H. C. Bailey

• Born: February 1, 1878
• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: March 24, 1961
• Place of death: Llanfairfechen, North Wales

Type of Plot: Private investigator

Principal Series: Reggie Fortune, 1920-1948; Joshua Clunk, 1930-1950

Contribution

Short stories about Reggie Fortune, first collected as Call Mr. Fortune in 1920, won an immediate following both in Great Britain and in the United States. Ingenious in plot, full of arresting characterization, and equally satisfying as detective puzzles or as moral fables, these stories established H. C. Bailey as a master of his art and Fortune as one of the world’s great fictional detectives. In 1930 the series of novels featuring Joshua Clunk began. These works had elaborate plots; to Bailey’s great skill in narration were added extended development of character, a variety of narrative voices and points of view, and a special concern for youths, especially the poor and the victimized. In 1934, Fortune also began appearing in novels; he appeared solely in novels after 1940.

Involved in police procedures, and normally on excellent terms with the Criminal Investigation Department, Fortune must nevertheless be considered a private investigator because of his independent judgments and actions, especially when he finds the police futile or mistaken. Drawling, purring Reggie and crooning, gushing Joshua are exactly alike in the intelligence with which they perceive and the energy with which they attack the wicked. Both will deceive the police and execute their own justice if by doing so they can protect the innocent or prevent a clever criminal from escaping.

Biography

H. C. Bailey was born Henry Christopher Bailey in London on February 1, 1878, and he lived most of his life there. After preparing at the City of London School, he studied at Corpus Christi College, Oxford University, and was graduated with honors in classics in 1901. From 1901 to 1946, he worked for London’s Daily Telegraph, advancing from drama critic to war correspondent and finally to editorial writer.

Bailey wrote his first novel while still an undergraduate. With only slight variation, he managed to publish a substantial historical novel each year, 1901 through 1928; by that time, he had also, with a coauthor, written a play based on one of his novels, written a history of the Franco-Prussian War, and written what became the first four collections of Reggie Fortune stories. The thirtieth and last historical novel, Mr. Cardonnel, appeared in 1931. Unlike his detective stories, Bailey’s historical novels vary enormously in scene and characters. The Roman Eagles (1928), a history for children, is set in ancient Britain at the time of Julius Caesar’s invasion. Mr. Cardonnel begins in 1658, the last year of Oliver Cromwell’s reign. The God of Clay (1908) is about the young Napoleon Bonaparte. Other tales have medieval settings, take place during the revolt of the Netherlands against Spain, or carry the reader to nineteenth century Italy. Apart from being good yarns, these works represent much knowledge and sympathy, and all were completed while Bailey worked at the Daily Telegraph.

In 1908 Bailey married Lydia Haden Janet Guest. They had two daughters and lived in a London suburb. Bailey wrote as if he enjoyed writing; his books were largely created between dinner and bedtime. His other hobbies were walking and gardening, both of which receive attention in his novels. Bailey was a founding member of the Detection Club, founded around 1930. E. C. Bentley, author of Trent’s Last Case (1913), was another member, as well as being Bailey’s colleague at the Daily Telegraph. G. K. Chesterton, whose Father Brown has much in common with Fortune and Clunk, was “Ruler” of the club until his death in 1936. Hugh Walpole, Agatha Christie, and Dorothy L. Sayers were among the other members.

Bailey was short and lean, with ample black hair, a black mustache, and thick eyeglasses. He concentrated his imaginative and creative life in his work, and was a retiring and respectable citizen. In many of his novels he created settings where mountains meet the sea: He and his wife retired to such a place, in North Wales. He died in 1961.

Analysis

The critics who argue that H. C. Bailey’s detective fiction is dated, dull, and full of class prejudice are mistaken. Though only nineteen years younger than Arthur Conan Doyle, Bailey was distinctly a man of the twentieth century. His plots exhibit a perceptive candor about sexual motives and human aberrations. There is none of the snobbery that holds that ancestry, education, or profession guarantee superiority. There is also no “land of hope and glory” patriotism. If liberal churchmen and civil servants are often narrow-minded and self-important in Bailey’s work, so too are retired army officers and landed gentlemen. Fortune avoids the pomp and ceremony of upper-class institutions whenever he can; he is kind to his brother-in-law the bishop, but he is not impressed by him. Fortune favors his eating clubs, not on the basis of their membership but for the quality of their muffins. Mr. Clunk is of humble origins and chiefly serves the poor; Bailey intends that the reader think Clunk a humbug for his pious cant, his Gospel Hall work, and his profitable investments, but case after case finds him lavish in good works. Clunk is the nemesis of pretentious charitable institutions that exploit the poor and helpless.

