Most Helpful Customer Reviews
|
|
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Four Faultless Felons are Fine Fellows Indeed - More Wit and Whimsy from G. K. Chesterton, August 13, 2007
Any reader familiar with The Man Who Was Thursday, The Club of Queer Trades, or The Paradoxes of Mr. Pond will immediately recognize G. K. Chesterton's unique wit and whimsy in these four tales.
Four Faultless Felons (1930) includes The Moderate Murderer, The Honest Quack, The Ecstatic Thief, and The Loyal Traitor. The individual stories were first published in 1929 and 1930 in London magazines; soon thereafter all four were published together as Four Faultless Felons (1930). Chesterton added a prologue and epilogue to tie these stories together.
Chesterton's protagonists are indeed faultless. Their crimes - murder, fraud, theft, and treason - are motivated by virtue, by altruism, and by good intentions. These humorous fantasies are intended for enjoyment, although Chesterton does not entirely disguise his disapproval of unregulated capitalism and insensitive politicians.
The four stories are essentially mysteries, albeit somewhat playful ones. A crime is committed and evidence points to the culprit. The problem is not so much in identifying the criminal (although the culprit's identity is not readily revealed), but in determining the motive for the crime. Chesterton's whimsical formula could have become repetitious, but by limiting his tales to only four they remain sufficiently novel and humorous to make this collection quite enjoyable.
Four Faultless Felons had been out-of-print for several decades before Dover reprinted in 1989 the Cassell edition of 1930. Fans of G. K. Chesterton should add Four Faultless Felons to their collection. Four stars.
|
|
|
3 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Four Faultless Felons, April 17, 2006
Early in life, G. K. Chesterton wrote "The Club of Queer Trades", a set of short stories in which it always appears that vile crimes are being committed. In the end, there's always an innocuous explanation, namely that the apparent criminal who's actually trying to gain admittance to a bizarre gentleman's club. Maay years later, Chesterton would return to the same idea in "Four Faultless Felons", again speculating about a club whose members must appear to be guilty of terrible deeds, while actually remaining innocent of wrongdoing. "The Club of Queer Trades" was basically a farce, as whispy and devoid of deep meaning as Chesterton could ever get. "Four Faultless Felons" may have fewer belly laughs, but it has far more food for thought.
The first story, "The Moderate Murderer", takes us to the Middle East, where the governor of a generic British colony has been shot in the leg. In the space of fifty pages, Chesterton takes us on a whirlwind mystery tour, as three different suspects are raised and discarded. The final denounment not only wraps up every corner of the mystery perfectly, but also offers a fine philosophical defense from the true shooter. It has been remarked that Chesterton only grows more relevant to our messed-up modern world with each passing year. Despite having died seventy years ago, his pithy sayings and seemingly offhand political opinions always drop exactly onto the hot issues of today. In between the breakneck plot and the large cast of very real characters, "The Moderate Murder" finds room for an editorial on why making the Muslim world accept western values at gunpoint is both unethical and unworkable. If it seems unreal that a tale from four generations past could contain an editorial that would be devastating in today's papers, well, that's Chesterton for you. Too bad that bonobo in the White House never got a copy of "Four Faultless Felons".
The remaining three stories are every bit as charming, clever, and wise as the beginners, and that's all I really need to say about "Four Faultless Felons". Or at least it should be all. Regrettably certain quotes from this book have sprung up as the centerpiece of claims that Chesterton was an anti-semite. This may be the most ridiculous smear campaign against an author since the infamous brouhaha over "Huckleberry Finn", and consequently I must answer the charges. The quotes in question come from the fourth story, "The Loyal Traitor". The chief of the Secret Police, aptly named Grimm, warns his superiors that a conspiracy of Jewish bankers is plotting the nation's downfall. He's wrong, of course, and the final resolution will amply prove the charges to be completely off base. In point of fact, the conspiracy never existed, and Grimm comes to look quite the fool by the end.
|
|
|
6 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
2.5 Stars: Cheeky progressivism, with a dash of xenophobia, March 26, 1999
Just as Priestley made the case for a code of ethics by presenting people who had none of their own, so Chesterson makes his by creating a set of principled outlaws, distancing themselves from society even as they serve its cause:
A fellow who attempts murder turns out to have purposefully failed in hopes of preventing the actual murder from taking place, a dishonest doctor turns out to have relinquished his integrity in order to save his lover's father from arrest, etc. These four stories' individual weaknesses are made less visible by their structural similarities--anything Chesterson fails to fully realize in one tale, he repeats successfully in another. And while the plots are a tad too precious for even the modern Oprah reader, they inspire nonetheless.
It's just a shame that Chesterson's heartening social commentary almost always sits beside a dismaying sense of xenophobia. His idea was to present literary diversions with progressive social and political underpinnings, and it's not well-served by his pronounced racism and anti-Semitism.
Three steps forward, two steps back.
|
|
|
|
by Gilbert K. Chesterton
by G. K. Chesterton
by G. K. Chesterton
by G. K. Chesterton
See all 7 books citing this book
