set of rooms curiously devoid of personality. There is a motive, but someone else must bring it forward to conclude the tale.
Mr. Fortune (a doctor who keeps getting consulted by the police, often to his annoyance) is usually described, when the stories are remembered at all these days, as a Lord Peter Wimsey knock-off, usually by people who hate Wimsey. I don't see the resemblance myself, except that he speaks in the odd slang of a certain type of 1920s upper-class character. YMMV, but for me this dialect is sufficiently removed in time that I can view it as period detail rather than an annoying affectation (casual racism is pretty much a given for this period, though the character who keeps being described as "the little Jew" becomes a trusted ally, and almost everyone lower-class or flamboyantly foreign turns out to have been wrongly suspected, which makes me wonder if Bailey was deliberately subverting cliche, or if I just got lucky in this collection).
Fortune's age in the first story is given as thirty-five. He is interested in wide variety of subjects; two that frequently come up are the theatre, and archeology. He is frequently described as neat and placid, almost too much so; he claims to have no imagination. Under his bland surface, he's got a rather fierce passion for justice. He doesn't put it into words until the novella that concludes the collection, but by that point we've seen him kill the murderer himself in one story, and possibly in a second one. Without being supernatural, there's something faintly numinous about the stories which escalates as they go on; by the last one in the book, Fortune is up against a killer he suspects is both methodical and profoundly unhinged, yet somehow the creepiest section is that in which he examines the victim's flat, a set of rooms curiously devoid of personality. There is a motive, but someone else must bring it forward to conclude the tale.
