Mr Fortune, Please (Green Penguin Book Club 4)

Shedunnit

Caroline Crampton

Books, Arts

4.8 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 7 August 2024

⏱️ 59 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Dolores Gordon-Smith joins Caroline to read this short story collection by H.C. Bailey. No major plot spoilers until you hear Caroline say we are "entering the spoiler zone", at 21:34. After that, expect full spoilers. Caroline's new book, A Body Made of Glass: A History of Hypochondria, is out now. To find out more and get your copy, visit her website carolinecrampton.com/abodymadeofglass. A full list of titles in the Penguin series can be found at penguinfirsteditions.com. Join the Shedunnit Book Club for two extra Shedunnit episodes a month plus access to the monthly reading discussions and community: shedunnitbookclub.com/join. Mentioned in this episode: — Mr Fortune, Please by HC Bailey — The Sea Captain by HC Bailey — Jack Haldean Mysteries by Dolores Gordon-Smith — Serpent's Eye by Dolores Gordon-Smith — How to Write a Classic Murder Mystery by Dolores Gordon-Smith — Everyman's Great Tales of Detection, edited by Dorothy L Sayers — Anthony Gethryn series by Philip MacDonald — Capital Crimes, edited by Martin Edwards — The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett — The Poisoned Chocolates Case by Anthony Berkeley Past Shedunnit Green Penguin episodes: — The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (Green Penguin Book Club 1) — The Murder on the Links (Green Penguin Book Club 2) — The Thin Man (Green Penguin Book Club 3) NB: Links to Blackwell's are affiliate links, meaning that the podcast receives a small commission when you purchase a book there (the price remains the same for you). Blackwell's is a UK bookselling chain that ships internationally at no extra charge. To be the first to know about future developments with the podcast, sign up for the newsletter at shedunnitshow.com/newsletter. The podcast is on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram as @ShedunnitShow, and you can find it in all major podcast apps. Make sure you’re subscribed so you don’t miss the next episode. Click here to do that now in your app of choice. Find a full transcript of this episode at shedunnitshow.com/mrfortunepleasetranscript Music by Audioblocks and Blue Dot Sessions. See shedunnitshow.com/musiccredits for more details. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Welcome to She Dunnet, I'm Caroline Crampton.
0:08.0	And welcome back to Green Penguin Book Club, a series within She Doneit that documents my journey of reading and
0:14.7	discussing every crime or green title from the main Penguin series in order.
0:19.3	Our book today is Mr Fortune Please by H.C. Bailey and it's also our first book of short stories we've come across in this series. The previous three have all been novels. The six stories
0:34.8	collected in Mr Fortune Please were first published in Flynn's Weekly in 1926 and 1927 and came
0:41.5	out together as a book first in
0:43.0	1928.
0:45.2	It was then added to the Penguin series in March
0:47.5	1936 as Penguin Number 34.
0:51.4	A fun trivia fact for you, this was H.C. Bailey's only crime title in the Penguin series, but not his only book to be included.
1:00.0	In August 1940, his 2013 swashbuckling historical novel, The Sea Captain, became Penguin Number 275 with an orange or general fiction cover. Henry Christopher Bailey, better known by his initials, H.C., was a prolific author and a journalist who also worked as a war correspondent during the First World War.
1:31.0	He started publishing serialized romantic and historical fiction in his early 20s
1:37.0	and produced his first detective fiction in 1919. For the first decade he focused entirely on short stories for magazines, but in 1930 he began
1:47.1	writing full-length crime novels too, and produced at least a dozen before his retirement from
1:52.0	writing in 1950. He had two recurring characters.
1:56.4	Reggie Fortune, a surgeon who assists Scotland Yard with tricky cases and who is the star of our book today,
2:06.0	and Joshua Clunk, a preacher turned lawyer who loves to suck peppermints and quote the Bible to criminals.
2:10.3	Bailey's work was greatly admired by his fellow authors in the interwar period, demonstrated by the fact that he was invited to become a founding member of the detection club in 1930.
2:20.0	Popular in his day, for reasons we'll discuss later, his work hasn't survived in the same way that that of his contemporaries did, and especially in the UK, it can be quite difficult to get hold of copies of his books now. I have linked in the
2:34.1	description to a free online version of Mr Fortune Please at the Internet Archive
2:38.5	so you can still read it there if it proves difficult to track down elsewhere. There's also a list of the whole Penguin series linked in the description so you can see what books will be coming up in the future.
2:50.0	Joining me today to discuss this book is Dolores Gordon Smith, author of the Jack Hal Dean Mystery
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Caroline Crampton, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Caroline Crampton and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.