Sun 14 Nov 2021
Reviewed by David Vineyard: H. C. BAILEY – Shadow on the Wall.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[16] Comments
H. C. BAILEY – Shadow on the Wall. Reggie Fortune novel #1. Victor Gollancz, UK, hardcover, 1934. Doubleday, US, hardcover, 1934. Rue Morgue, softcover, 2008. Note: Joshua Clunk appears in a small offstage role.
Reggie Fortune, that plump drawling darling of Harley Street, surgeon to the rich and famous and amateur detective par excellence has been out of favor roughly since the end of the Golden Age of the Fair Play Detective Novel. He has, in fact, been so out of favor even ardent fans of the genre would be excused if they only know his name by hearsay.
You can hardly find a short adventure of Reggie’s reprinted in even the most extensive anthologies of the genre, indeed, you are more likely to run across such rarities as Barnabus Hildreth or Dr. Eustace Hailey before you find one of Reggie’s adventures.
I don’t think there was ever an American publication of one of his books in paperback past the 1940’s and not much then, and while he gets a mention in Haycraft and by others, he is easily the least known of the fairly popular sleuths from the era, even Barzun and Taylor give him short shrift in Catalogue of Crime.
I don’t know exactly what I expected when I first started reading Bailey and Reggie Fortune. I knew from my reading that he tended to be annoying according to critics, that too many of his books involved children in danger, that he was chubby but not fat, and that he tended to be rude to policemen, but beyond that I couldn’t figure out exactly why that was more annoying than the some of the same traits in Peter Wimsey or Albert Campion.
I still don’t know what Bailey and Reggie did that so annoyed critics that they seemed happy to bury him.
Shadow on the Wall is the first novel length adventure of Reggie Fortune and it dives right in. At a Royal gathering Reggie meets with his friend Lomas, head of the Criminal Investigation of Scotland Yard, where they are accosted by Lady Rosnay who seems determined to see both attend her costume affair that evening.
She is also all abuzz about the scandalous death of Lucy Poynitz, the wife of a RAF test pilot who apparently committed suicide as a result of guilt over an affair with an unknown man. When, at that parties end Reggie learns her husband has died in a plane crash of unknown cause too, he is intrigued and decides against he best judgment to show up at Lady Rosnay’s that evening.
Attending the party doesn’t make things any clearer either. Lady Rosnay and a friend seem determined to let Reggie know they don’t trust Simon Osmond, an up and coming political figure sure to be the next Prime Minister if nothing stops him and with a reputation with the ladies.
Then there are some odd things going on, such as why would Lady Rosnay remove her jewels in the middle of the party, and what happened that led them to find her unconscious. Did she fall or was she hit?
No one is talking.
If you can’t make a mystery out of those ingredients you are in the wrong business, and Bailey isn’t.
Aside from Reggie Fortune Bailey also penned the adventures of Joshua Clunk, a less that scrupulous solicitor and wrote a number of fairly good swashbucklers. He knew his way around a plot and for all Reggie’s affectations he is often very effective in short form, and no worse at novel length than many of his fellow writers from that period.
More murder follows and Reggie finds himself deep in the middle of the investigation and closer to the truth than someone finds comfortable.
Granted he’s not exactly the finest action writer you have ever read, but there’s decent atmosphere, and pretty good detective work by Reggie who plays great detective quite well.
I suppose some might have been bothered that Reggie turns up a conspiracy, the Maison Montrespan…
Reggie will uncover the truth about the Maison Montrespan, reveal a murderer, and rise above the nasty business in true great detective manner before the final line, and its pretty entertaining, moving well enough, and with decent detection.
Reggie is no more annoying than any other great detective of the era, a “g†dropping lot if there ever was one, and while he is isn’t in the top class of puzzlers here, many of his short adventures hold up quite well and deserve reprinting.
As far as I know there is no single great Bailey novel or short. Maybe someone can name one. So far what I’ve read is capable though and often entertaining.
It feels as if Reggie got the blame for all the worst excess of the entire genre, and really doesn’t deserve it. For lovers of the genre, he and Bailey are well worth seeking out though I grant he is best taken in small doses.
