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G.K. Chesterton fans were shocked last month when a never-before-seen essay by the great writer appeared in The Strand Magazine, a quarterly publication devoted to mystery fiction and its makers. According to Chesterton scholar Dale Ahlquist, who wrote a foreword to the essay in the magazine:
“The manuscript has been sitting in the Rare Books and Special Collections of the Hesburgh Library at the University of Notre Dame for decades.”
It was originally written for the Detection Club, a “secret society” made up of accomplished mystery writers like Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Eric Ambler – and Chesterton himself. The club had intended to publish a magazine.
Chesterton wrote an essay for the first issue, but for some reason the magazine idea was dropped.
(View the PHOTO GALLERY at the end of this article to learn more about G.K. Chesterton’s mystery books and the fantastical sleuths who make up his “Chesterton Detective Agency.”)
Bringing creativity to the last truly “moral” tales
In the rediscovered essay, titled “The Historical Detective Story,” Chesterton encourages his colleagues to resist the “monotony of detective fiction.” He asserts that mystery writers need to apply more creativity and dynamism to their stories, because “the detective tale is almost the only decently moral tale that is still being told.”
At the time the essay was written (sometime after 1930), other forms of fiction had been tainted by moral relativism, at least in Chesterton’s view. But in crime stories, characters and readers alike still cried out for justice, even if that desire was sometimes thwarted by the author.
No writer understood the moral roots and creative possibilities of detective fiction like G.K. Chesterton. Over his long career, he produced a whole series of classic mysteries that remain as odd and innovative today as there were in his own time.
Chesterton’s many detectives
Chesterton is best known for his Fr. Brown mysteries – but readers who stop there are missing out. In books such as The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Poet and the Lunatics, and the Paradoxes of Mr. Pond, G.K.C. not only creates a series of puzzling and deeply amusing mystery scenarios, but they are really only excuses to explore deeper mysteries that are philosophical and theological in nature.
The various detectives in his stories employ methods that are just as odd as Fr. Brown’s detection methods that were learned in the confessional – but each investigator uses a method that is uniquely strange. The poet Gabriel Gale identifies murderers through his artistic senses, while Horne Fisher, a bureaucrat, reluctantly uncovers corruption at the very center of government because he always “knows too much.” Then there is Rupert Grant, who solves crimes that do not exist!
Together, all these gumshoes created by Chesterton form one of the strangest and most wonderful detective agencies that ever (or never) existed.
View the PHOTO GALLERY below to learn more about the sleuths of the G.K. Chesterton Detective Agency. Hopefully it will entice you to explore the great Catholic author’s many delightful and thought-provoking mystery books…
And today we celebrate...