Were it not for John Dickson Carr’s The Crooked Hinge, the mystery novel Montgomery read at the prompting of a friend, he may never have overcome his aversion. Prior to reading Carr, Montgomery felt that detective stories were beneath him; after finishing The Crooked Hinge, he went on to author a series of outstanding mystery novels under the pen name of Edmund Crispin.
Like Montgomery, I have a complicated relationship with mysteries. While I have always appreciated good writing, regardless of the genre it is packaged under, the intellectual snob within has some distinct reservations about much of what is labeled and sold as mystery fiction. To quote Kingsley Amis’s introduction to a series of Father Brown stories, I have always believed – and still believe – that the mystery fiction genre is divided into two types of works: detective stories; and, “detective stor[ies] with a difference, or several differences.” (G.K. Chesterton, Selected Stories. Ed. Kingsley Amis.) Mysteries in the former category may be highly entertaining to read, but they are formulaic, plot heavy devices. One reads frantically through them in search of the answers – Who? What? How? Oh my! – and turns the last page without a second thought. Rereading such a book would be a farce; by relying so heavily on plot, and on convention, these works forget about the traditional elements of the novel that set a good book apart from a mediocre one: the delineation of character; the description of people and places; and the use of language that is both beautiful and evocative. The second category of mystery novels, those Amis refers to as mysteries with a difference, manage to combine the traditional elements of the mystery genre and the novel with something which is original and clever. Those authors who write mysteries with a difference – Georges Simenon instantly comes to mind – challenge our conceptions of what a mystery is and what it can be in the future. Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time is the perfect example of a novel that broadened and reinvigorated the mystery form; despite the temporal lapse between its “crime” – the murder of Richard III’s nephews in the tower – and its detective – an ailing twentieth century police inspector – Tey managed to create a wholly original novel that was eminently literary, suspenseful, and moving.
Edmund Crispin and G.K. Chesterton also wrote detective stories with a difference. Like Crispin, Chesterton had not intended to become a mystery novelist. Trained in fine art at the Slade, he turned his back on an artistic career in favor of the life of a reviewer, journalist, and poet. His mystery fiction was born of a need to “subsidize a series of weekly newspapers: the Eye Witness , later the New Witness, which he founded with his brother Cecil and Hilaire Belloc in 1911; and its successor G.K.'s Weekly , which Chesterton edited from 1925 until his death on 14 June 1936.” (Leitch, Thomas M. "G(ilbert) K(eith) Chesterton." British Mystery Writers, 1860-1919. Ed. Bernard Benstock and Thomas F. Staley.)
Despite its humble origins, the mystery fiction G.K. Chesterton authored is anything but run of the mill commercial work. Chesterton’s stories – which include both stand alone mysteries as well as mysteries starring his amateur detective, Father Brown – are small masterpieces of both description and logic. In all of Chesterton’s work there is an:
inexhaustible fascination with the outward appearance of things, not only with the effects of light upon them but with the things in themselves: landscape and seascape, streets, shops, gardens, the outsides and insides of houses, ornaments, knick-knacks of every possible kind, details of dress and costume – and, more than any of these, the lineaments of the human beings inside the costume. Nobody, I think, would call Chesterton a great characterizer of the inner selves of men and women, but one would have to turn to a writer on the scale of his beloved Dickens to find a better representer of how they look.
(From Kingsley Amis’s introduction to: G.K. Chesterton, Selected Stories. Ed. Kingsley Amis.)
Chesterton’s frequent descriptions are rendered with the kind of detail and precision one would expect of a classically trained artist as well as with an uncommon degree of humor. Take, for example, Chesterton’s description of Glengyle Castle, the location for his Father Brown story, “The Honour of Israel Gow.” The story begins thus:
A stormy evening of olive and silver was closing in, as Father Brown, wrapped in a grey scotch plaid, came to the end of a grey Scotch valley and beheld the strange castle of Glengyle. It stopped one end of the glen or hollow like a blind alley; and it looked like the end of the world. Rising in step roofs and spires of seagreen slate in the manner of the old French-Scottish chateaux, it reminded an Englishman of the sinister steeple hats of witches in fairy tales; and the pine woods that rocked round the green turrets looked, by comparison, as black as numberless flocks of ravens.
