Heteronym
New Member
G. K. Chesterton is a very special writer. He seems to write about the least important things: murders, anarchist conspiracies, kidnappings and all types of crimes imaginable. His ‘Father Brown’ stories chronicle the exploits of a detective priest. In The Man Who Was Thursday, a young man infiltrates a ring of anarchists. Manalive gives us the absurd trial of Innocent Smith, a loveable fool accused of murder, bigamy, theft and deserting his wife. In The Club of Queer Trades the author invents unique, bizarre professions. But in the end he’s always talking about something else. I’ve seen his work described as ‘metaphysical mysteries’ and I guess that’s an accurate description. He was a devout Christian and set up ingenious mysteries to explore eternal themes of human nature like God, faith, love, the nature of sin or the perception of reality. For me it’s this blend of low and high culture that makes him such a modern writer.
In my latest book by him, Chesterton returns to his beloved detective genre for some amusing tales about Mr. Pond, a shy Civil servant who revels in paradoxes. “Grock’s soldiers obeyed him too well; so he simply couldn’t do a thing he wanted”, begins the first of the stories in this little volume. Or “as there was nothing to drink, they all got tipsy at once”. Or even “I did know two men who came to agree so completely that one of them naturally murdered the other”. These are more than fancies: they’re small mysteries waiting to be explained by Mr. Pond which end up becoming fascinating stories about unlikely murderers and inventive crimes.
Chesterton is my favorite detective writer. Unlike Poe or Conan Doyle, he doesn’t think detectives should be impersonal thinking machines devoid of personality. Mr. Pond is not just a great detective, he’s also a great conversationist, dramatising his narratives with amazing flights of fancy, sharing personal anecdotes, meandering into apparently pointless stories before returning to the main one.
His mysteries seem like a synthesis of colorful portraits and surreal plays, with their bizarre, lively characters, always with unpredictable motives for their crimes. Reading these stories, one gets a feeling one’s reading fantasy stories, but there’s nothing supernatural about them; it’s just the atmosphere that Chesterton builds that seems taken from fairy-tales.
Anyone who likes unusual detective stories with a good dose of humor needs to discover the work of G. K. Chesterton. Anyone who likes reading in general should discover him: his sentences have a unique rhythm and his word puns and constant paradoxes will remain in one’s mind for a long time.
In my latest book by him, Chesterton returns to his beloved detective genre for some amusing tales about Mr. Pond, a shy Civil servant who revels in paradoxes. “Grock’s soldiers obeyed him too well; so he simply couldn’t do a thing he wanted”, begins the first of the stories in this little volume. Or “as there was nothing to drink, they all got tipsy at once”. Or even “I did know two men who came to agree so completely that one of them naturally murdered the other”. These are more than fancies: they’re small mysteries waiting to be explained by Mr. Pond which end up becoming fascinating stories about unlikely murderers and inventive crimes.
Chesterton is my favorite detective writer. Unlike Poe or Conan Doyle, he doesn’t think detectives should be impersonal thinking machines devoid of personality. Mr. Pond is not just a great detective, he’s also a great conversationist, dramatising his narratives with amazing flights of fancy, sharing personal anecdotes, meandering into apparently pointless stories before returning to the main one.
His mysteries seem like a synthesis of colorful portraits and surreal plays, with their bizarre, lively characters, always with unpredictable motives for their crimes. Reading these stories, one gets a feeling one’s reading fantasy stories, but there’s nothing supernatural about them; it’s just the atmosphere that Chesterton builds that seems taken from fairy-tales.
Anyone who likes unusual detective stories with a good dose of humor needs to discover the work of G. K. Chesterton. Anyone who likes reading in general should discover him: his sentences have a unique rhythm and his word puns and constant paradoxes will remain in one’s mind for a long time.