Call Mr. Fortune by H. C. Bailey

"You look very young."

"I try to be."

It's Reggie Fortune delivers that snappy (?) comeback.

This is the first book in the series and our hero starts as something of a lazy dilettante. "At Oxford, at his hospital, he did what was necessary to take respectable degrees, but no more than he could help." Now out of school, the first story 'The Archduke's Tea' starts with his father, Dr. Fortune, delivering young Reggie a lecture. Reggie will be taking care of his father's medical practice while the father goes on vacation. And he'd better do it right. His first call is to a Continental archduchess living in the neighbourhood.

"She was a serene Highness of the house of Erbach-Wittelsbach, which traces its descent to Odin, and had an independent realm of nearly two square miles,..."

On the way there Reggie and his father's driver Gorton come across the body of a man killed in a hit and run accident. He looks a lot like the Archduke, but isn't. Is somebody trying to kill the Archduke? Of course they are. So who? The Archduchess? The brother-in-law? The two of them working in cahoots? And will the police actually be able to solve the case, or will the solution be squelched due to political pressure?

The second case 'The Sleeping Companion' has a similar setup: Reggie gets called in on a case in place of his father. A woman is having bad dreams. Why?

By the end of those two cases, though, Reggie is a dilettante no longer and knows this is what he wants to do. He hangs out his shingle in London as a consulting detective, and in the remaining four cases in this book, he's a professional. His medical background comes in handy. In the third case 'The Nice Girl', he's called in by Scotland Yard to investigate the death of Sir Albert Lunt, a businessman with lots of enemies.

Three more cases round out the book. One of the stories I thought weaker, but mostly they're pretty entertaining. As the Wikipedia article on H. C. Bailey suggests, Reggie's education and general demeanour--and maybe the name, too--put him in a class with Lord Peter Wimsey, but I found him less exasperating than Lord Peter. Wikipedia also says the stories are darker and more political, but that really only shows up in the last one of these, which does turn on government corruption. This is the only book of Bailey's I've read, but now I do plan to read more, and the second in the series, Mr. Fortune's Practice, also a collection of stories, is available from Project Gutenberg (as was this one) and is already downloaded to my Kobo.

Call Mr. Fortune came out in 1922, with the stories appearing individually in the year before that. So...

Vintage Mystery, Gold, Piece of Furniture: The picture on the cover above will represent the second story, 'The Sleeping Companion.' That's the murderer's hand creeping in at the side, while Miss Weston has been drugged and is sleeping in the chair.