| THE CASE OF THE FORGOTTEN DETECTIVES: THE UNKNOWN CRIME FICTION OF G.K. CHESTERTON. by John C. Tibbetts (RARO3@aol.com) [Published in the American mystery journal, THE ARMCHAIR DETECTIVE, (Fall 1995), Vol. 28, No. 4, pp. 388-393.] Father Brown is by no means G. K. Chesterton's only detective. Less celebrated than the mild, dumpy little priest are other investigators whose cases are just as exotic and methods just as delightfully unconventional as his. To be sure, only a few are professional detectives or policemen; more significantly, most are what Chesterton cryptically calls "buoyant amateurs" retired judges, civil servants, escaped lunatics, and accused felons. What unites them all is that, like Father Brown, they are insightful observers and diviners of paradoxical truths. They stand the world on its head. Sometimes, like Gabriel Gale, they even stand on their heads. Their adventures, while wildly uneven in quality, are at their best every bit as good as Brown's. A few are even better. Alas, unless you're a Chesterton collector, you may have difficulty locating these stories. Even Marie Smith's admirable anthology, Thirteen Detectives (1987), which purports to bring together the "best" of the non-Father Brown mysteries, omits entirely references to several important story collections. Although virtually unknown today, The Club of Queer Trades (1904), which predated the first Father Brown story by six years, was Chesterton's first attempt to put his theories of the detective story into practice. Three years before, in 1901, he had published "A Defense of Detective Stories," wherein he had celebrated the form as a modern romance that, alone among popular genres, expresses "some sense of the poetry of modern life." The policeman or detective is a modern knight-errant, protecting society from chaos, inferring from the "hieroglyphs" of every stone, brick, and signpost the revelation of some great secret that will astonish the reader. At the same time, warned Chesterton, the mere accumulation of clues can become a sterile, self-defeating process, which, bereft of psychological insight and philosophical acumen, too often leads the investigator astray. Thus, in the six stories in The Club of Queer Trades, we not only encounter a crowded London of "perpendicular streets" and "flying omnibuses" but two investigators, the brothers Rupert and Basil Grant, who represent Chesterton's ideas of the worst and best in methods of detection. The red-haired Rupert is a private investigator who is cut from the standard mold. He dashes about London collecting clues and reaching wrong conclusions. His grey-haired brother Basil, on the other hand, goes nowhere and knows everything. He is a retired English judge who became so disillusioned with English law that he "suddenly went mad on the bench" and fled the profession to live a humble recluse in a Lambeth garret. Basil absorbs what he calls "atmospheres" and scorns a dependence on mere data. Facts, how facts obscure the truth. I never could believe in that man what's his name, in those capital stories?Sherlock Holmes. Every detail points to something, certainly; but generally to the wrong thing." As case in point is the best of the stories, "The Tremendous Adventure of Major Brown." A case of mistaken identity leads to Major Brown's involvement in a series of bizarre eventsincluding a death threat spelled out in flowers in a garden, an encounter with a woman who faces the sunset every afternoon at the stroke of six 'clock, and the unanswered question, "How did the jackal die?" The perpetrators of the deed are revealed to be agents of a mysterious organization called The Adventure and Romance Agency (one of the "Queer Trades" of the book's title) which undertakes to inflict upon its clients "startling and weird events" so that they may return, in effect, to "that godlike time when we can act stories, be our own heroes, and at the same instant dance and dream." (By the way, neither Major Brown nor we ever learn the mystery of the jackal!) This love of paradox and exotic situations dominates two story collections, Tales of the Long Bow (1925) and The Paradoxes of Mr. Pond (1937). In the former, eight linked short stories relate the activities of members of the League of the Long Bow, an organization of erstwhile but mild-mannered political revolutionariesa retired lawyer, an Anglo-Indian Colonel, a Flying Officer, an eccentric Vicar, a young mathematics teacher, an aeronautical engineer, and an American millionaire. They are not detectives investigating crimes so much as curious citizens united in their pursuit of the real meanings behind several bizarre incidents. Why, for example, did Colonel Crane eat a hat-shaped cabbage; why did Owen Hood literally set a river on fire; how did Captain Hilary Pierce cause pigs to fly; and how did Commander Blair erect a castle in mid-air? "These things... are easily seen to be absurd," says one member in "The Exclusive Luxury of Enoch Oates; "but even after they are seen to be absurd, they are still there." It is characteristic of Chesterton that the irrational and miraculous events have entirely prosaic (if ingenious) explanations. Thus, as James McNamara and Dennis O'Keefe have noted, much of the enjoyment "proceeds from the way he sets the powers of rationality and irrationality at each other's throats." In my opinion, however, the whimsical tone too often is forced and labored, and much of the book is marred by Chesterton's tendency to inject agrarian Distributionist polemic into the proceedings. The Paradoxes of Mr. Pond is Chesterton's last book, published