The Little Captain (1941)

In America as Orphan Ann.

1941 Grosset & Dunlap blurb:
What connection can there be between a girl in a quiet country orphanage, and a body lying among the bluebells of a little wood?
Or between that girl and a man under suspicion of selling Admiralty secrets? And another body plunging bloodily into midnight waters?
And a refugee doctor whose secretary disappeared into thin air? And Inspector Hubbard, whose specialty was the darkest peccadilloes of the female sex? And a rising tide of intrigue and violence that washed about the mysterious figure of Orphan Ann—until Joshua Clunk cut through the whole murderous pattern with a ruthless efficiency that spared no one in his path.

My review:

The Little Captain (or, in America, Orphan Ann) boasts one of Bailey's more tangled plots, with plenty of incident and suspense as Josh Clunk, self-styled hand of God, working for once with the police rather than against them (although his methods of securing justice, including allowing a murder and driving a woman to suicide, are highly dubious), investigates the murder of Mollie Marn, and attempts to defend Captain Davy, outside whose cottage Marn's corpse was placed, from charges of murder and treason. A sinister orphanage run by a white slaver also looms large in the plot. Let the reader who, like Barzun and Taylor, feels that Bailey occasionally lets his love of and for mistreated children-in-peril plunge the story into bathos be reassured that this theme does not dominate. As the story progresses, and is lost in "an infernal fog of crimes," the tension builds, as exciting event follows exciting event. Unfortunately, the fiend is arrested eighty pages or so from the end, and the guilt is shared between the members of a conspiracy, so the reader's anger is diffused. Result: a feeling of anti-climax, and a general muddle. This is particularly disappointing, as there are plenty of good clues in the book, and the first half is one of the most detection-filled Bailey novels.

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