Honour Among Thieves

Bailey has a rare gift for portraying sympathetically the poor and neglected of society. “The Brown Paper” (in Mr. Fortune Here, 1940) explores the friendship of two working-class Londoners: Ann Stubbs, an orphan in her early teens, and Jim Hay, a robust deliveryman a few years older. Honour Among Thieves (1947) shows, among many other things, the growth of trust and affection between Alf Buck, who has fled his criminal past to work a truck farm, and Louisa Connell, who has escaped from reform school. There is the further fine touch of showing this relationship develop through the eyes of Alf’s younger brother, who resents Lou as a ruinous intrusion and fails to understand his brother’s growing interest in her. Clunk, without their knowledge, protects all of them both from Alf and Lou’s past criminal associates and from the police.

The Veron Mystery

Yet Bailey does not represent moral character as depending on social class; if spoiled and selfish types are often found among the prosperous and secure, he is merely holding a mirror to reality. Some of his middle-and upper-class characters are honest, reliable, and generous in spirit; some of his working-class types are villains to the core. He will sometimes show diabolical cooperation between servants and masters; in The Veron Mystery (1939), a shrewd old serving woman first tries to protect her dying master, then speeds him to his grave in an effort to protect his estranged but worthy son.

Bailey’s stories and novels offer a rich variety of women. They come from all classes and backgrounds and range from stammering infants to wise ancients. There are dedicated, efficient professionals—such as Dr. Isabel Cope in The Life Sentence (1946)—candid college students, spunky teenagers, philosophical single women, and devoted wives and mothers. A single short story from 1939 presents the Honorable Victoria Pumphrey, a charming and masterful detective whom the reader unfortunately sees only in her first case. This Bailey rarity, “A Matter of Speculation,” may be found in Ellery Queen’s Anthology, issue 15, 1968. Yet without wickedness and murder there would be no detective stories, and Bailey’s women, though usually interesting, are sometimes murderous. Indeed, his female criminals are alarming in their resourcefulness and numbing in their malice and villainy. If demonstrating that the female is deadlier than the male is misogynistic, Bailey stands convicted.

The Bishop’s Crime

Children figure in many of the stories and novels, tiresomely so according to detractors. Imperiled children often contribute to the suspense and anxiety induced by Bailey’s plots; the author’s ability to represent the minds of small children is extraordinary. They are far from alike; in The Bishop’s Crime (1940), the reader first meets Bishop Rankin’s daughter Peggy Rankin, ten years old, outside after dark to steal plums. When Fortune finally wins the trust of this high-spirited girl, she contributes to the solution of the mystery.

Apart from the series heroes themselves, Bailey has one large group of characters who, taken altogether, may be too good to be true. Many of his stories have love stories as subordinate plots; in these, there are a number of young men whose devotion to their ladies is chivalric, unconditional, and selfless.

Reggie Fortune

The character of Reggie Fortune changes hardly at all through a very long series of stories and novels, though in the latter tales Fortune does remark about his advancing years and reflect on cases of earlier days. Plump, baby-faced, and blond, Fortune prefers lying down to sitting, and sitting to walking. A gourmet with a large appetite, he avoids distilled liquor altogether, but enjoys table wines. He prefers the quiet country life to the bustle of the city. Whenever possible he will sleep late and start his day with a long soak in the tub. He enjoys his pipe and cigars in moderation. He protests when called to cases but, once engaged, proves capable of rapid sprints, long hikes, and furious—everyone except Fortune would say recklessly dangerous—driving. Fortune was dropping his final g’s before Lord Peter Wimsey came on the scene, and he was dropping many parts of speech as well. His manner of speaking is usually brief, like old-fashioned telegrams, interspersed with quaint expressions such as “Oh my hat!” and “My only Aunt!”