posthumously in 1937. Pond displays the same kind of duality we see in Father Brown. He is a man who looks and behaves like a mild little civil servant, yet in reality he has considerable experience fighting crime and intrigue with the Secret Service. (As Chesterton wittily puts it, Pond keeps the secret of his services.) As we learn in the first story, "The Three Horsemen of Apocalypse," Pond is like the placid little pool in his garden: "He was so quiet at all normal times, so neat in shape and so shiny... and yet I knew there were some monsters in Mr. Pond also monsters in his mind which rose only for a moment to the surface and sank again." Four of the stories are particular standouts. In "When Doctors Agree" Pond confronts the dilemma of two men who are in such complete agreement on things that one is forced to murder the other. "A Terrible Troubadour" is a curious retelling of Poe's "Murder in the Rue Morgue." "A Tall Story" presents a particularly striking setup involving a body that is found impaled into the ceiling by a large sword. Here the paradox, as stated by Pond, is: "The murderer was too tall to be seen." (And, indeed, Pond is right!) The fourth, "Pond the Pantaloon," benefits from some very clever allusions to the tradition of the Christmas Pantomime. Each story, like those in Tales of the Long Bow, is based on the presumption that however bizarre the world might seem, it is entirely reasonable when seen from the right distance and perspective. The stories collected in four works, Manalive (1912), Four Faultless Felons (1930), The Poet and the Lunatics (1929), and The Man Who Knew Too Much (1919) are fraught with one of Chesterton's favorite paradoxes that guilt and innocence, sanity and lunacy, the detective and the criminal, are sometimes indistinguishable. All that differentiates them is an angle of perspective, an interpretion of a shape, even a trick of the light. The five interlocking stories in Manalive (1912) revolve around the presumed crimes of a blonde wild man named "Innocent Smith," a comically swashbuckling figure (a la the young Douglas Fairbanks) as likely to climb a tree as to dash across rooftops. Two investigators, Cyrus Pym and Michael Mooncut from the same mold as Rupert and Basil Grantsift through the facts in the case. Why did Smith fire bullets at his best friend; why did he steal property; why did he abduct a woman; and why did he commit polygamy? After sifting through the evidence and calling eyewitness accounts, Pym determines Smith is guilty and Moon concludes he is innocent. "We have come to think certain things wrong which are not wrong at all," Moon says. "In themselves they are not merely pardonable; they are unimpeachable." He explains that Smith's murder attempt was in reality a gesture to save a man's life; that his theft was merely the removal of items from his own house; that his acts of abduction and polygamy were complicit actions with his own wife. Far from being guilty of these crimes, declares Moon, Smith has merely acted to make himself and other people feel more keenly alive. As commentator Dudley Barker puts it, "The moral meaning of the crimes is concerned with an attempt to recover the lost sense of the wonder and glamour of everyday life." Smith is thus a virtuous soul, a capital fellowin short a "man alive." I agree with Garry Wills that Manalive is Chesterton's happiest book. Although neglected today, it contains some of Chesterton's wittiest, liveliest prose. A much later work, Four Faultless Felons (1930), is strikingly similar to Manalive and The Club of Queer Trades, although the prose lacks some of the sparkle of the former and the casual romance of the latter. The "felons" of the title, John Hume, Dr. Judson, Alan Nadoway, and John Conrad are members of what might be dubbed a "Club of Men Misunderstood." Rather than a club of men who have invented trades, it's a club of men accused of eccentric crimes. Their detective work, as it were, consists not of establishing guilt but of proving innocence. The titles capture the tone and paradoxical themes"The Moderate Murderer," "The Honest Quack," "The Ecstatic Thief," and "The Loyal Traitor." Of the four narratives, John Conrad's "The Loyal Traitor" is by far the best, concerning the disappearance of three men from a locked room. The solution hinges on a spectacular feat of impersonation. In The Poet and the Lunatics (1929) Gabriel Gale, like Innocent Smith and the Four Faultless Felons, points up the contrast between the madness of a world which claims to be sane and the sanity of a character whom the world believes to be mad. Seemingly capricious and wilfully unpredictable, the lanky, fair-haired Gale is another in the long line of fool figures that always fascinated Chesterton. Only his topsy-turvy sensibility can interpret and solve the mad crimes he encounters. "Perhaps you think I am as mad as [the criminal]," Gale says in "The Yellow Bird." Echoing similar pronouncements of Father Brown, Gale continues: "And I have told you that I am at once like [the criminal] and unlike him. I am unlike him because, thank God, I can generally find my way home again." Furthermore, like Basil Grant, Gale prefers interpreting "atmospheres" and impressions to gathering physical clues: "Oh, proofs! I know the sort of proofs you want. The foot-prints of the remarkable boots. The bloody finger-print carefully compared with the one at Scotland Yard. The conveniently mislaid match[box, and the ashes of the unique tobacco. Do you suppose I've never read any detective stories? Well, I haven't got any proofsof that sort." Gale is capable