# Call Mr. Fortune — Character guide

> Key figures in Call Mr. Fortune by H. C. Bailey.

- [Mr. Reginald Fortune](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/call_mr_fortune_se/characters/reginald_fortune.md): 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 ordinar
- [Mr. Lomas](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/call_mr_fortune_se/characters/stanley_lomas.md): 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 s
- [Horace Kimball](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/call_mr_fortune_se/characters/horace_kimball.md): 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 c
- [Superintendent Bell](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/call_mr_fortune_se/characters/superintendent_bell.md): 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
- [Geoffrey Charlecote](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/call_mr_fortune_se/characters/geoffrey_charlecote.md): 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 fathe
- [Sir Albert Lunt](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/call_mr_fortune_se/characters/albert_lunt.md): 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 se
- [Birdie Bolton](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/call_mr_fortune_se/characters/birdie_bolton.md): By daylight she is a tweedy, over-dressed British spinster in the quiet suburb of Westhampton; by night she is a gaunt, diamond-draped spectacle who screams like a seagull and dances like a dozen women fighting. She has 
- [Alice Warenne](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/call_mr_fortune_se/characters/alice_warenne.md): She arrived at the Devon school with the highest introductions, her father a distinguished Englishman living abroad, her French better than her English. Miss Lomas calls her a sweet nature and can imagine nothing against
- [Herbert Charlecote](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/call_mr_fortune_se/characters/herbert_charlecote.md): Educated at Harrow and Cambridge, Herbert emerged polished and ordinary, successful in the most pompous drawing-rooms and dutiful in all things. Where Geoffrey scandalized the family by going abroad to be a sculptor, Her
- [The Archduchess](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/call_mr_fortune_se/characters/archduchess.md): She moves in the highest circles, where a tea party is never merely tea and an invitation can be a summons. Around her gather the titled, the ambitious, and the compromised—people whose private lives are matters of publi
- [Mrs. Sandford](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/call_mr_fortune_se/characters/mrs_sandford.md): She belongs to the respectable, well-connected world where reputations are guarded and old associations are not discussed. Her link to the Kimball affair makes her one of the quiet hinges on which the investigation turns
- [Hilda Crowland](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/call_mr_fortune_se/characters/hilda_crowland.md): She moves through the Charlecote circle with the frankness of youth and the sharpness of someone who has learned to read a room. Where the men quarrel over money and reputation, Hilda sees the human cost—and is not alway
- [Victor Lunt](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/call_mr_fortune_se/characters/victor_lunt.md): Victor Lunt belongs to the Lunt family whose diamond fortunes and South African past shadow the case of Sir Albert's death. Where his brother Albert was loud and notorious, Victor is smooth, watchful, and speaks in lower
- [Sir Lawson Hunter](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/call_mr_fortune_se/characters/lawson_hunter.md): Sir Lawson Hunter occupies the respectable heights of politics and society, the kind of man whose name opens doors and whose actions ripple far beyond his own career. He is connected to the Lunt family's affairs in ways 
- [Mr. Rand](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/call_mr_fortune_se/characters/rand.md): Mr. Rand is the tenant nobody quite knows, a few weeks in a Montmorency House flat, no visitors, civil but distant, and then gone. When a corpse is found in the well beneath his window, his absence becomes the case's mos
- [Mr. Cranford](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/call_mr_fortune_se/characters/cranford.md): Cranford exists in the case as a name that keeps appearing without quite resolving, a figure whose connection to the Lunt family and to the crimes around them is more felt than seen. He is the kind of unknown who forces 
- [Dr. Newton](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/call_mr_fortune_se/characters/newton.md): Dr. Newton is a quiet medical man whose life and death sit at the edge of the Lunt case, unremarkable in manner and yet impossible to ignore once he is gone. His profession places him near secrets that patients tell only
- [Donald Gordon](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/call_mr_fortune_se/characters/donald_gordon.md): Donald Gordon moves in the world of business where the Lunt fortune was made, a man whose dealings put him close to the family's money and its quarrels. He is the sort of figure who knows the practical details others pre
- [May Weston](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/call_mr_fortune_se/characters/may_weston.md): May Weston belongs to the closed world of Miss Lomas's school, where new girls arrive rarely and only with the best introductions. Her disappearance turns a placid playing-field of white dresses and tennis courts into a 
- [Miss Joan Amber](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/call_mr_fortune_se/characters/joan_amber.md): A woman whose inheritance is at the center of a mystery.
- [The Archduke Leopold](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/call_mr_fortune_se/characters/archduke_leopold.md): A royal figure whose actions cause diplomatic trouble.
- [Jack Mason](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/call_mr_fortune_se/characters/jack_mason.md): An older man with ties to the Rand mystery.
- [Secretary Sandford](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/call_mr_fortune_se/characters/secretary_sandford.md): A secretary involved in the Kimball case.

HTML index: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/call_mr_fortune_se/characters