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Bailey, HC

Page history last edited by Jon 12 years, 5 months ago

HC BaileyHenry Christopher Bailey (1878 - 1961) was an English writer, author of detective fiction. Bailey wrote mainly short stories featuring a medically-qualified detective called Reggie Fortune. Fortune's mannerisms and speech put him into the same class as Lord Peter Wimsey but the stories occasionally explore the darker side, with topics like child abuse. There are several Fortune novels but these are less successful.

A second series character, Josiah Clunk, is a sanctimonious lawyer who exposes corruption and blackmail in local politics. Clunk and Fortune occasionally appear together in the same book.

 

Bailey was a classical scholar at Oxford who obtained a BA in 1901. He worked for the Daily Telegraph in London for forty-five years as a drama critic, war correspondent and editorial writer. His earliest writings were historical novels, and still alternated historical and mainstream novels with his detective writings after 1920. Bailey retired to North Wales in the 1950s. 


Mike Grost on HC Bailey

 

H.C. Bailey was one of the most popular and most critically acclaimed writers of the Golden Age of detective stories (1920 - 1945), but his work has dated badly today, in my judgment. The typical story of Bailey, or one of his followers, has the following paradigm. The detective is usually a medical expert, a doctor or scientist who is also a member of Britain's upper classes, who works closely with Scotland Yard, and who is highly respected by them as a genius. He is assigned a case, one that often looks superficial or simple. The detective is disturbed by some simple looking clue, and suspects that some evil conspiracy is lurking in the background. He follows up on this, often over the protests of the police that he is making things too complicated, and discovers an incredibly evil conspiracy behind the wings. The goal of this conspiracy is to injure or kill some innocent helpless person, usually either a small child, or a defenseless young woman. The motive is usually greed, such as obtaining an inheritance, combined with a very sick mentality that sees nothing wrong in the torture of the innocent. Oftentimes the mechanism of this diabolical conspiracy is scientifically based, and the villain has a scientific or medical background, too. Detective work uncovers a hidden background to the current crime, often another crime in the past, one that forms a complex piece of mystery plot all on its own. At the end, there is a melodramatic finale, in which the detective struggles to keep the villain from committing yet further sinister crimes. Throughout the story there is an atmosphere of evil, combined with the action of melodrama.

 

One can see several problems with this formula from such a description. There is often a concentration on horror elements in such a work, an approach that has never been a favorite of mine (for whatever reason I have no interest in horror fiction whatsoever, marking me out as very different from the typical American reader of the 90's). Secondly, there is often an emphasis on morbid psychology, a look inside sick minds. This was exactly the element about Bailey's tales that appealed to Dorothy L. Sayers, who felt that Bailey's work in this direction showed "originality", but it often just seems to me to be "sick".

 

There are also formal problems with the approach of the Bailey School. The hidden conspiracies and complex backgrounds of the tales are often "deduced" by the detective from the slenderest and most innocuous looking clues. It often seems to me that their approach violates the convention of "fair play", that there is no way an intelligent reader or other independent observer could actually deduce these complex background plots from such slender threads.

 

I am not sure I really should be including any of the work of the Bailey School on a list of "My Favorite Mysteries". Certainly, some of the stories show real power, and deserve at least some respect for inventiveness. However, I also have very strong reservations about all of this fiction. None of these works come highly recommended by me. To be fair, I must admit that my sampling of the Bailey school is quite superficial, and that there might be some outstanding works lurking in these writers' bibliographies that I have not yet read. In particular, some of Anthony Wynne's impossible crime novels are now beginning to gather a reputation. Also, one might point out the unanimous critical acclaim that at one time greeted Bailey's work. He was both praised and anthologized by S.S. Van Dine, Dorothy Sayers, Ellery Queen, and Howard Haycraft, a clean sweep of the great critics of the Golden Age. Also, the Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection says that he was the most popular mystery writer in Great Britain between the wars. This means that his works were more popular than Chesterton, Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers or Carr, something that seems incomprehensible today. Despite all this, I cannot work up any great enthusiasm for his work. One might also note, that I still get very nice letters from contemporary enthusiasts of Bailey's fiction, so his work still has a significant following. One might also note that Earl Emerson's Going Crazy in Public (1996) pays homage to Bailey, by including characters named both for H.C. Bailey himself, and for his lawyer detective Joshua Clunk.

