Mr. Fortune and Mr. Clunk
Mr. FORTUNE
Mr. Fortune has a modest nature—or that kind of vanity—which avoids personal advertisement.
Continual and growing curiosity about what he is really like, his private life, his training, the early, obscure years of his career, and his way of thought upon crime and the world has, however, produced so many misleading statements that he has been persuaded to allow a brief sketch of a biography.
Reginald Fortune was born less than fifty years ago, the only son—there were several daughters—of a doctor of moderate means in good general practice in one of the wealthier suburbs of London. Reginald was educated at Charterhouse and University College, Oxford. Neither at school nor university had he any particular distinction but a general popularity. Schoolmasters and tutors pronounced him the most ordinary of amiable youths, though one or two remarked that he had an abnormal capacity for being interested in any subject, from prehistoric religion to the new physics. Men who were boys with him report that the only uncommon thing about him was his interest in everybody.
It was always understood that he should become a doctor and succeed to his father’s general practice. Reginald accepted this destiny with cordial satisfaction. Yet when he went on from Oxford to a London hospital he found, to his mild annoyance, that he was developing a certain specialised ability, first as a surgeon, then as a pathologist. Rather plaintively and against his will he accepted this call and proceeded to study in the clinics of Vienna.
His own statement is that there were two formative educational influences in his young life, first the professor who had amassed a larger amount of useless knowledge than any man in Oxford, secondly Sir Lawson Hunter whose “European reputation as a surgeon has been won by knowing his own mind.”
It was agreed by his contemporaries and his seniors that he might have done very well either in surgery or pathology. He became uncommonly sound in diagnosis and had the poise and the manual dexterity which make a surgeon. The love of investigation, the patience in scientific method, the flair which the pathologist requires were equally well developed in him. Nevertheless he went back to the suburb of his birth and took an assistant’s share of his father’s placid family practice.
He will always maintain that this is what he was made for, the cure or care of the common ills of life, the children’s measles and the parents’ rheumatism. It is his opinion that the specialist is inevitably a rather absurd and unhappy person, doomed to narrow thought and incomplete appreciation of the world. In pensive moments he will mourn the fate which made him one. But against specialisation he has steadily protected himself, keeping touch with all kinds of knowledge and everything which the natural man enjoys.
What compelled him to specialise was two cases of crime in his suburban practice. The speed and certainty of his apprehension, his insight and power of inference from slight, obscure facts commended him as the ideal expert to the chief of the Criminal Investigation Department, who, as he complains bitterly, would never let him alone afterwards. Yet Reginald cannot have been wholly unwilling. There is no doubt that the real forces which determined his career were his quick and deep interest in the drama of humanity, his consciousness of power to divine and deal with human motives, and his affection for the victim, the “under dog,” in the strife of the world. He would smile away the notion that he has any ambition to “ride abroad redressing human wrongs.” He dislikes philanthropists. But it is a fact that the suffering of the weak is apt to excite him to his most ruthless efficiency.
Nothing of that is suggested by his looks or his habits of life. He continues, in spite of years which must be called middle age, to look about twenty-five, a rather plump twenty-five, but of a fresh and innocent face which might be younger. An irreverent damsel christened him “Cherub,” and the name has stuck. His fair hair is ample and unfaded still. His blue eyes have still a simple candour, or a wistful childlike surprise at this wonderful world. His round cheeks keep a schoolboy complexion.
He lives at his ease. No human pleasure, from the higher poetry or the profounder speculations of science and philosophy to chocolate cream, is alien to him, except the sport which consists in killing creatures and the social ceremonies which draw crowds. He has been accused of an excessive interest in food and drink, and his appetites of this kind are hearty and, apart from an absolute refusal to take any interest in port or whiskey, of a catholic extent. But it is believed that, after the presence of his wife, his garden and his laboratory give him his dearest delights.
Concerning the principles and methods of his work in crime, there seems to be some misapprehension. Some of his most studios and appreciative critics have classified him as an “intuitionist detective.” This is, for example, the decision pronounced in the introduction to the Oxford University Press selection of detective stories in the “World’s Classic” series, where the late E.M. Wrong thus amplified it: “Mr. Fortune feels atmosphere more keenly than any other detective, and is marvellously accurate in his judgement of character.”
In accord with this is the Scotland Yard estimate of Superintendent Bell, “wonderful how he knows men,” which ascribes to him something like a sixth sense for the perception of the motive and personality behind actions.
