Abstract
Ellery Queen, in his survey of early detective fiction, was moved to describe Chesterton’s The Innocence of Father Brown (1911), his first collection of such stories, as the ‘miracle book’.2 There is just the faintest tinge of irony in this statement; this first set of clerical mysteries do indeed contain some of the most celebrated stories in the canon, but they are also perfect examples of how Chesterton sought to articulate, in fictional form, the desirable qualities of the Catholic faith: a faith which would ultimately become his own.
Orthodoxy is my doxy; heterodoxy is another man’s doxy.
Bishop William Warburton, ‘To Lord Sandwich’1
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Notes
Bishop William Warburton, ‘To Lord Sandwich’, in The Works of William Warburton, 10 vols (London: Cadell, 1807) vol. 1, p. 372.
Ellery Queen, Queen’s Quorum: A History of the Detective-Crime Short Story as Revealed by the 106 Most Important Books Published in this Field since 1845 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1951). There are 12 stories in The Innocence of Father Brown; they are, in sequential order: ‘The Blue Cross’, ‘The Secret Garden’, ‘The Queer Feet’, ‘The Flying Stars’, ‘The Invisible Man’, ‘The Honour of Israel Gow’, ‘The Wrong Shape’, ‘The Sins of Prince Saradine’, ‘The Hammer of God’, ‘The Eye of Apollo’, ‘The Sign of the Broken Sword’ and ‘The Three Tools of Death’.
G. K. Chesterton, ‘How to Write a Detective Story’, The Chesterton Review 10.2 (1984), 112.
Hans Robert Jauss, ‘Theory of Genres and Medieval Literature’, in Modern Genre Theory, ed. David Duff (Harlow: Longman, 2000), p. 137.
Bernard De Voto, ‘Easy Chair’, Harper’s Magazine (December 1944), 37.
Marty Roth, Fair and Foul Play: Reading Genre in Classic Detective Fiction (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), p. 5.
Frank Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 23.
William David Spencer, Mysterium and Mystery: The Clerical Crime Novel (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992), p. 304.
Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 6.
Dean DeFino, ‘Lead Birds and Falling Birds’, Journal of Modern Literature 27.4 (2005), 74.
For a concise and informative account of the Oxford Movement and Newman’s involvement in particular, see: C. Brad Faught, The Oxford Movement: A Thematic History of the Tractarians and Their Times (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003).
Jonathan Hill, The History of Christian Thought (Oxford: Lion Publishing, 2003), p. 249.
For a discussion on Newman and Tract 90 see John R. Connolly, John Henry Newman: A View of Catholic Faith for the New Millennium (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), and Frank M. Turner, Apologia Pro Vita Sua & Six Sermons (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008).
For details of Chesterton’s life see Maisie Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1943), and Alzina Stone Dale, The Outline of Sanity: A Life of G. K. Chesterton (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing, 1982).
See Adam Schwartz, ‘Swords of Honor: The Revival of Orthodox Christianity in Twentieth-Century Britain’, Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 4.1 (Winter 2001), 11–33 (p. 13).
G. K. Chesterton, ‘Heretics, Orthodoxy, the Blatchford Controversies’, in The Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton, ed. David Dooley et al., 35 vols (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986), vol. I, pp. 332.
Chesterton, ‘The Thing’, The Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton, vol. III, pp. 265 and 299.
G. K. Chesterton, ‘The Blue Cross’, in The Complete Father Brown (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), p. 20.
David Paul Deavel, ‘An Odd Couple? A First Glance at Chesterton and Newman’, Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 10.1 (2007), 116–35. See also Sheridan Gilley, ‘Newman and Chesterton’, Chesterton Review 32.1–2 (2006), 41–55.
G. K. Chesterton, ‘A Defence of Detective Stories’, in The Art of the Mystery Story, ed. Howard Haycraft (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1946), pp. 5–6. This essay was originally published in G. K. Chesterton, The Defendant (London: R. B. Johnson, 1902).
Ian Ker, The Catholic Revival in English Literature, 1845–1961: Newman, Hopkins, Belloc, Chesterton, Greene, Waugh (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003).
G. K. Chesterton, ‘Charles Dickens’, in The Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton, vol. XV (1989), pp. 29–210.
Chesterton, ‘The Secret of Flambeau’, in The Complete Father Brown (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), p. 588.
James V. Schall, ‘Chesterton: The Real “Heretic”: The Outstanding Eccentricity of the Peculiar Sect Called Roman Catholics’, Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 9.2 (Spring 2006), 72–86 (p. 78).
Kenneth and Helen Ballhatchet, ‘Asia’, in The Oxford History of Christianity, ed. John McManners (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 518.
Christopher Routledge, ‘The Chevalier and the Priest: Deductive Method in Poe, Chesterton and Borges’, Clues 22.1 (2001), 1–2.
Robert Gillespie, ‘Detections: Borges and Father Brown’, Novel: A Forum on Action 7 (1974), 226–7.
Donald A. Yates, ‘Melville Davisson Post’, in The Oxford Companion to Crime and Mystery Writing, ed. Rosemary Herbert (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 349. Donald A. Yates, ‘An Essay on Locked Rooms’, in The Mystery Writer’s Art, ed. Francis M. Nevins (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1970), pp. 272–84 is one the earliest scholarly essays to examine the locked room mystery as a separate form.
Charles A. Norton, Melville Davisson Post: Man of Many Mysteries (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1973), p. 9.
Melville Davisson Post, ‘Dedication’, in Uncle Abner: The Doomdorf Mystery (Mattituck, NY: Amereon House, 1986).
Francis Nevins, ‘From Darwinian to Biblical Lawyering: The Stories of Melville Davisson Post’, Legal Studies Forum 18.2 (1994), 176–212 (p. 194).
Melville Davisson Post, ‘The Angel of the Lord’, in Uncle Abner: The Doomdorf Mystery (Mattituck, NY: Amereon House, 1946), p. 41.
Otto Penzler, ‘Collecting Mystery Fiction’, Armchair Detective 18.29 (1985), 168.
Melville Davisson Post, ‘The Grazier’, in The Man of Last Resort (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1897), p. 252–3.
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© 2011 Michael Cook
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Cook, M. (2011). G. K. Chesterton’s Enclosure of Orthodoxy in ‘The Wrong Shape’. In: Narratives of Enclosure in Detective Fiction. Crime Files Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230313736_4
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