The Bishop's Crime
(1940)
My review:
How gifted an author was
Bailey—and how shamefully
neglected and forgotten! Like Chesterton,
Sayers and Mitchell, he applied the gifts of the novelist to the
detective
story: those of character, atmosphere and style. The
cathedral town of Badon, where the
various murders are committed and where the great Mr. Fortune moves
slowly and mournfully
from the slenderest of clues to find a murderer and a long-dead
bishop’s
treasure, is its own place, real, vivid, beautiful and powerful. The psychological atmosphere, one of hatred,
hostility and suspicion, so out of place in a bishop’s seat, has its
roots in
the ideological conflict between a progressive bishop and his
reactionary dean,
and, when ignited by the rumour of buried treasure, erupts into murder. Gone is the religious serenity; instead,
“Hell’s
at work.” And Mr. Fortune is given a
problem to solve. It is not as
malevolent as the plans hatched at the Maison Montespan; not as
original and powerfully
imaginative as the tragedy of the Aston-Tracy feud in Durshire; nor as
complex and
difficult to solve as the multiple murders in the parish of Hurst,
yet it is
undoubtedly one of Mr. Fortune’s greatest cases, showing his ability to
connect
past and present and foresee the future, to read character and
atmosphere, and to
hang a murderer on the finest of threads.
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