 

The Bailey School: Realists Vs Intuitionists

 

Where does Bailey's work fit in detective fiction history? Certainly, Bailey and company considered themselves aligned with the fair play, puzzle plot detective stories of the Golden Age. I would agree, with the caveat that the Bailey school's work often fails badly in the "fair play" department.

 

Within the Golden Age, where does Bailey's fiction fit? Is he aligned with the "intuitionist" school of Chesterton and Christie, or with the "realist" school of Freeman and Crofts? S.S. Van Dine firmly associated Bailey with the intuitionists, as Bailey's detectives, like Christie's, get their solutions by a mix of intuition and logical deduction, instead of anything resembling the realistic detective work of Freeman and Crofts. While Van Dine has a point, it also seems to me that Bailey's work is quite a ways off from what Jon L. Breen calls the Main Street of the detective story centered on such great intuitionist writers as Christie, Queen and Carr. One might add that Bailey's introduction "Mr. Fortune" to the collection Meet Mr. Fortune disavows that there is anything "intuitionist" about his sleuth.

 

The Bailey School's work also has some features in common with that of Freeman and his followers. The presence of doctors as detectives, combined with the frequent use of scientific or medical techniques to commit crimes, seems similar to Freeman's work. Bailey himself often used physical clues from which Mr. Fortune made deductions à la Dr. Thorndyke. Especially in the earlier stories, Mr. Fortune often concentrates on forensic analysis of the body to reconstruct the crime, also in the Thorndyke tradition. He combines this with a thorough look for other physical evidence at the crime scene. The clues also sometimes draw on natural history of plants in the vicinity of the crime, another Freeman-like idea. All these features make it likely that Mr. Fortune was originally conceived with Dr. Thorndyke as a model. The Fortune stories also occasionally deal with antiquities, another Freeman theme. There are tiny ancient statuettes from prehistoric cultures that serve as clues in such early Bailey stories as "The Hottentot Venus" and "The Young God" (1925).

 

Mr. Fortune loves to quote phrases from classic literature, a trait perhaps derived from another Realist school pioneer, E. C. Bentley. The best early Mr. Fortune tale "The Business Minister" also shares Bentley's skepticism about the rich and powerful, that appeared in Bentley's [Tremt's Last Case by EC Bentley|Trent's Last Case (1913). "The Profiteers", an otherwise annoying ghost-story-masquerading-as-a-mystery, also has a vein of social criticism, going after businessmen who made a killing out of World War I. "The Profiteers" contains a brief but memorable statement of Supt. Bell's religious views, a subject that returns in "The Cat Burglar".

 

The presence in "The Cat Burglar" (1926) of ex-Scotland Yard Inspector Mordan, now a private inquiry agent, echoes the regular appearance in Crofts of the British version of the private eye. Mordan is one of the more interesting recurring characters in the Fortune series.

 

However, the extremely melodramatic storytelling of the Bailey School seems like the dialectical antithesis of Freeman and Crofts, who stressed sober realism in all things. Bailey has little interest in alibis, and that Realist school standby "the breakdown of identity" rarely occurs in his fiction. Nor does the Bailey school create "backgrounds" that realistically depict some industry or social institution, although perhaps the North Country local color in Bailey's The Red Castle (1932) comes close.