Joan Amber, Fortune’s wife, rarely plays a large role in his adventures, but she appears often enough to have a distinct style and character. Joan is far happier in society than Fortune, but, lovely as she is, she goes out to enjoy people rather than to be admired. She sometimes prods her husband to get him started on a case, but she never interferes once he has started. Undoubtedly devoted, Joan nevertheless sustains a line of teasing banter that might well irritate a man less pleased with himself than Fortune. Elise, the cook of the household, is always offstage; the reader knows her by the exotic feasts she prepares for the Fortunes. Sam, the chauffeur, on the other hand, is considerably more than a servant; when the police are unable or unwilling to help, Fortune often calls on Sam to do some discreet investigating. Sam has sharp eyes and a clever mind. He is also tough and reliable in the tight spots.

All discussions of Fortune must take up the debate over whether he is an intuitive detective, operating with a sort of sixth sense for crime, or an innocent. Reggie Fortune describes himself as a simple, natural man: His talent for finding clues and drawing far-reaching inferences from them may indeed illustrate how an unfettered human intelligence can work unaffected by prejudice and preconceived theory. He does not, in fact, recognize killers as such on first meeting them, but he can usually tell if pain or torment are present; on the other hand, he invariably recognizes goodness when he meets it. All readers would agree that he is a fine judge of character; devoted fans might add that that is a function of his good heart as well as his learning and experience. A typical case for Reggie Fortune is one in which the police are either baffled or have accepted a simple explanation that fails to take everything into account. The detective’s zeal comes both from a need to right wrongs and from a vast array of exact knowledge that permits him to see what conscientious police officers often miss. Along the way he displays a commanding knowledge of physiology, the effects of various wounds and poisons, and the healing arts. Yet some of his cases are solved by his command of ancient languages and literatures and an understanding of history. Bailey’s achievement in his portrayal of Fortune is of the same order as Rex Stout’s with Nero Wolfe: Both writers have created credible geniuses.

Though he is based in London, most of Fortune’s cases take him to provincial towns and villages, where the police are often honest and sometimes intelligent but rarely both. If the detective inspectors on the scene are rarely crooked, they are quite often obstructive, so that Fortune must overcome their obstacles as well as those created by criminals. The turning point in many of his cases comes when he has finally persuaded the Honorable Sidney Lomas to send in Superintendent Bell and Inspector Underwood of the Central Intelligence Division.

Joshua Clunk

Joshua Clunk, whose cases often take him to the provinces as well, must labor even harder to engage the attention of the police or to prevent them from charging the innocent while the guilty go free. Well along in years, sallow of complexion, preening his gray whiskers, with prominent eyes and false teeth, Clunk rivals Erle Stanley Gardner’s Bertha Cool as the most immediately unattractive crime fighter in detective fiction. His comfortable suburban home resembles Fortune’s in having a large garden and an atmosphere of serenity, but the overall tone could hardly be more different. One sees even less of Mrs. Clunk than of Mrs. Fortune. She is, nevertheless, the perfect mate for the old puritan, sharing his pleasure and activity in the Gospel Hall he founded and in which he preaches. The couple call each other “Dearie,” and Mrs. Clunk never questions her husband concerning his curious activities. Sunday at the Clunks is given to attending divine services (three of them) with large meals and cozy naps. Clunk will not work or even drive his automobile on a Sunday, unless, as he puts it, the Lord’s work demands an exception: Then he hails a taxi and pursues his case with typical energy.

Gushing exaggerated praise and compliments on staff and police alike, squeaking when alarmed, pattering in and out of rooms on his short legs, interlarding his animated talk with verses of hymns, and chewing or sucking candy, the energetic Clunk somehow stirs and guides staff and police to discover criminals and liberate the innocent. One can sometimes get through an entire adventure without Clunk’s appearing in court, but the reader finds him in this setting often enough to know that he is quick-witted, knowledgeable, and persuasive. Indeed, some of the best scenes in the series take place in courtrooms. For sheer genius in seeing the significance of things and reasoning inferentially, Clunk is at least the equal of Fortune and may be (partly as a result of Bailey’s own ironic camouflage) the most underrated of the great fictional detectives.

It is a device of this series that Clunk should be out of the action much more than he is in it. Most often the reader sees the plots unfolding with no detective present—Bailey always uses third-person, omniscient narrative—or, once the initially unrelated episodes begin to form a pattern, one or another of Clunk’s assistants is followed through his laborious investigations. His assistants often question Clunk’s directions—and even his motives. The assistants—usually Victor Hopley, Jock Scott, or Miss John—are notable for their sensible decency and good taste, yet the reader is never in doubt that the cases are Clunk’s, and however much his assistants grumble or question, they continue working for the old hypocrite.

