The Great Game

H. C. Bailey (full name Henry Christopher Bailey) was an English author of mysteries. He took to writing early, publishing My Lady of Orange (1901) during his senior year at Oxford, and spent many years as a journalist and author of romantic fiction before he began writing detective novels. Call Mr. Fortune (1920) introduced the world to Reggie Fortune, a brilliant investigator with a knack for solving chilling murder mysteries, who would become one of the most popular sleuths of the English golden age of detective fiction. Fortune's mannerisms and speech put him into the same class as Lord Peter Wimsey but the stories are much darker, and often involve murderous obsession, police corruption, financial skulduggery, child abuse and miscarriages of justice. Fortune appeared in nine novels, yet it was in a series of 84 short stories that were published from 1920 to 1940 where he truly shone, combining elements of several popular archetypes—the eccentric logician, the forensic investigator, the hard-boiled interrogator, the psychological profiler, the defender of justice. Bailey’s classics are distinguished by well-clued puzzles, brilliant sleuthing, vivid description and social critique, with Fortune evoking images of Don Quixote and the Arthurian Knights in his pursuit of truth and justice in an uncaring world. (McFarland Books) A second series character, Josiah Clunk, is a sanctimonious lawyer who exposes corruption and blackmail in local politics, and who manages to profit from the crimes. He appears in eleven novels published between 1930 and 1950, including The Sullen Sky Mystery (1935), widely regarded as Bailey's magnum opus.