The Man Who Knew Too Much: Nine Mysteries

The association of G. K. Chesterton and the subject of mysteries results immediately in the realization of Father Brown, his beloved detective-priest who first appeared in 1910. Yet Father Brown is not the totality of Chesterton’s contribution to the great genre of detective stories. The Man Who Knew Too Much contains nine additional offerings of the suspenseful puzzlement and paradox which could spring only from the mind of Chesterton. Eight of these feature Horne Fisher, the man who knew too much, and his “Watson,” the journalist Harold March, and their world of upper-class Britain which witnesses to the very worst and very best of mankind. In the last, a four-part novella entitled “The Trees of Pride” which appeared only in the American edition of the volume, a Cornish squire wagers his life on a walk through a fantastical forest.

For Chesterton, mystery stories involve the two simple realities of truth and light, and any story that shirks the truth or shuns the light is not worthy of its title. “Glowing with divine fire and glittering with the tinsel sheath of paradox”—in the words of A. D. Douglas—The Man Who Knew Too Much seeks the light at every turn and embraces the truth at the end.