An unpublished essay by the English writer and critic GK Chesterton will be published this week by the Strand Magazine.
Under its editor-in-chief, Andrew Gulli, the Strand has recently published unknown stories by Truman Capote, James M Cain and Rod Serling, creator of The Twilight Zone. But the case of the lost Chesterton is different, if appropriately so given its author’s famous wit. It turns out the essay, The Historical Detective Story, wasn’t lost at all.
“The funny thing about this essay is that many people have known about it for a long time,” said Dale Ahlquist, president of the Society of Gilbert Keith Chesterton. “It’s just that they probably saw the manuscript in the special collections at the University of Notre Dame, and they just assumed it was known.
“Part of the whole problem was that he wrote so many essays, and it took us years to catalog them all … We think we found maybe all of them, at least 99 point many nines per cent of all of them, and the number’s 8,000 now.”
Born in London in 1874, Gilbert Keith Chesterton died in Buckinghamshire in 1936. A novelist, playwright, poet, historian, and social and political commentator, and a Catholic with the zeal of a convert, he is perhaps best known now for the Father Brown stories, pillars of 20th-century detective fiction.
The essay in the Strand is linked to Chesterton’s membership in the Detection Club, which Ahlquist in his introduction calls a “secret society of mystery writers … who met regularly in a private room at L’Escargot” in Soho, in central London. Founding members, including Agatha Christie, Ronald Knox, Dorothy L Sayers and AA Milne, indulged in “such ceremonies as an oath before a human skull about not cheating on the clues and on the solutions. (eg, ‘No identical twins.’)”
The club planned an annual magazine. Chesterton finished his submission but the project did not advance. And so one copy of Chesterton’s essay came to rest at Notre Dame, in Indiana, while another sat in the British Library on Euston Road in London. Eventually, along came Ahlquist and Gulli, ready to “put two and two together”.
Thanks to them, Strand readers can now consider Chesterton’s argument that though “the detective tale is almost the only decently moral tale that is still being told”, because “it is only in blood and thunder stories that there is anything so Christian as blood crying out for justice to the thunder of the judgment”, writers of detective fiction should seek out fresh sources, to escape what even 100 years ago was the cliche of the country house murder.
Looking to real mysteries of history, Chesterton writes: “I do not of course mean that we should turn all our detective-dramas into costume-plays. I only mean that if we did so now and then, for a change, we should find some new liberties as well as some new limitations.
“Suppose we took some striking and still puzzling incident, like the Campden Wonder [of 1660, in which three people were hanged for murder, the supposed victim turning up alive two years later] or the Gowrie Conspiracy [of 1600, a supposed plot to murder King James VI of Scotland] and, prefacing it with a statement of the admitted facts, then took it in turns to give a solution of the historical riddle, in the form of a short historical romance. It would give to the jaded detective, what is so often recommended by the doctor: a change of scene.”
Much of the essay pokes fun at writers including Chesterton himself but ultimately he proposes someone tackle perhaps the ultimate historical whodunit: the death of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, a magistrate found in Hyde Park in 1678, apparently strangled with a rope but also with his own sword “thrust through his body”.
Chesterton was on to something. A century on, historical detective stories, from The Name of the Rose to The Alienist and on, are as strong-selling as any tale of country house murder.
In his home country, Chesterton’s reputation is contested. Not so long ago, one Guardian writer called him “a supremely elegant, aphoristic Nietzsche … domesticated for the English gentleman’s study”, capable of “exemplary declarations of universalist ethics” but also “flared-nostrilled defense of Edwardian privilege”. Inevitably, his attitudes to race and gender seem to some to pall.
But Ahlquist is in good company (Jonathan Lethem, Gilbert Adair, Christopher Hitchens) in having found in Chesterton’s writing “just a passion that took over”. As well as chairing the Chesterton society, he is a co-founder of the Chesterton Schools Network, an international Catholic education project.
“I’m fortunate to have chosen such a prolific writer,” he said. “If I had the same obsession with Jane Austen, there’d be a lot of regurgitation of the same novels, right? But I’ve enjoyed studying Chesterton for over 40 years now.
“He went into almost total eclipse and total obscurity, through the 1960s and 70s and even the early 80s, when I started reading him. It was a secret pleasure. There were only a few of us who admitted that we were reading Chesterton. And then the popularity started to surge in about the late 90s.
“I think there’s a couple reasons why. There’s the huge interest in CS Lewis,” another writer of fiction who also wrote about faith. “People start wanting to know more about him, and they find out that really the force behind CS Lewis is GK Chesterton … That’s how I discovered Chesterton too.
“Chesterton is one of those writers who keeps providing more thrills because of his wonderful use of the language, his use of paradox, his use of shock with things that you already know, which is what makes him such a good mystery writer. He reveals the solution to the mystery when you’ve been looking at the solution the entire time. That’s a pleasure, I think, in reading him.
“Plus, he described a lot of societal problems that seem to be more relevant even today. Problems with public education, with the breakdown of the family, social issues like that. The things he says about them really resonate, 100 years later.”
Ahlquist also praises Chesterton for his friendships with writers, including George Bernard Shaw and HG Wells, who were philosophical opponents.
“I think it’s one of the most interesting things about him. He was called a man with no enemies, because he really befriended people that he disagreed with, and they loved him. There’s something to be said for that.”