(G.K. Chesterton, Selected Stories. Ed. Kingsley Amis.)
These detailed descriptions of places, people, and things, allowed Chesterton to create tension and atmosphere without having to sacrifice the simplicity of his plot lines. The mood builds through the word choices he makes, and the comparisons he draws, rather than through an accumulation of nefarious happenings.
Chesterton was an advocate of simple mysteries: "the secret may appear complex, but it must be simple; and in this also it is a symbol of higher mysteries." The author has given the reader the handful of clues necessary for the mystery’s successful resolution; whether the reader is able to “solve” the case depends not on her being able to keep up with the plot twists but with her ability to see “the world of the story in a completely new way, a way [she has] never suspected before.” The detective story is, ultimately, a kind of logic puzzle in which the reader “is not really wrestling with the criminal but with the author.” (Leitch, Thomas M. "G(ilbert) K(eith) Chesterton." British Mystery Writers, 1860-1919. Ed. Bernard Benstock and Thomas F. Staley.)
“The Honour of Israel Gow” is an excellent example of the mystery story as logic puzzle. In this story, Father Brown is looking into the death of the master of Glengyle Castle. The circumstances of his death are shadowy, at best, and there is a puzzling array of clues: a stash of loose “precious stones;” “heaps and heaps” of loose snuff; “curious little heaps of minute pieces of metal;” and wax candles, without candle holders. Scotland Yard’s Inspector Craven, who is also at the scene, challenges Father Brown (and the reader) to successfully resolve the case as “by no stretch of fancy can the human mind connect together snuff and diamonds and wax and loose clockwork.” Whether one is able to work out how these pieces fit together – and Miss Merricat was not when she first read this story – Father Brown’s solution to the case comes like a revelation of clear thinking. Rather than feel anger at the author for failing to provide you with the needed clues, the reader is left frustrated with herself for her inability to see the obvious truth before her eyes.
While some of Chesterton’s stories are easier to reason out than others, he rarely fails to provide the reader with the clues she needs to work out the story for herself. Partially, this is due to Chesterton’s belief that the story should act as a kind of logical game, as a way for the reader to test her wits against those of the fictionalized detective. But his meticulous fairness to his readers stems from another source as well: he believed that “a reader who [was] given the opportunity to discover the secret of a detective story [was] thereby offered a model for perceiving the world of God's reason.” (Leitch, Thomas M. "G(ilbert) K(eith) Chesterton." British Mystery Writers, 1860-1919. Ed. Bernard Benstock and Thomas F. Staley.) The spiritual world, which Chesterton strongly believed in, was a mirror for the fictional world of the detective story; the deceptively simple secrets of each would be revealed to those who approached them with patience and with logic.
As a Catholic, much of Chesterton’s work is infused with traditional notions of right and wrong: he, “unabashedly, used the structure and figures of detective fiction as a vehicle for dramatizing [his] moral and eschatological view of the world.” (Leitch, Thomas M. "G(ilbert) K(eith) Chesterton." British Mystery Writers, 1860-1919. Ed. Bernard Benstock and Thomas F. Staley.) For some of his contemporaries, including George Orwell, this was his main fault. By failing to keep his personal ideology separate from the poetry and prose he composed, he was apt to imbue his work with – sometimes objectionable – religious and political imagery.
In addition to the Father Brown stories, Chesterton also authored poetry and nonfiction. In some of these works, Chesterton expressed his most unappealing character trait: his anti-Semitism. Some critics have tried to salvage Chesterton from this accusation by insisting that numerous members of British society were anti-Semitic during the 1920’s; they somehow feel that by making his bigotry appear commonplace, a societal ill rather than a personal failing, they can redeem the man. While these critics may be well intentioned, their premise is completely unsound: we cannot ignore his prejudice merely because it was shared by others. Chesterton is a racist bigot by contemporary standards, and he “was a racist bigot even by the standards of his time.” (Beckett, Francis. "G K and A K: a tale of two anti-Semites." New Statesman (1996). 126.4323 (28 Feb. 1997): p46.) As one who believed in moral absolutes, Chesterton himself would not have exempted another’s conduct from reprobation simply because the individual was not on the extreme fringes of society. Wrong was wrong, no matter how often one encountered it.
