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Mr. FORTUNE'S MAGGOTS

 

Few writers of detective fiction have suffered the catastrophic fall of H C Bailey. In his lifetime, Bailey's stories featuring Reggie Fortune, scientific adviser to Scotland Yard, and Joshua Clunk, shyster lawyer extraordinaire, were both immensely popular and critically acclaimed. Bailey was seen as the leading light of detective fiction, and his immortality assured.

And yet Bailey is now all but forgotten. Although the odd short story occasionally turns up in collections, neither the short story collections featuring Reggie Fortune, scientific adviser to Scotland Yard, nor the novels starring Joshua Clunk, a crooked lawyer of startling hypocrisy and deviousness, have been reprinted in more than thirty years. [Update: Shadow on the Wall will be reprinted by Rue Morgue Press in April 2008.] Recent criticism to Bailey has generally been hostile – see, for instance, Colin Watson's Snobbery with Violence (1971) or Julian Symons's Bloody Murder (1972).

Does Bailey deserve to be rediscovered? What makes Bailey special?

In his Observer review of Shadow on the Wall, HC O'Neill states that:

There are certain moods in which Mr. Fortune seems the most engaging detective of fiction. There is never a mood in which he does not richly satisfy the mind that takes pleasure in this type of novel. But hitherto his incursions into crime have been in the nature of short, swift, swoops upon the criminal. In Shadow on the Wall he makes his first appearance in a full-length novel, and, for his admirers, it is sufficient to say that though now happily married, he is the same as ever, luxurious when occasion offers, but tireless at need, subtle, tenacious, amusing, flippant, cruel, and utterly ruthless. For those who have not made his acquaintance it can be said that he belongs to the intuitional type of detective, very much of Dr. Thorndyke's equipment worn more urbanely, with a perfect foil in Superintendent Bell, and a glittering superior in Lomas… And Mr. Bailey writes. It is unusual, and some would say unnecessary, in the detective novel. But it adds for the discriminating the last appeal in a most attractive story.

The stories are richly written, and appeal to all the senses, with their emphasis on the beauties of nature, food, music, and poetry. Both Bailey and Fortune have an appetite for the good things in life – food, gardening, music, art and poetry. They are civilised. In “The German Song”, Reggie and French policeman Dubois talk of pictures and of music, of poetry and sculpture – ‘a lesson in the art of life'. Several stories make use of Fortune's appreciation of art, including “The Woman in Wood” and “The Face in the Picture”, which opens in a Paris art gallery. Fortune is an admirer of music; in “The Lion Party”, he listens with pleasure to Rossini (who would appeal to Reggie's gourmet hedonism) and Puccini; in “The Little Dog”, he makes a marionette play of Wagner's Tannhäuser ; and he uses his knowledge of the aria “Connais-tu le pays”, from Ambroise Thomas's Mignon , to solve the mystery of “The German Song”. In this last, his closest forebear is Sherlock Holmes, who interrupted his investigation of “The Red-headed League” to attend a violin concert, and who celebrated the successful conclusion of The Hound of the Baskervilles by taking Dr. Watson to see the De Reszkes in Les Huguenots of Meyerbeer. Fortune's love of nature stands him in good stead in many cases. He is able to tell when a murder was committed by studying “The Dead Leaves”, and is often found in his garden, as at the start of “The Greek Play”.

O'Neill recognised that Bailey's stories are something out of the ordinary. Bailey's detective stories are well-written, intelligent and sophisticated explorations of universal moral themes. Like Chesterton before him, he managed to turn the detective short story into myth. As E R Punshon wrote in the Manchester Guardian :

Because Mr. H C Bailey never forgets these larger issues his stories are not only admirable in their presentation of baffling puzzles that keep the reader guessing as first one answer, then another, appears the more likely, but also as presenting in dramatic form those common human problems of love and hate, of fear and greed, in solving which mankind must find or lose its soul.

Bailey's works are, as Nancy Ellen Talburt recognised, non-naturalistic. They are heavily influenced by the Old Testament, by Greek tragedy, and by John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. His stories are timeless morality plays. They are ‘about' the great themes of guilt and innocence, justice and punishment, in a way that few detective stories are.

Bailey's stories expose the difference between the detective story, which focuses entirely on the problem, and the story proper. The weight of Bailey's stories lies not in the solution, but in the resolution of the situation – that is to say, what happens to the characters, and why.

Often it is Reggie Fortune himself who brings about the resolution, in a particularly drastic manner. Part of the power of Bailey's works comes from the contrast between Reggie's urbanity and cosmopolitanism, and the uncompromising sternness of Fortune's approach to justice. Reggie Fortune himself often acts as judge, jury and executioner. Reggie is cruel and ruthless when it comes to meting out punishment for the ungodly. In “The Only Son”, Reggie prevents a couple of criminals from causing a son to murder his mother. Because they will only go to prison for a few years, he forces them to commit suicide. The criminals have ‘gone to trial' – that is, to Judgement, or, as Reggie says on other occasions, ‘referred to a higher court'.

‘They'd tortured that boy and his mother. They planned to murder mother and son. They did their best to murder that boy's soul. And the law would only have given them a few years in prison. I want justice.'

[Superintendent] Bell looked at him with dread.

‘It's an awful responsibility to take.'

‘Yes. I take it,' Reggie Fortune said.

Similarly, in “The Woman in Wood”, he sends the villains off to sea in a leaking boat, much to the horror of his chauffeur, Sam. Yet Bailey, very cleverly, makes it unclear whether or not he approves of his character's actions. There is invariably another character – a policeman like the Hon Stanley Lomas or Superintendent Bell, or his chauffeur Sam – to register the average reader's disapproval and shock.