Considering some of the drivel showing up in e-book form by the likes of Anthony Bathurst, H. C. Bailey and Reggie Fortune are classic works of genius.
November 14th, 2021 at 5:16 pm
Hello David,
Among the novels, I recommend The Sullen Sky Mystery, and I’m fond of Black Land, White Land. The Great Game and The Bishop’s Crime are also well regarded.
The short stories, though, are generally better than the books. The best would include:
The Broken Toad
The Long Dinner
The Yellow Slugs
The Dead Leaves
My overview of Bailey here: https://grandestgame.wordpress.com/2017/11/28/h-c-bailey/
November 14th, 2021 at 7:05 pm
I’ve read only two or three of Bailey’s short stories, all in anthologies with other authors and none from his own collections, but I made it only as far as half way in the only novel I tried. I enjoyed the short stories, but I was still in my teens when I tackled the novel. I was reading everybody and everything at the time, but it was too early for me to know why some books worked and some didn’t.
Nick, I know now why the one I read didn’t. I hope you don’t mind my quoting from your essay on Bailey — and everyone reading this really ought to follow the link. In any case:
“For Bailey, however, deceiving the reader is less important than exploring problems of character and moral responsibility. To this end, his stories work as a unified whole, composed of the shape of the story, the setting, the atmosphere, the murderer’s character and motive, and the resolution.
“The power of Bailey’s works often comes not from the solution to the mystery, but from the resolution of the situation: what happens to the characters, and why.”
When I was 16 I was more interested in clues, detection and deduction, not so much (or at all) in character and social issues. Bailey wasn’t Christie, Queen or Carr, not to my mind he wasn’t.
Maybe now’s the time to read him again.
November 14th, 2021 at 6:58 pm
I just read “The Yellow Slugs†yesterday! It’s in Guilty Creatures, A Menagerie of Mysteries edited by Martin Edwards, a recent (2021) British Library Crime Classics volume with 14 stories. I liked the story.
November 14th, 2021 at 7:08 pm
Probably one of his best. (It’s one of the ones I mentioned as reading, up there in comment #2.)
November 14th, 2021 at 8:51 pm
The emphasis on character over clues might explain why Reggie got short shrift, but so far I’ve enjoyed the more novelistic approach Bailey uses, and this novel at least holds together well.
I have THE GREAT GAME and will be reading that one soon. I’ve also got several of the short collections mentioned by Nick Fuller and will be looking for the stories Steve mentioned.
Truth is I’m somewhat pleased to have discovered a Golden Age sleuth fairly new to me whose work I knew of, but found annoyingly hard to find.
November 14th, 2021 at 10:53 pm
It’s mysterious to me why such authors soldiered onward in such a singular, even lonely way that they did, forging their own path, as this gentleman apparently did. Writing for the fickle-minded reading public is difficult even when you have a knack for writing. It was tough for Hemingway. It’s tough for everyone.
Gotta salute an author like this who found something he wanted to say, even though his whole era was maybe looking for something wholly different than what he was doing.
November 14th, 2021 at 11:21 pm
Bailey was very highly regarded in the Thirties. He was one of the Big Five. Sayers, Punshon, and Van Dine all praised him; so did major critics like Torquemada (in the UK) and Will Cuppy (in the US). Here are some more views:
Alexander Woollcott:
“To my notion, the man who has come nearest to the mark (the Sherlock Holmes stories) is H.C. Bailey, the creator of that engaging fellow, Mr. Reginald Fortune… This man Bailey writes rather better than any of his contemporaries.†–
Ralph Straus, Observer:
“He is not only a skilful builder of mysteries; he is a man of letters.â€
Ogden Nash:
“H.C. Bailey is as near being a king of them all as it is polite for me to say.â€
But some lost souls can’t abide Reggie, as Torquemada pointed out:
“Mr. Fortune’s position among readers of detective stories is unique. Some cannot read about him at any price; many regard him as merely one of several first-class practitioners; but many more still, the other and my side idolatry, mark time between Mr. Bailey’s chronicles. To us any case of “Reggie sighed†is criminologically royal.”
November 15th, 2021 at 12:00 am
Bailey’s popularity was why I was intrigued he fell off so quickly after such a long run of success. Critics were more than savage about him seeming to take personal affront at some of Reggie’s affectations that are no worse than Lord Peter, though he is hardly the romantic figure Sayer’s hero was.
