NEW YORK -- When he wasn't working on mystery stories, and he completed hundreds, G.K.Chesterton liked to think of new ways to tell them.Detective fiction had grown a little dull, the British author wrote in a rarely seen essay from the 1930s published this week in The Strand Magazine, which has released obscure works by Louisa May Alcott,Raymond Chandler and many others.
Suppose, Chesterton wondered, that you take an unsolved death from the past, like that of the 17th century magistrate Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, and come up with a novel that explores how he might have been murdered?“I suggest that we try to do a little more with what may be called the historical detective story," Chesterton wrote.“Godfrey was found in a ditch in Hyde Park, if I remember right, with the marks of throttling by a rope, but also with his own sword thrust through his body.
Now that is a model complication, or contradiction, for a detective to resolve.”Chesterton's words were addressed to a small and exclusive audience.He remains best known for his Father Brown mysteries, but in his lifetime he held the privileged title of founding president of the Detection Club, a gathering of novelists whose original members included Agatha Christie, Dorothy L.
Sayers and AA Milne among others.They would meet in private, at London's Escargot restaurant; exchange ideas and even work on books together, including such “round-robin” collaborations as “The Floating Admiral.”The club, established in the late 1920s, is still in existence and has included such prominent authors as John le Carre,Ruth Rendell and P.D.
James.Members are serious about the craft if not so high-minded about the club itself.
Among the sacred vows that have been taken in the past: No plots resolved through “Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo-Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery, Coincidence or the Act of God” and “seemly moderation" in the use of gangs, conspiracies, death-rays and super-criminals.According to the...