Mr. Fortune's Practice (#Mystery)

"How do you do these things, Fortune? You look only human, not to say childlike. Yet you have us all beat."

That's the Hon. Sidney Lomas, chief of the Criminal Investigation Department at Scotland Yard. And friend to our hero, Reggie Fortune.

This is the second volume in the Reggie Fortune, detective consultant, series, and in this one he's a practically a regular at Scotland Yard. In the second (of seven) stories in this, he and Lomas are on a salmon-fishing vacation in Norway. 

In the first, 'The Ascot Tragedy', someone is murdered at the races, and it's clear the poison was administered in the royal pavilion. Fortunately the king wasn't there yet, but what a scandal!

In the second, 'The President of San Jacinto', while our hero is on that fishing vacation, Lord Carwell is murdered, and Carwell's cousin convicted. But when he gets back the beautiful actress Joan Amber asks him to take a look. Fortune had already had doubts about the case from what he read in the paper.

In 'The Young Doctor', we've got a second conviction and once again Fortune doesn't quite believe the evidence says what the prosecutor says it does. Did Dr. Horace Wilton actually steal those diamonds? 

'The Magic Stone' sees a talisman from Borneo stolen out of the British Museum. Then Lord Tetherdown, a famous collector of East Asian artifacts disappears. Connected? Of course.

Reggie Fortune goes to a country house party. Uh, oh! But not to worry: there's no sudden snowfall, the phone lines aren't cut, and nobody's even murdered. But it does seem some jewelry is stolen.

In 'The Leading Lady', Lomas and Fortune are again taking it easy, punting along a river in the countryside. They spot a lady's bag floating in the water; it belongs to well-known actress who they discover has disappeared. Do they need to drag the river?

Sir Humphrey Bigod falls to his death. The coroner's journey declares for 'death by misadventure,' but nobody's sure what happened. Then Dr. Emily Hall, medical officer at an orphanage, is murdered during a Christmas party fundraiser. 'Not a nice murder,' says Fortune. Then Fortune is summoned, in his role as an M.D., to look at a child with a bad stomach upset. It's not the flu, but arsenic. The story is 'The Unknown Murderer', but the murderer doesn't remain unknown...

Fortune is given to non sequiturs that prove to mean something after all: he reminds of Lord Peter Wimsey or Albert Campion; if you like that sort of detective, you'll like Fortune. I find him more tolerable than Wimsey, and not quite as off-the-wall as the early Campion. It works for me.

They're funny, but they can be a bit dark about the function of the law. There's those two mistaken convictions in this, and twice Fortune takes the provision of justice into his own hands because he fears the law won't provide it.

And that beautiful Joan Amber from the second case? In the last story:

"Mr. Fortune was much occupied in being happy, for after long endeavour he had engaged Joan Amber to marry him. The lady has said the endeavour was hers,..."

Pretty entertaining. I got this, together with the previous one, from Project Gutenberg. This came out in 1923, and I guess I've got a couple of years before Project Gutenberg can legally do the next one in the series. From here on to read more of them gets tricky...but I'm sure I'll try.

For the Vintage Mystery challenge:

Vintage Mystery, Gold, Man in Trench Coat: That picture on the cover will be from the last case, 'The Unknown Murderer' and that's Reggie Fortune himself in the trench coat.

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.