Clearly Fortune and Clunk have much in common—and so do the elaborate stories in which they operate. Scenery plays a considerable role in the tales; indeed, Fortune himself maintains that the rivalry between the fertile lowlands and the chalky hills was at the basis of the crimes in the adventure consequently called Black Land, White Land (1937). Certainly the landscape plays a large role in The Veron Mystery. One of the leading characteristics of a Fortune or Clunk plot is that the detectives can solve the crime at hand only by solving a much older one, left unsolved by the authorities of its day, or worse, mistakenly solved by convicting and punishing someone who was really innocent. That is another leading characteristic of both series: Bailey’s villains are not content to murder out of malice or greed; they delight in finding innocent victims and framing them. Fortune and Clunk are therefore frequently engaged in reevaluating a case that well-meaning police have accepted from the hands of clever criminals.

Most controversial among the traits these detectives share is their willingness to arrange and even execute justice on their own account: A favorite device is to so apply pressure on partners in crime that they turn on one another, usually with lethal violence. Yet saving the cost of a trial is by no means the main goal: Bailey’s heroes are usually acting to protect the injured innocent or the honestly redeemed. Their means are often disturbing—one winces when Clunk or Fortune quietly suppresses evidence or rearranges it; their ends, on the other hand—the restoration of wholesome, useful life—are admirable.

It has already been suggested that the quality of the Fortune stories, followed by the Clunk and Fortune novels, remained consistently high. Over the course of Fortune’s and Clunk’s literary lives, however, some social change is evident. The earliest Fortune stories sometimes reflect the exuberance that affected the arts in the 1920’s. Nevertheless, the tone reached by the mid-1920’s remained fairly uniform until World War II, when Reggie Fortune gave up much of the luxury that had attended his life at home. This austerity lasted to the end of the series; plush living had hardly returned to Great Britain by 1948. During the war against Adolf Hitler, Fortune and Clunk sometimes challenged German spies; international intrigue had not been a feature of the series before that point. With their restrained and serious atmosphere, the wartime novels are, perhaps, the most consistently good; at least they feature new levels of complexity in plot and new depths of villainy among the wicked. Bailey’s last four novels have all his trademark characteristics but an even leaner style. He was always terse, but here there is more reliance on dialogue, both to advance the stories and to define character, and a minimum of description.

As a storyteller, Bailey displays wisdom, learning, and skill in entertaining combination. His stories and novels occur in particular times and places, but they illustrate values of valor, innocence, and truth, in conflict with hate, greed, and cruelty. Arranged in challenging puzzles full of colorful characters artfully drawn, his novels are classics.

Principal Series Characters:

• Reggie Fortune studied medicine to become a family practitioner but instead becomes fully employed by Scotland Yard as a medical expert in cases of murder. Married to Joan Amber early in the series, the cherubic Fortune prefers a quiet country life in the company of flowers, his Persian cat, and good food. An unsolved crime, however, awakens limitless zeal and a surprising ruthlessness.
• Joshua Clunk , the surviving partner of Clunk and Clunk, is the solicitor of choice among London’s lower-class criminals. Chanting bits of hymns and gushing piety, old Josh is suspected by all of hypocrisy and double-dealing. He deploys a staff of talented and attractive investigators, usually to expose large-scale and dangerous criminals.

Bibliography

Priestman, Martin. The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Contains a chapter on the Golden Age of mystery writing as well as one on the private eye, which provide a perspective on Bailey’s work.

Purcell, Mark. “The Reggie Fortune Short Stories: An Appreciation and Partial Bibliography.” The Mystery Readers/Lovers Newsletter 5, no. 4 (1972): 1-3. Lists Purcell’s favorites among the Reggie Fortune stories with an explanation of what makes the listed stories noteworthy.

Rzepka, Charles J. Detective Fiction. Malden, Mass.: Polity, 2005. Overview of detective fiction written in English focuses on the relationship between literary representations of private detectives and the cultures that produce those representations. Provides context for understanding Bailey’s work.

Sarjeant, William A. S. “’The Devil Is with Power’: Joshua Clunk and the Fight for Right.” The Armchair Detective 17, no. 3 (1984): 270-279. Looks at one of Bailey’s famous characters and examines his function.

Sarjeant, William A. S. “In Defense of Mr. Fortune.” The Armchair Detective 14, no. 4 (1981): 302-312. Focuses on one of Bailey’s most famous characters and delves into his function both within the writer’s works and within the larger world of detective fiction.