I’ve come across the following article here and I thought it might be of interest to readers of this blog.
[Published in the American mystery journal, THE ARMCHAIR DETECTIVE,
(Fall 1995), Vol. 28, No. 4, pp. 388-393.] The article begins as follows:
Father Brown is by no means G. K. Chesterton’s only detective.
Less celebrated than the mild, dumpy little priest are other
investigators whose cases are just as exotic and methods just
as delightfully unconventional as his. To be sure, only a few
are professional detectives or policemen; more significantly,
most are what Chesterton cryptically calls “buoyant amateurs”–
retired judges, civil servants, escaped lunatics, and accused felons.
What unites them all is that, like Father Brown, they are
insightful observers and diviners of paradoxical truths.
They stand the world on its head. Sometimes, like Gabriel Gale,
they even stand on their heads. Their adventures, while wildly
uneven in quality, are at their best every bit as good as Brown’s.
A few are even better.
Unless I’m totally mistaken, Chesterton crime fiction short stories were mainly collected in: The Club of Queer Trades (1905), The Man Who Knew Too Much and other Stories (1922) The Poet and the Lunatics: Episodes in the Life of Gabriel Gale (1929), Four Faultless Felons (1930), and The Paradoxes of Mr Pond (posthumous, 1937).
A Crime is Afoot 