Reginald would disclaim with a plaintive protest this abnormal power or any other abnormality. His piercing judgements of character he explains as purely rational inferences from the facts of a case. A slight, apparently insignificant piece of evidence, he is wont to argue, may often be decisive as to the nature of the unknown person who has been active. The accuracy of his inferences, in his interpretation of his mental processes, is due to the fact that he is wholly and intensely the ordinary man, feeling about things and people and reacting to them in the natural way.
He is wont to say that he has an old-fashioned mind. In so far as this refers to morals it means that he holds by the standard principles of conduct and responsibility, of right and wrong, of sin and punishment. Modern theories that the criminal is the product of a wicked society, that he should be treated as the unfortunate victim of illness, that retribution is unjust and so forth, are for him the perversion of a fraction of the truth into an absurd general rule.
For general rules of any kind he has small respect. The maxim that the only general rule is: There are no general rules—is a favourite of his. He does not always accept the law of a case as justice and has been known to act on his own responsibility in contriving the punishment of those who could not legally be found guilty or the immunity of those who were not legally innocent. In his capacity to judge each case he has the absolute confidence of the surgeon called in to decide how a patient should be treated, when the choice of treatment will determine life or death, happiness or misery. And Reginald’s standards of justice and right are those which the common sense of the common man has shaped.
On the conviction of a criminal he has sometimes been heard to repeat the phrase of the old divine “There, but for the grace of God, go I.” But this does not proceed from the comfortable philosophy that anybody may be a rascal if circumstances impel him that way. Mr. Fortune’s theory is that the original impulse in a great deal of crime is a motive which many or most people feel. The distinction of the criminal is that he indulges it to extravagance. For that extravagance, when it wrongs others, Mr. Fortune finds no excuse in difficult or tempting circumstances. A cruel crime is to him the work of a pestilential creature, and he sees his duty in dealing with such cases as that of a doctor in treating illness. The cause must be discovered and extirpated. There is no more mercy for the cruel criminal than for the germs of disease. Both must be made innocuous. The measures taken against both must be such as to diminish the danger of further infection. That the criminal may be born to commit crime as a bacillus is born to cause suffering and death, Mr. Fortune agrees with his whole mind. For that mystery he has no explanation, but his philosophy is that the business of the human reason is to make the world safe from both. He is pained at the admiration which finds anything mysterious in his success. All his investigations, he will insist, proceed by the tried and proved methods of science, careful and minute and exact observation, interpretation of the facts by scientific knowledge, formation of a hypothesis and the testing of it by further investigation and experiment.
The modern specialisation which exalts criminology into a separate science he smiles at as a pedantic and delusive arrangement. All the sciences from astronomical physics to palæobotany, he will maintain, are required in criminal investigation, and in addition every other department of human knowledge, millinery or mountaineering, from the garden of Eden to Russian films. The real specialist in criminology would be omniscient. The effective practitioner, he says modestly, is the ordinary man who knows enough of everything to know his way about in anything and can use his mind in a scientific way.
Not that he has any superstitious faith in science. He takes all its present conclusions as provisional and trusts them only so far as they will do the day’s work for him, with a perfect faith that they will be superseded by something more effective tomorrow. On each new theory which comes forward to supersede them he turns an impartial and critical eye. So he will smile at the newer psychologies, as putting the oldest religions into a fresh and inconvenient jargon, and go his hopeful and ruthless way believing heartily in God and the devil and the power of the human mind to know which is which and give an effective hand to either.
H.C. BAILEY
[From Meet Mr. Fortune, The Book League of America, New York, 1942.]
Reggie Fortune is married to the actress Joan Amber between Mr. Fortune's Practice and Mr. Fortune's Trials, having met her in "The Business Minister" (Call Mr. Fortune). His associates at Scotland Yard include the Hon. Stanley Lomas, Superintendent Bell, and Inspector Underwood. He appears in the short story collections Call Mr. Fortune (1920), Mr. Fortune's Practice (1923), Mr. Fortune's Trials (1925), Mr. Fortune, Please (1928), Mr. Fortune Speaking (1930), Mr. Fortune Explains (1930), Case for Mr. Fortune (1932), Mr. Fortune Wonders (1933), Mr. Fortune Objects (1935), A Clue for Mr. Fortune (1936), This is Mr. Fortune (1938), Mr. Fortune Here (1940; and the novels Shadow on the Wall (1934), Black Land, White Land (1937), The Great Game (1939), The Bishop's Crime (1940), No Murder (1942), Mr. Fortune Finds a Pig (1943), Dead Man's Effects (1945), The Life Sentence (1946), and Saving a Rope (1948). Meet Mr. Fortune (1942) is an omnibus collection published in America.