I did notice Bailey’s sentence construction was often a bit Jacobean, possibly a left over from his popular historical novels, but no worse than anyone else affectations of the period, and he is far from one of the Symon’s “dull” writers, not averse to a bit of melodrama when needed.
To go from that kind of popularity and critical acclaim to virtually disappearing over night from the critical and popular view is a fairly quick turn over.
Of course I realize Sayers big revival didn’t really come until the Ian Carmichael television series, but she had some presence off and on in American paperback reprints over the years.
I believe Reggie appeared in some seventeen books over the years and Joshua Clunk in twelve or so, a fair run for any writer.
I admit because of all the negative comments I had read I wasn’t expecting to enjoy his adventures as much as I have. He’s not just a Golden Age writer I didn’t have much experience of, but a major one once ranked with Christie, Sayers, Marsh, Allingham, and others at the very top of the game.
I suppose you could compare him here to Anthony Abbott and Thatcher Colt save there are only about five Colt books over a long period and even they were reprinted more often than Reggie.
November 15th, 2021 at 12:57 am
I’m glad to stand corrected and learn something new at the same time. Vincent Price commented once that England in the 1930s hosted a ‘Golden Age’ of literary critics (thanks to the great changes in employment wrought by WWI). Its interesting to consider how they bounced -wrongly or rightly –on a given author like this one.
November 15th, 2021 at 5:03 am
I think one of the reasons why Bailey, and Fortune, fell out of favour was inverted snobbery – the way Fortune talks makes him sound upper-class, even if he isn’t. I’d agree that Reggie is better in short stories, although I’ve only read one of the novel-length stories (Mr. Fortune Finds A Pig).
November 15th, 2021 at 6:21 pm
Nick’s commentary on Bailey (and many other authors) is very good.
I’ve never been able to track down The Sullen Sky Mystery.
My favorite Reggie Fortune novel is “The Bishop’s Crime”.
“Shadow on the Wall” and “No Murder” have good sections (and some poor ones).
Joshua Clunk is best in “Nobody’s Vineyard”. Plus pleasant in “Garstons” and “The Red Castle Mystery”.
None of these are as good as the many Reggie Fortune short stories, IMHO.
My Bailey article is at:
http://mikegrost.com/allingh.htm
It has detailed picks.
November 15th, 2021 at 6:55 pm
Thanks for the link, Mike. Lots of detailed discussion there, for anyone who would like to read more about both the books and the stories. And I mean lots!
Also — and on this blog — is Curtis Evans’ essay on several of the Reggie Fortune stories:
https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=%205762
November 15th, 2021 at 7:50 pm
Regarding Bailey and Reggie’s opinion of the common man SHADOW ends on Reggie speaking in almost Capra like terms of the common man and identifying himself as one despite the upper class affectation of his speech patterns.
It’s a speech that could have appeared in MEET JOHN DOE.
Nick Fuller mentions the influence of Bailey and Reggie on Philip MacDonald and Anthony Gethryn, and it occurs to me critics were often hard on PM for much the same reasons they were Bailey, with PM perhaps only surviving because several of his books fall in the tour de force category and his long successful career as a screenwriter.
November 15th, 2021 at 7:52 pm
To save someone else the trouble I’ll do the fourteenth comment just to avoid the obvious.
I’ve read a couple of Bailey’s historical novels, and they are quite good, well written, and great fun in as swashbuckling romantic vein with more than a touch of humor.
November 17th, 2021 at 9:30 pm
I was very glad to see David coming in on the side of H.C. Bailey.
It would be enjoyable to read a review by David of one of Bailey’s historical novels. Bailey wrote a ton of them, but they are read very little today. I’ve never read one!
November 21st, 2021 at 4:28 am
Mike Grost,
I might get around to it if I can decide which is the best fit for here. I’ve read three of them and they were fun.
Having read them before reading much of Reggie Fortune I recognized some stylistic touches and some of the sense of humor and melodrama from them in the Fortune titles.
Bailey’s slightly odd sentence construction reminds me a bit of Dornford Yates tendency toward Jacobean literary flourishes in his work.