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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Curious Amateur Sleuths and Imaginative Plots,
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This review is from: Thirteen Detectives (Hardcover)
Twelve stories introduce thirteen detectives created by G. K. Chesterton. All are slightly eccentric, curious amateur sleuths. Seldom brash, these more reserved amateurs are more artistic than scientific, and yet are every bit as clever as their contemporary, Sherlock Holmes.Marie Smith selected and compiled these twelve stories. Dodd, Mead, and Company published this entertaining introduction to Chesterton's lesser known detectives. For readers familiar with Chesterton's remarkable Father Brown stories, Thirteen Detectives contains a surprise. The Donnington Affair is a newly discovered Father Brown mystery that had remained hidden away in an obscure English magazine, The Premier. The format is unorthodox - another writer posed the murder mystery and challenged Chesterton to solve the mystery. Chesterton's Father Brown succeeds, but in doing so he provides his most Byzantine solution. Two stories, When Doctors Agree and The Three Horseman of the Apocalypse, introduce Mr. Pond, a mild mannered civil servant that has the curious trait of uttering paradoxical statements that often lead to intriguing tales. For example, in the story When Doctors Agree he unaccountably states, "I did know two men who came to agree so completely that one of them naturally murdered the other." More adventures can be found in the Dover reprint of G. K. Chesterton's The Paradoxes of Mr. Pond. Two tales that involve the brothers Rupert and Basil Grant - The Singular Speculation of the House Agent and The Tremendous Adventure of Major Brown - have a fantasy like quality. These two stories and others can be found in Chesterton's The Club of Queer Tales, another Dover reprint. I also enjoyed the six remaining stories; all were entirely new to me. In The White Pillars Murder two young apprentices, John Brandon and Walter Weir, assist the great detective Dr. Hadrian Hyde. The solution was quite a surprise. The other stories are The Garden of Smoke, The Hole in the Wall, The Bottomless Well, The Shadow of the Shark, and The Finger of Stone. The science in the last story was suspect, but the story was intriguing nonetheless. The remarkable Argentine writer, Jorge Luis Borges, astutely observed that today's widely popular detective story is essentially a literary game, and speculated that readers might tire of its structured formula and that this genre would eventually disappear. Nevertheless, he argued that "in spite of this, Chesterton's stories will always be read, since a mystery that so imaginatively suggests an impossible, fantastic occurrence is interesting for more than the logical explanation contained in the last few lines."
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