Detective Stories
It strikes some readers as strange that Chesterton, a highly respected literary
critic, could take seriously the lowly detective story. But he did take it
seriously.
Because the plots of the classic detective stories were designed to vindicate
good and to rebuke evil, Chesterton saw them as a modern morality tales. He saw
the great fictional detective as an urban version of a knight errantry backing
the cause of law and order against the forces of crime and disorder. And he
admired the detective story writers for updating the country tales of brigands
and blackguards to create a new kind of adventure-romance for the cities.
Chesterton did not claim a literary superiority for the formula mystery story
compared with the novels critics take seriously. But he did claim that
detective stories, packed as they must be with dangers and surprises, present a
more accurate portrayal of life. Life itself is packed with dangers and
surprises, he argued.
Chesterton saw detective stories as a series of contests between individual
free wills rather than as the conflict of impersonal forces. In his view,
modern novels of psychological urges or social pressures are inferior in representing
life because their outcomes seem inevitable. The great thing about a murder
mystery is that the reader has no idea who has done the grisly deed. As Father
Brown explained,
Our general experience is that every conceivable sort
of man has been a saint. And I suspect you will find, too, that every
conceivable sort of man has been a murderer.
In that sense, Chesterton saw the
detective story as a parable of the doctrine of Original Sin.
[And for further reading in
Chesterton's works, see "A Defence of Detective Stories", The
Defendant; "How to Write a Detective Story", The Spice of Life;
"On Detective Novels", Generally Speaking; and (of course) The
Father Brown Omnibus]. Information selected from Martin Ward's Chesterton page.