of seeing that a wild crime might be a merely commonplace event seen from a cockeyed angle; and that a mild, innocuous incident might be an outrageous transgression of justice as seen from another angle. "He had often maintained that the main object of a man's life was to see a thing as if he had never seen it before," says Chesterton. These are among Chesterton's most evocative twilight tales, seen as if through smoky stained glass. Like Innocent Smith and the Faultless Felons, Gale even commits a crime of his own in "The Crime of Gabriel Gale"; and, like them, he is exonerated by his victim. Two other stories, "Shadow of the Shark" and "The Finger of Stone" present impossible crimes, the second of which has a delightfully outrageous solution worthy of Carr in one of his most deranged moments. It also contains a characteristically clever (and exceedingly wicked) commentary on the criminal as "artist." The eight stories of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1922) are the darkest in tone and theme of all Chesterton's mystery short stories, (save, perhaps, a few of Father Brown's cases). This is ironic in view of the fact that they were published shortly after Chesterton's conversion to the Catholic church. Horne Fisher, the lean, dour cousin and secretary of an important politician, has reasons of his own to distrust conventional definitions of crime and punishment. Lacking Gabriel Gale's weirdly comic edge, Fisher, like Basil Grant, is disillusioned and corrupted by his experience with the evil. "I know too much," he says at one point; "and that's what's wrong with me." What he knows are the things that aren't worth knowing"all the seamy side of things, all the secret reasons and rotten motives and bribery and blackmail they call politics." Thus, too distrustful of the system to entrust the criminals he exposes to the machinations of civil justice, he allows them to go free, convinced they will bring about their own punishment. The book's cynical tone will come as a surprise to those who think Chesterton is only a cheerleader for Merrie Olde England. Two of them, moreover"The Face in the Target" and "The Hole in the Wall" must rank among Chesterton's finest achievements. The first is yet another variant of the murderer-as-artist theme; the second is concerned with a miracle crimehow can a drowned body disappear from a shallow pond? The scene painting and the rich sense of allegory here are quite stunning. It is my favorite Chesterton detective story. Several detectives appear in only one story apiece. Gabriel Syme is a Scotland Yard operative assigned to infiltrate a gang of anarchists in The Man Who Was Thursday. Since it is among the best known of Chesterton's works, we need not linger over it. Just as memorable, though virtually forgotten, are the four stories appended to the 1922 edition of The Man Who Knew Too Much. Inspector Traill, late of Scotland Yard, solves the problem of a murderous rose in "The Garden of Smoke." A Frenchman, Paul Forain, encounters a man who is murdered twice in "The Five of Swords." An ageing red-haired hermit, Father Stephen (why do so many of Chesterton's characters have fair, or red hair?), is slain by a most peculiar bullet during his investigations of a diamond theft in "The Tower of Treason." And, best of all, a veritable army of investigators tackle the problem of the disappearing squire in "The Trees of Pride." The last-mentioned story explains how a man can be "temporarily" murdered; and it is solved by the one man who has done his utmost to incriminate himself as the murderer! It is one of the most dazzlingly executed and richly atmospheric tales in all of Chesterton. Lastly, "The White Pillars Murder" (1925) marks the only appearance of private detective Adrian Hyde. In one important respect it is Chesterton's ultimate detective story. "[Detectives] get to know about criminals by being half criminals themselves," says Hyde's young assistant of his boss, "by being of the same rotten world, by belonging to it and by betraying it, by setting a thief to catch a thief..." As we have seen, this description applies also to any number of Chesterton's other detectives, particularly Gabriel Gale and Horne Fisher. The relationship between detective and criminal in this story, however, is carried a step farther. It is an intimacy that borders on identity. A final note. It has become a commonplace in Chestertonian criticism to refer to many of the aforementioned works especially Manalive, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Tales of the Long Bow, The Poet and the Lunatics, Four Faultless Felons not as short stories about crime and detection but as loosely-knit novels about agrarian reform, the nobility of the common man, and the romance of medievalism. Spend a few hours with Ian Boyd's classic study, The Novels of G.K. Chesterton: A Study in Art and Propaganda, and you'll see how such academic analysis fairly knocks the stuffingand the funout of them. Nay, I submit we delight in them for other reasons, the very reasons too often ignored by the scholarsprecisely because they are cycles of short tales full of enchanting prose, bizarre crimes, eccentric characters, and ingenious solutions. Their jewelled images flash in the sun and smoulder in the shadows; their exaggerated, sometimes old-fashioned melodramatics strut a pose and declaim a ballad; and their profound philosophy begins in a mystery and ends with a revelation. John C. Tibbetts 6024 Maple Ave Mission KS 66202 (phones: 816-346-9334message; 913-831-4126home) | |
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