The revelation at the end of the great detective story, G.K. Chesterton held, is parallel to divine revelation: It sheds a bright light on the entire story. Its end is mysticism.
John Peterson
John Peterson of Barrington, Illinois died on May 20, 2026, at the age of 92. A one-time teacher who made his way into the world of advertising, Peterson rose to become Senior Vice President at Leo Burnett in Chicago. His intellectual passion, however, was for the work of G.K. Chesterton—especially his detective fiction. Significantly, Mr. Peterson edited and introduced Father Brown and the Church of Rome, Father Brown and the Ten Commandments, and the twelfth and thirteenth volumes of the Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton for Ignatius Press, as well as a volume of Father Brown stories for Penguin, and a two-volume annotated complete Father Brown with the small publisher Battered Silicon Dispatch. He was also the author of two volumes of stories for TAN (Best Laid Plans: 88-Bite Sized Stories that Twist and Turn and The Return of Father Brown) and the founder of Gilbert, the magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton, for which he served as publisher until 2008. In his memory, we republish this 2010 review of his collection G.K. Chesterton on Detective Fiction (Battered Silicon Dispatch—sadly out of print) by David Deavel, which appeared in Gilbert. —Editor
The experience of reading reviews of her own work, for Edith Wharton, was like “watching somebody in boxing-gloves trying to dissect a flower.” I confess that being presented with the prospect of reviewing a book on detective fiction, even one compiled by John Peterson, from the writings of Chesterton, made me feel like Wharton’s boxing-glove botanist. I’m only a casual spectator of detective fiction, thinking it mainly something to watch on television while I fold laundry—not as something to take up my valuable reading time. Why not trust this assignment to an expert on crime novels like Gilbert Magazine’s own Steve Miller? I am not worthy, O Editor.
Second thoughts are sometimes better than first impressions, however. After beginning to read the collection I realized that the things that make me think little of so many mysteries are precisely what annoyed Chesterton himself. And what I like about them he illuminates.
What annoyed Chesterton about popular detective fiction? One problem is “the materialistic error” by which he means “the mistake of supposing that our interest in the plot is mechanical, when it is really moral.” What ultimately interests humans in these stories is precisely the human element in them: why a man was killed and not how he was killed. Poe’s Dupin, G.K. judges, is greater than Sherlock Holmes because the former is a philosopher and the latter is merely a sort of ideal English conception of a narrow view of logic. Holmes “was a product of science; and could observe, but not think.” While I am in full agreement with Chesterton—I love Fr. Brown because the philosophy’s the thing with him—I wonder if he wasn’t partly mistaken in his judgment about the popular imagination. I know a great many men (meaning males) whose main interest is in the mechanics of the investigation and not necessarily in the detective’s philosophy. Even Chesterton sometimes admitted this, claiming in one essay that “the drama of detection is in discovering how [the victim] can be killed decently and economically, within the classical unities of time and place.”
For Chesterton, the philosophy was the main subject of interest in any endeavor. With the detective story it served as an underlying basis in the sense that the whole plot depended upon the traditional moral dictate that murder is wrong because life is precious: “High or low, good or bad, clever or stupid, a moral story almost always meant a murderous story.” The problem with so much of what was known as “realist” fiction was that it presented a parade of characters “feebly (and vainly) trying to get the others to come to life.” Much preferable for Chesterton was “the novel in which one person does another person to death.” Yet Chesterton was already complaining in the 1920’s that some crime novelists were now writing stories which seemed to punt on the question of whether putting that person to death was wrong. “[I]t is one thing to sympathise with people sorely tempted to a desperate solution, and quite another to recommend that solution.”
Even for those writers who stayed on the right side of the bright line, however, Chesterton noted difficulties of a technical nature that could lead to the boredom of the reader. Those who wrote at book-length often piled up chapters in which the detective is fooled by a suspect, sometimes chasing him across the globe, and moves on to the next suspect having learned nothing from his mistakes. Chesterton was not against the book-length detective story, labeling, at different times, Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone and his friend E.C. Bentley’s Trent’s Last Case as the best detective tales out there. He also praised in particular the book-length tales of S.S. Van Dine’s Charlie Chan, Dorothy Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey, and Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, among others. Jane Eyre is praised as “one of the best blood-and-thunder detective stories in the world.” But Chesterton’s detective story ideal was that the first chapter was the last chapter.
What makes detective fiction work? For Chesterton, the secret was not just mystification, since anyone can mystify a reader. But, instead, it was the mystification of the reader in such a way that he could have figured out the solution but didn’t. The revelation at the end of the great detective story is parallel to divine revelation: it sheds a bright light on the entire story. Its end is mysticism, that “almost agonising sense of the preciousness of everything, the preciousness of the whole universe, which is like an exquisite and fragile vase, and among other things, the preciousness of other people’s tea-cups.”
John Peterson’s collection is a must-have for any student of Chesterton and any fan (even casual) of mysteries. Organized chronologically, Peterson has included all the known writings on detective fiction, collected and uncollected, from Chesterton’s vast output. Where Chesterton has been writing on some other subject and digressed to mysteries, Peterson wisely includes only the relevant digressions. I think a few more footnotes could have helped in certain places, as well as an index. And though it is plagued with a large number of typographical errors and has one essay printed twice (a column from the New York American reprinted in G.K.’s Weekly), the assembled texts are well worth the price. For this reviewer, any future mystery assignments will feel much less like dissecting the flower in boxing gloves.
__________
This essay, in slightly different form, first appeared in Gilbert magazine and is republished here with gracious permission of the author.
The Imaginative Conservative applies the principle of appreciation to the discussion of culture and politics—we approach dialogue with magnanimity rather than with mere civility. Will you help us remain a refreshing oasis in the increasingly contentious arena of modern discourse? Please consider donating now.
The featured image is “Funeral Symphony (IV)” (1903), by Mikalojus Konstantinas Ciurlionis, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