 

All in all, it makes sense to consider Bailey and his followers as a "third school", one directly allied with neither Chesterton and Christie, nor with Freeman and Crofts. I have never seen any attempt at all to "place" Wynne or Bechhoffer Roberts in detective fiction history; both are fairly obscure writers. I have grouped them with Bailey on grounds of perceived similarities with his works. And although [Bramah, Ernest|Ernest Bramah preceded Bailey by a decade as an author, some of his 1920's works show some affinities to the Bailey school. Such works as "The Mystery of the Poisoned Dish of Mushrooms" and "The Disappearance of Marie Severe" deal with children in jeopardy. They also have the medical background that often shows up in Bailey.

 

Bailey's first Mr. Fortune tales appeared in book form in 1919, a year before the appearance of Freeman Wills Crofts' The Cask (1920) and Agatha Christie's The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), often taken as the start of the Golden Age. Bailey did not publish a mystery novel till 1930, concentrating on short stories, instead. This emphasis on the short form seems more typical of the pre-Golden Age era of Doyle and early Freeman, rather than of the 1920-1950 period in which most of Bailey's mystery fiction actually appeared.

 

There are Doyle like elements in Bailey's Mr. Fortune stories. Both Sherlock Holmes and Mr. Fortune typically intervene in the midst of a complex, on-going intrigue, hoping to prevent a tragedy. Neither typically just stands around and solves an already completed crime, the way many Golden Age sleuths do. Fortune's disparagement of the police echoes Holmes belittling of Lestrade. Holmes solving a crime in A Study in Scarlet through being able to read German is echoed by Fortune's using his knowledge of Greek in "The Long Barrow", "The Violet Farm" and "The Picnic". The opening of "The Long Barrow" seems designed to contrast Holmes' position as a consulting detective, with Fortune's collaboration with the police.

 

Bailey Themes

 

It has been fashionable in mystery fiction criticism to assert that, while Chandler and other hard-boiled writers often criticized police corruption, Golden Age writers depicted society as wholly good, and the police as agents and guardians of social virtue. W.H. Auden described Golden Age fiction as a fairy tale in which the bad were cleansed out of a good society. I feel very dubious about this whole critical approach; it is especially off in the case of Bailey. Bailey was extremely skeptical of the police. Such tales of his as "The Cat Burglar" (1926), "The Little Finger" and "The Yellow Cloth" air many criticisms of the police. Other British set Golden Age novels that criticize police corruption include John Rhode's contribution to Ask a Policeman (1933), and John Dickson Carr's Death-Watch (1935), as well as some of Edmund Crispin's stories in Beware of the Trains.

 

Bailey's tales are notable for their bloodthirstiness. There is often not one crime going on in a short story, but multiple killings, assaults, disappearances, burglaries, arson, con games, you name it. This is not merely a matter of melodrama, although Bailey exploits the lurid potential of such events to the max. It also aids Bailey's puzzle plotting. Bailey often shifts roles in the solution of his plots. What was assumed to be done by one character, was in fact done by another. Even before the solution, much of the criminal investigation done by Mr. Fortune and the police consists of speculations about the perpetrators of the crimes in the tale, with a constantly shifting perspective on who might have committed them. Bailey is uninhibited about coincidence. He finds nothing odd in a situation where two or three criminals are all running amok at once, piling up interlocked crimes that are all attributed to each other.

 

Bailey tales are often about kidnappings. These stories tend to come in pairs. An early pair consists of "The Magic Stone" and "The Little House" (1926). These tales seem like versions of each other. Both end with a climactic raid on a nest of bad guys. A later pair of stories describe kidnappings after outings in the countryside. In both, there are physical remains of the outing for the detective to study. This pair consists of the Mr. Fortune story "The Picnic" and the Joshua Clunk novel The Red Castle (1932).

 

Other Bailey tales also come in pairs. "The Young God" (1925) is a greatly improved version of material found earlier in "The Nice Girl". Both stories involve dysfunctional families in which there is an ambiguous, hard to interpret killing; their chief suspect being brought to trial, followed by a final revelation of the truth. The earlier story has some offensive stereotypes. Bailey has also made the characters more likable in the second tale, and deepened the amount of mystery.