Many of Bailey's best stories are interrogations of justice. Take, for example, the powerful “Bicycle Lamp”. An honourable man kills his son, a forger and believed murderer, to stop him from crime. To save a wrongly arrested man, even though he knows there is no real case against him, the Chief Constable, by profession a judge, engineers his suicide – and is condemned by Fortune. Who is right?

“The Silver Cross” offers another view of justice. The main character is a saintly vicar, who speaks in Christ's quotations from the New Testament. The villain, the local big man, attempts to frame the vicar for theft. The villain is cleared of suspicion of murder by the saint whom he tried to frame, although there is no doubt that he is morally responsible for a death which turns out to be suicide.

A similar story is “The Pink Macaw”, in which a rich man murders the man whom he knows seeks revenge against him, and, to make it look like self-defence, scratches himself with his victim's knife – and dies of infection from the poisoned blade. The story is a simple, but ironic, account of the biter bit. Yet it is also somehow unnerving, in its strong sense of retribution, a justice not Western, but akin to the inevitability of Greek tragedy, with its use of hamartia.

Another notable story is “The Mountain Meadow”, which has one of Bailey's bitterest endings. Fortune is powerless to prevent a miscarriage of justice, much to his anger. An innocent man, however nasty, should not be arrested for a murder he did not commit.

Bailey also had, as Dorothy L Sayers recognised, a keen understanding of abnormal mentalities.

There is, too, a proper psychological complexity about many of his crimes…which lifts the problem out of the realm of the commonplace.

Many of his best stories focus on domestic relationships gone badly wrong. “The Broken Toad”, arguably his masterpiece, reveals the great gulf between love and kindness, in its memorable depiction of mother love gone badly wrong. “The Yellow Slugs”, perhaps Bailey's most famous work, presents the victimisation of two children at the hands of their ghastly stepfather, Brightman (a name straight out of Bunyan). “The Unknown Murderer” presents a criminal who thrives on the suffering of her victims' loved ones. Even more interesting is the criminal in “The Long Dinner”, a philanthropist who murders the unwanted offspring of wealthy patrons, and devotes the money to rescuing slum children.

The other recurring theme in Bailey's work is the misuse of or desire for power, particularly in politics and big business. Bailey was one of the most progressive of detective writers, up there with GDH and M Cole (leading lights in the Fabian Society), Nicholas Blake (in his early books), and Gladys Mitchell. In “The Business Minister”, the last story in his first collection, Call Mr. Fortune , we find Reggie noting with ‘ineffable admiration' that a character is ‘reading a book by Mr. Sidney Webb on the history of trade unions'. Many of the stories are satires on modern business methods. Several of his villains, as in “The Lion Fish” or “The Walrus Ivory”, run a criminal organisation as a firm. “The President of San Jacinto” murders two men in a bid for land exploitation, and ends up as the successful politician of a South American nation. “Zodiacs”, one of the best Fortune stories, involves an attempt by a crooked financier to frame one of his business rivals for murder. Bailey's first Fortune novel, Shadow on the Wall , makes a clear link between politics, big business, and the desire for power and the love of doing evil. Similarly, The Sullen Sky Mystery , Bailey's most successful detective story, although a Clunk rather than a Fortune novel, featuring involves financial skulduggery in a town council, a real estate scam, and police corruption. Unusually for a Golden Age writer, Bailey consistently represents the police as the agents of officialdom and the ruling classes, and hence opposed to justice. Often, they refuse to accept evidence of a crime until the murder has been committed, or try to conceal murders, so as not to offend the local knobs. In “The Little Dog”, for instance, the investigating policeman is suspended by his superiors.

Bailey's works are, to quote B A Pike, ‘remarkable: complex and oblique, with an elegant surface and a savage undertow'.

Bailey makes demands on his readers, through his oblique and subtle approach and a style that is mannered, elegant, and elliptical. His narrative achieves a smooth and decorous surface that masks all manner of threats and tensions. The lines between victim and predator are continually smudged by ironies and ambiguities.

The Fortune stories are a phenomenal achievement, one of the most thematically dense and powerful canons in detective fiction. Let us hope that their true genius is soon recognised.

Observer , 8 th July 1934 .

H C Bailey, Mr. Fortune Speaking , London : Ward Lock, p 208.

And on this subject: The closest comparison to Bailey's catastrophic fall may well be that of Giacomo Meyerbeer, the leading opera composer of the nineteenth century, who was popular with both audiences and with the critics, who saw them as operas of ideas, and classed him with Beethoven and Michelangelo as one of the great geniuses of civilisation. Unfortunately, Meyerbeer has fallen into disrepute, thanks in no small part to Richard Wagner. It seems, however, that Meyerbeer's reputation is improving.

E R Punshon, Manchester Guardian , 22 January 1937 .

Nancy Ellen Talburt, “H C Bailey”, in Twelve Englishmen of Mystery , ed. Earl F. Bargainnier, Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1984.

HC Bailey, Mr. Fortune's Casebook , London : Methuen , 1936, p 469.

Dorothy L Sayers, Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror: Second Series , London : Victor Gollancz, 1950, p 21.

Bailey, Mr. Fortune's Casebook , p 189.

John Cooper and BA Pike, Detective Fiction: The Collectors' Guide , second edition, Aldershot : Scolar Press, 1994, p 21.

BA Pike, in The Oxford Companion to Crime and History Writing (ed Rosemary Herbert), Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1999, pp 34 – 35.