Even casual Chestertonians are familiar with Father Brown. Chesterton wrote multiple stories about his clerical sleuth. There have been movies and television series depicting him.
But Chesterton wrote more detective stories than the ones containing the good padre.
John Touhey looks at these other detectives in "Mystery afoot? Call the Chesterton Detective Agency" in Aleteia.
The brief article begins:
A newly rediscovered and just-published essay by G.K. Chesterton prompts us to look at his wacky and wonderful detectives. (There are more than Fr. Brown!)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. ...
The article (and slide show) mention such books as The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Club of Queer Trades, The Poet and the Lunatics, and the Paradoxes of Mr. Pond and such detectives as Horne Fisher, Gabriel Gale, and Rupert Grant. And then the article links to a slide show.
As for me, I have read (and enjoyed) all the Father Brown mysteries, but I have read none of the others. I do own The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Club of Queer Trades, and The Poet and the Lunatics, so I will give them a read. As for the Paradoxes of Mr. Pond, hmm, a book I need to acquire!
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