H. C. Bailey
H. C. Bailey (1878-1961) was an English author of mysteries. He took to writing early, publishing My Lady of Orange (1901) during his senior year at Oxford, and spent many years as a journalist and author of romantic fiction before he began writing detective novels. Call Mr. Fortune (1920) introduced the world to Reggie Fortune, a brilliant investigator with a knack for solving chilling murder mysteries, who would become one of the most popular sleuths of the English golden age of detective fiction.
“Fortune comes nearest to the dream of all good detective-story readers. . . . When he says, as he sometimes does, ‘not a nice murder, Lomas,’ one feels the cold and authentic shiver in the spine.” —Stephen Vincent Benét, author of John Brown’s Body