 

Another early pair of tales is "The Archduke's Tea" and "The Missing Husband" (1926), in which an outsider wife is suspected of attacks on her aristocratic husband. Both of these minor works suffer from having only one real suspect aside from the wife - not a very mysterious situation. Bailey succeeds in bringing home the crime to the Most Likely Suspect, not a good paradigm for the mystery. The chief merit of the otherwise forgettable "The Archduke's Tea", which is the first Mr. Fortune story, is that it introduces recurring Scotland Yard characters the Honorable Stanley Lomas, chief of the Criminal Investigation Department, and his associate Superintendent Bell, and gives perhaps the best description of these men found in the series.

 

Bailey set some of his tales on the European continent. "The Face in the Picture" is very knowledgeable about both its Parisian setting, and modern art. Bailey, like Agatha Christie, was clearly quite pleased with modern painting. Several stories of Bailey's use clues involving plants. Bailey knew a great deal about the flowers and trees growing in both the English countryside and in suburban gardens. Traces of these are always being found on bodies and at crime scenes. Bailey also liked butterflies and moths; he is almost as interested in these creatures as R. Austin Freeman was in mammals. Some of his stories give vivid pictures on butterfly hunting in the between the wars British countryside, especially "The Long Barrow" and "The Holy Well". In general, many of Bailey's best tales are woven around charming knowledge of some subject: nature, antiquities, art.

 

Each of the early Fortune collections has a comic story. These tales deal with crimes much less serious than murder. Although they have the form of mystery tales, they eventually reveal burlesque solutions. The tales seem to spoof the mystery as a form. This is especially true of "The Snowball Burglary". This is a rare example in Bailey of an intricate "timetable of the suspects' movements during the crime" mystery, an approach he usually eschews. Bailey shows he can pull this off with imagination. "The Hermit Crab" is an extreme example of a Dr. Thorndyke like deduction from natural facts, also used for somewhat of a burlesque here. "The Snowball Burglary" and "The Hermit Crab" form another of Bailey's story pairs. Both have a similar "extra mystery" in their story's final pages, with a similar kind of solution.

 

Bailey often creates clues to his characters' personalities. One method is through interior decoration, describing in great detail his characters' rooms and places of business. These rooms tend to be cluttered, elaborately furnished, and redolent of their owners' personality. Characters' gardens are similarly described and symbolic. Another path into his characters' minds is through their hobbies. Binks' collecting and Sally's rock climbing in The Red Castle are examples, as are Joshua Clunk's eating and revivalist preaching. Characters are also sometimes color coded. For example, the little old lady's love of light blue and pink in "The Gipsy Moth", and Sally's green clothes in The Red Castle. The ostinato recurrence of pink and blue in "Moth" creates an effect of underlining the old lady's existence as a human being. We are reminded again and again that she was a person with wants and feelings.

 

Detective Bibliography

 

(based on material from Christian Henriksson's site)

 

Call Mr Fortune (1920)

Mr Fortune's Practice (1923)

Mr Fortune's Trials (1925)

Mr Fortune, Please (1928)

Garstons (1930)

Mr Fortune Speaking (1930)

Mr Fortune Explains (1930)

The Red Castle (1932)

A Case for Mr Fortune (1932)

The Man in the Cape (1933)

Mr Fortune Wonders (1933)

Shadow on the Wall (1934)

THe Sullen Sky Mystery (1935)

Mr Fortune Objects (1935)

A Clue for Mr Fortune (1936)

Black Land, White Land (1937)

Clunk's Claimant (1937)

This is Mr Fortune (1938)

The Great Game (1939)

The Veron Mystery (1939)

The Bishop's Crime (1940)

Mr Fortune Here (1940)

The Little Captain (1941)

Dead Man's Shoes (1942)

No Murder (1942)

Mr Fortune Finds a Pig (1943)

Slippery Anne (1944)

The Cat's Whisker (1944)

The Wrong Man (1945)

The Life Sentence (1946)

Honour Among Thieves (1947)

Saving a Rope (1948)

Shrouded Death (1950)

 

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