Although it does not excuse his beliefs, nor mitigate their harmfulness, it would be unfair of me to fail to mention Chesterton’s strong opposition to Hitler. As Amis notes, “he was quick to speak out against the rise of Hitlerism, rather quicker, in fact, than some social democrats of the period.” (From Kingsley Amis’s introduction to: G.K. Chesterton, Selected Stories. Ed. Kingsley Amis.)
Chesterton was a bigot, but he was also a fine mystery writer. Whether the former cancels out the latter is something you will have to decide for yourself; while I cannot look at some of Chesterton’s poems, or nonfiction, without feeling nauseated by his beliefs, most of the Father Brown stories remain untainted for me. Lacking complicated plot structures, grisly crimes, or an overly eccentric amateur sleuth, these stories function as both artfully constructed logic puzzles as well as entertaining feasts of description. They are also, dare I say it, often quite funny.
Like Chesterton, Crispin was keen to provide his reader with all of the clues necessary for the solution of the case. As Fen asks in The Case of the Gilded Fly:
You've had all the facts that I've had; more, you've had a lot of them at firsthand; they give you everything you want. Do you honestly mean to tell me you still don't know what this is all about?
Despite being provided with all of the clues necessary, most readers will find Crispin’s puzzles less than simple to decipher. As a fan of John Dickson Carr – the recognized master of the so-called locked room mystery – Crispin’s work typically involves a seemingly impossible crime. In order to help the reader work out how the murder could have been committed, his books come complete with a detailed map to the crime scene and its environs.
What Crispin brought to the pantheon of impossible crime stories is a wholly unique protagonist; in Gervase Fen he created a completely amoral detective who was both a moody and pompous academic as well as a childlike eccentric. To watch Fen reason out how a crime occurred, and why, is to receive a thoroughly entertaining advanced course in logic.
Like Chesterton, Crispin was a political conservative. He believed in middle class Britain's values and work ethic, although he labeled himself as "a lazy person essentially, and of a sedentary habit." (As an aside, Miss Merricat finds this quote to be a wholly appropriate description of herself as well.) Although his politics occasionally crept into some of his later works, most of Crispin’s novels are remarkably free of moral or ideological judgments. The books are mysteries, but their resolutions are meant to tax the reader’s logical capacities – and her sense of humor – rather than her sense of the world and one’s place in it. Crispin is decidedly uninterested in ethics or epistemologies; any character who even ventures into such waters is apt to receive a rather hilarious drumming down from an irate Fen. (Christie, David A. "(Robert) Bruce Montgomery." British Mystery and Thriller Writers Since 1940: First Series. Ed. Bernard Benstock and Thomas F. Staley.)
Although strikingly different as men, and authors, both Chesterton and Crispin used the precepts of the mystery genre to create original works that were wholly reflective of themselves and their interests. For Crispin, the mystery became an avenue to explore characterization, humor, and impish perversity. For Chesterton, it became another route by which to study paradox and revelation.
What both men shared is an idea of the mystery as something which should be solvable, a test that the careful and logical reader could master along with the amateur sleuth. There are no missing clues or shocking last minute revelations brought into the fray. There are only facts, clearly given, waiting for the reader to pick them up, examine them, and fit them into place. The picture that emerges from these disparate parts may or may not be one of jarring simplicity, but it comes into focus with a sense of awe that can only be called revelatory.
As T.S. Eliot wrote, of another kind of mystery entirely:
What both men shared is an idea of the mystery as something which should be solvable, a test that the careful and logical reader could master along with the amateur sleuth. There are no missing clues or shocking last minute revelations brought into the fray. There are only facts, clearly given, waiting for the reader to pick them up, examine them, and fit them into place. The picture that emerges from these disparate parts may or may not be one of jarring simplicity, but it comes into focus with a sense of awe that can only be called revelatory.
As T.S. Eliot wrote, of another kind of mystery entirely:
the end of all our exploring / will be to arrive where we started /and know the place for the first time.
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