Wednesday
Background: When I was the editor of Gilbert Magazine, I was responsible for the "Tremendous Trifles" column. It was occasionally hard to find a sufficient amount of interesting GKC material to fill the page, so John Peterson sent me a file full of Chesterton ancedotes. They were idiosyncratic, historical, and Chestertonian. He recently gave me permission to use them here. I hope y'all find them as interesting as I have over the years. Most of them have never been published.
Chesterton Short(s)
Gwen Robyns, biographer of Agatha Christie, writes of the Detection Club, a dining society for a select group of successful mystery-story authors, that everything was "shrouded in mumbo-jumbo secrecy." The club was founded in 1929, and Chesterton, as we know, was its first president. The other charter members, according to Robyns, were E. C. Bentley, Anthony Berkeley, Agatha Christie, Freeman Wills Crofts, Clemence Dane, A.E.W. Mason, A.A. Milne, Gladys Mitchell, Baroness Orczy, Dorothy L. Sayers, Helen Simpson, and Hugh Walpole. In those days the twice yearly meetings were held in Londons L'Escargot Bientu restaurant on Greek Street. [The Mystery of Agatha Christie, New York: Doubleday, 1978, pp. 102-07]
John Dickson Carr, whose fictional detective Dr. Gideon Fell was purportedly based on Chesterton, was elected to London's Detective Club in 1936. It may come as a surprise to Carr's fans, but the writer never met Chesterton, who died just before Carr's induction. [William Malloy, The Mystery Book of Days, Mysterious Press, 1991]
The Oath of Initiation: "Do you promise that your detectives shall well and truly detect the crimes presented to them, using those wits which it may please you to bestow on them and not placing reliance on nor making use of Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, mumbo-jumbo, jiggery-pokery, coincidence, or an act of God? Do you solemnly swear never to conceal a vital clue from the reader? Do you promise to observe seemly moderation in the use of gangs, conspiracies, Super Criminals and Lunatics and utterly and forever to forswear Mysterious Poisons unknown to science? Will you honor the King's English? If you fail to keep your promise, may other writers steal your plots and your pages swarm with misprints." [Elaine Budd, 13 Mistresses of Murder, New York: Ungar, 1986, p. vii].
