Black Land, White Land (1937)
1937 Doubleday Doran blurb:
In this book, a full-length Reggie Fortune novel, H.C. Bailey has written unquestionably the finest mystery story of his career. And as Reggie Fortune is already established as one of the leading fictional detectives of all time, and since the mantle of immortality which has previously cloaked only Sir Conan Doyle and Edgar Allan Poe must also be applied to H.C. Bailey, it can be said that this is possibly one of the outstanding detective stories of our time.
In Durshire there is a proverb, “Black land, white land, always at strife,” and it was a landslide in this strife-ridden countryside that drew Reggie into this case. How could the bones of a young man, who hadn’t been dead for more than fifteen years, reach that stratum of earth which had held entombed for thousands of years the bones of a prehistoric animal? It seemed impossible but Reggie found it was nevertheless true. And this discovery set Reggie on the track of a twelve-year-old murder. In the course of his investigation Reggie discovered the broken cameo, the evidence of the buttonhole and a hunter’s watch, and learned the significance of a quotation from an Aristophanes comedy. Finally, after the episode of the flint mine and the jar of paste, Reggie was able to send his case to the last assize where there is no solicitor general and but one judge.
The thing that has always amused Reggie most about this case is that had it not been for General Duddon’s sweet tooth there would still be strife between the black land and white land of Durshire.
My review:
"Black land and white land never agree. Proverb in these parts. People who hold the black land where things grow rich always being pushed off it to the barren white land by thrustful newcomers. From age to age. From the dark and early natives through our Astons and our Tracys to our Brown. And learning hate, one and all. Their duty and their delight."
This is a Mr. Fortune story—Reggie is undoubtedly one of my favourite detectives: he is original without being eccentric, and simultaneously amusing and frightening—in this respect, he resembles both Father Brown and Mrs. Bradley, who were also concerned with the fate of the innocent, and who had their own ideas of justice. The story has a very Chestertonian feel—it is as much an allegory as it is a detective story, with clever and unobtrusive symbolism, and a general feeling of care and attention to novelistic details, raising the book from the status of a "mere" detective story—here, it is a (carefully controlled) Greek tragedy. Bailey is always highly readable, possessing a lyrical grace, but here he surpasses himself—every phrase is redolent with meaning, conjuring up a thousand vivid pictures of the fertile black land and of the impoverished chalk land, and of the doomed families who live on them—the way in which the events of the imaginary county's past have a bearing on the present is particularly effective. The solution is clever, and eminently fair—although Bailey does not reveal all the clues in his solution, they are all in the narrative. This is a subtle and ingenious way of managing the truth, for it saves the boredom of explaining every clue in laborious detail, and allows the reader to feel clever for remembering them. These clues tend to be both physical and situation-based—i.e., there is a need to explain what certain actions, certain rumours, mean; once these actions are explained, the detective moves closer to the truth.