Mr. Fortune's Trials (1925)
My review:
The Furnished Cottage: An unusual story in which Reggie himself is the intended victim of a mistakenly obsessed woman's revenge. The motive and the situation are excellent, and the final redemption at the end—instigated by Fortune—is vital to the story's themes of guilt, innocence, redemption, and expiation.
The Young God: A weak example of the "traditional" country house variety (which never finds H.C.B. at his best), with few clues, despite the array of physical evidence. Mention is made of the conviction of the reluctant alderman of the murder of the inspector of taxes—"a popular but ugly case".
The Only Son: An excellent tale of a scientific plot directed against an unstable young man and his mother. The plot is strong, the atmosphere suitably menacing, and Mr. Fortune's rôle as Nemesis at the end is excellent. It is in this book that mention is made of the case of the wrong false teeth, a story I wish Bailey had written!
The Hermit Crab: Mr. Fortune feels that this story "is, perhaps, my masterpiece". Bailey in a light vein (comic relief afte the horrors of "The Only Son"), as an unpleasant and domineering woman, Miss Platt-Robinson, is kidnapped by a band of Amazons and held prisoner on an island. Miss P.-R. is a very amusing—yet menacing—portrait of a type recognisable today ("That is one of my principles!" indeed). The story is fast-moving and unpredictable, and everything ends as it should. Mention is made of the matter of the infested marmoset (a crime, you remember, of passion).
The Long Barrow: A first-class tale set in Dorsetshire, with a menacing atmosphere, a strong sense of landscape, and some sinister archaeology (the crank Larkin is intent on proving that a British barrow is Phoenician). The sinister rustic (similarities to Elijah Hawke in Black Land, White Land), the strange noises around the house, the long barrow itself, and the Greek codes are all artfully combined. Mention is made of the inquest on Zuleika the lemur—a strange, sad case.
The Profiteers: Bailey leaves the realm of the detective story in this masterpiece, "not one of our simple cases. A lot of dark background. And something rather queer in the dark." Although two people die under suspicious circumstances, someone else had a hand in the matter, and Fortune reveals a particularly unexpected and disturbing truth at the end, this is NOT a detective story proper at all. Rather, it belongs to those hybrids of the detective and the ghost story: "The Uncommon Prayer-Book" of M.R. James, Gladys Mitchell's The Devil at Saxon Wall, and John Dickson Carr's The Burning Court. As such, it is excellent (the solution is an effectively eerie surprise(, but, as a DETECTIVE STORY, it is bound to fail. Fortune's success in proving the daughter of the Lithuanian millionaire, Baron Lampe, innocent of the assault on the abominable Roumanian fiddler is mentioned.