Call Mr. Fortune

Mr. Reginald Fortune

Fortune became a specialist in the surgery of crime only because the Criminal Investigation Department kept appealing to his multifarious knowledge, and he resents every minute of it. He likes ordinary things and ordinary people, which is precisely why his judgment cuts through the tangles that baffle Scotland Yard. When the tape machine clicks out Sir Albert Lunt's murder, Reggie groans that the beggars get killed just to bother him, then goes to work anyway.

Mr. Lomas

Lomas is a family skeleton-haunted official who confesses his limitations freely and envies Fortune's spirits. His maiden sister runs a princely school at Tormouth where rooms are mysteriously ransacked and photographs stolen, and he wants Fortune to investigate without quite believing it is a real case. Meanwhile Horace Kimball telephones twice a day demanding a scapegoat for a financial scandal, and the whole Government is on Lomas's neck.

Horace Kimball

Kimball is ridiculously rich, reputedly honest, and pathetically anxious that everyone should suppose he has been educated. Only he and his private secretary Sandford knew which companies the primary provisional scheme concerned, and when a Stock Exchange boom follows, Kimball is huffy at any suggestion that Sandford could be the leak. He means to be civil, but he is mad to catch the fellow who gave his scheme away, and he calls Lomas twice a day to say so.

Superintendent Bell

Bell belongs to the official machinery that Fortune alternately aids and outruns, the men who gather facts and follow the forms. In the Charlecote affair, where a son finds his father lying dead in the street outside his own door, Bell's investigation must contend with family quarrels, a sculptor's stubbornness, and Fortune's sleepy, devastating questions. He is the professional whose case it is, and whose conclusions will either hold or crumble under Reggie's scrutiny.

Geoffrey Charlecote

Geoffrey was one of the great men of his college, socially magnificent and even suspected of brains, but he was bored by Mayfair and refused to go into Parliament. When he discovered he wanted to be a sculptor, his father raged and forbade it, and Geoffrey went abroad anyway. Now he has quarrelled with the old guv'nor, found him lying in his blood, and knows the police suspect him, which is why he grabs Reggie Fortune on the courthouse steps and begs for help.

Sir Albert Lunt

Sir Albert built a rococo palace not quite in Park Lane and pantomime splendours at Prior's Colney, a ballroom in the lake and a dining-room panelled in silver. His photograph shows a commonplace enough face until you see the expression underneath, a look of insolence and conceit of singular force, the secret of his success. When he is found shot in his deer park, the tea-merchant whistles that he won't be missed, and Reggie agrees that someone was bound to murder the animal.