cambridge-crime-fiction

The short story from Poe to Chesterton
irony, in ‘The Resurrection of Father Brown’ (1923), he places himself, the
reluctant hero of short stories published in American magazines, at the centre
of a Doyle-like attempt to exploit that credulity by killing him off and
resurrecting him.
One of Brown’s trademarks is the paradox, and the central one is that
credulity in the mystical is a consequence of contemporary materialism and
lack of belief in God, while Roman Catholicism is on the side of common
sense. He only makes the latter assertion explicitly in a parenthesis, 51 but the
claim is substantiated in his detective activities, as he repeatedly, in a late and
sudden realisation of how stupid he had been, demystifies the apparently impossible
or monstrous events with down-to-earth explanations. This process
of detection depends not on scientific rationality but precisely on a common
sense which is allied to an intuitive insight into the culprit, most particularly
into their corruption. Father Brown’s ultimate claim to expertise is that, as
a priest and a Catholic, he has a greater sense of evil than non-believers.
The paradox, which characterises Father Brown’s conversational style, is a
good figure for this attempt to raise the genre into something that is simultaneously
entertaining and ideologically influential. His studiously unsettling
interventions are intended, like the stories it would seem, to amuse by their
outrageousness, while pungently containing a fundamental truth. But Father
Brown’s relative lack of popularity suggests that the detective story was not
capable of taking that weight, especially when it involves the atmospheric,
frequently Gothic, descriptive writing that Chesterton engages in to generate
the appearance of complexity that his hero will simplify, or to conjure the
necessary aura of the mysterious, mystical and evil. Likewise many readers
are likely to find that the ‘clever’ remarks of the Holmesian detective become
here sententious and his overworked humility as tiresome as Van Dusen’s arrogance.
Chesterton believed that detection in the modern city was a form
of ‘knight-errantry’ 52 ; twentieth-century readers were to prefer the tougher
chivalry and terser style of Dashiell Hammett’s and Raymond Chandler’s
streetwise private eyes.
NOTES
1 See Dorothy L. Sayers, ed., Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror
(London: Victor Gollancz, 1928).
2 Walter Allen, The Short Story in English (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981),
pp. 3–5, 24–9.
3 Ibid., pp. 21–3.
4 Clive Bloom, ‘Capitalising on Poe’s Detective: the Dollars and Sense of Nineteenth-
Century Detective Fiction’, in Nineteenth-Century Suspense: From Poe to Conan
Doyle, ed. Clive Bloom et al. (London: Macmillan, 1988), p. 14.
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