Six stories featuring young doctor Reggie Fortune and, usually, his friend Stanley Lomas, the head of the CID, beginning with “The Archduke’s Tea,” in which the tea is served to Reggie, who switches the cups, and the Archduke Leopold gets the strychnine he has taken from Reggie’s bottle. The Archduke has run down and killed a pedestrian he mistook for his brother Archduke Maurice, the heir to the throne. Then Leopold persisted and ran down Maurice, but didn’t manage to kill him. Reggie, taking over his father’s lucrative suburban practice while the elder doctor is away, has been called to the estate the Archduke is occupying with his wife and brother.
“The Sleeping Companion” obviously didn’t murder the music hall performer Birdie Bolton; it was the suspicious maid with the foreign accent in league with the chauffeur of the companion’s boyfriend, and the chauffeur doesn’t even appear in the action, so it’s hardly fair play. Reggie often complains of the cold in England and he likes muffins for breakfast or tea. In fact, he is fond of all four meals. He quotes the standard authors and some who are no longer so, like Jemmy Thomson: “O, Sophonisba, Sophonisba, O!”
In “The Nice Girl,” Reggie gets off the fiancé of a nurse he knows, from a murder charge. Turns out the fellow really did it, though fairly, having given a pistol to the financier who cheated him out of a Tanzanian mine. One of Reggie’s habits is pocketing evidence when he finds it, later producing it at inquest or trial, in flagrant disregard of rules of evidence.
“The Efficient Assassin” who kills the elder Charlecote with a stiletto is not the Italian wife of the artistic son who inherits in the new will, but the doctor who put the nephew up to killing him when the will was still in the nephew’s favor—the doctor who tried to kill the old man with pills for his dyspepsia but eventually did it with a stiletto and then had to kill the nephew as well—for nonpayment or fear of ratting. Did you get all that? The doctor rushes Reggie, who tips him out a second-story window, thus saving a prosecution without much evidence. It’s the second of these tales in which Reggie offs the bad guy.
“The Hottentot Venus” is a complicated story which plays out at Lomas’s sister’s girls school in Tormouth. The Prince of Ragusa kidnaps his daughter, with the help of another girl who is really a music-hall actress. Reggie goes along for the yacht ride and manages to bring everything back to shore all right.
“The Business Minister” is K., who hates his sister so much for leaving him to marry that he seeks out her husband and ruins him, then does the same thing to her son after her death. Finally, when something Reggie says convinces him that he has been found out, he arranges his own death so that blame will fall on the son. Fortune-ately, Reggie has had Lomas watching both men.
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