The Encluesiast

INTRODUCTION

As this post’s title indicates, this is not an attempt to analyze all of the stories in G.K. Chesterton’s The Innocence of Father Brown (1911). Rather, I wish to analyze five stories—“The Secret Garden,” “The Queer Feet,” “The Invisible Man,” “The Wrong Shape,” and “The Sins of Prince Saradine”—that employ principles of camouflage. There is a sixth story in this collection—“The Sign of the Broken Sword”—that is the locus classicus of (and possibly even the origin of) a particular kind of camouflage that reappears throughout detective fiction for decades to come. I have discussed this in a post on Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine’s blog Something Is Going to Happen. I recommend that you read that before reading the current post, as I build here on some of the ideas that I articulated there.

Before I proceed further, it is worth considering whether the Father Brown stories are (or should be) within this blog’s purview. After all, this blog’s subtitle is “Detailed Analyses of Fair-Play Mysteries.” Do the Father Brown stories really play fair?

In an episode of Jim Noy’s podcast In GAD We Trust, guest John of the website Countdown John’s Christie Journal says the following:

Chesterton actually does give us the clues and is moving towards a fair-play scenario. I think that in most of the stories which we’re going to look at here and, I think, generally, there is enough in them to allow the reader to solve the problem, should they wish to do so. I think sometimes maybe motive would be hard to find. And certainly, in some of the stories, Father Brown has additional information which enables him to kind of see there is a more likely killer. But we have the evidence that would enable us to see how things were done and that would probably point us to the killer without having knowledge of motive.

Along similar lines, I. Stump at Solving the Mystery of Murder writes:

However, though The Innocence of Father Brown can be seen flirting with a kind of plotting that would go on to dominate the puzzle plots of the 1920s to 40s, it cannot be said that the notion of “fairplay” has actually yet fully formed. Often times, Father Brown solves the crimes through information hitherto unbeknownst to the reader, thought processes that sometimes don’t even begin to approach rational or concrete […] or simply divining the answer from mid-air. Nonetheless, the seeds for the Golden Age are clearly here, and it’s easy to see how Chesterton preempted (or even created) many of the elements of what would become the “fairplay” detective novel half a decade before its formal existence. Many famous Golden Age mysteries […] have borrowed, adapted, reworked, inverted, subverted, reimagined, and reconstructed tricks from Chesterton’s tales, so much so that it can be said Chesterton invented many of the forms of misdirection for which the genre would go on to be known.

I think I agree with most of what these two bloggers have to say. The Father Brown stories are not squarely within the fair-play tradition, in that Chesterton does not feel absolutely bound by the rules. He is willing to withhold some information, although less than (for example) Conan Doyle characteristically does. But there is enough there in most of his mysteries to make them solvable. I do wonder, though: was solvability ever the real point? Perhaps, instead, we could say that this is more like literary foreshadowing and/or that these clues are meant to be seen only in retrospect or upon second reading. In other words, it may be that the scales are meant to fall from your eyes precisely when Father Brown reveals the truth and not before then.

Where I differ from Countdown John, however, is that I do not believe motive to be the least clued element of most of Chesterton’s stories. In fact, I think Chesterton is usually quite scrupulous about providing information. The problem is that many of the motives themselves hinge on Chesterton’s famous paradoxes—he gives you a piece of information and requires you to draw a counterintuitive conclusion in order to see the light. (For Chesterton, these paradoxes are not merely games; rather, they contain some of the deepest spiritual and psychological truths.) One such example from a different story in this collection (which I otherwise do not discuss) is ROT13: Va gur “Guerr Gbbyf bs Qrngu,” Fve Nneba’f Eryvtvba bs Purreshyarff vf jung pnhfrf uvz gb orpbzr fhvpvqny. Guhf, jura gur ernqre vf gbyq bs Fve Nneba gung “uvf rguvpf jrer nyy bcgvzvfz,” jr zhfg gerng guvf nf n pbhagrevaghvgvir “pyhr” gung ur zhfg or qrfcrengryl haunccl. 

A particular beautiful example occurs in a story from The Incredulity of Father Brown (1926) ROT13: Va gur “Gur Zvenpyr bs Zbba Perfprag,” Jneera Jlaq vf vagebqhprq gb guerr genzcf naq jvgu n tynapr vf noyr gb gryy jung gur orfg sbez bs punevgl vf sbe rnpu bs gurz. Gur vaghvgvir ernqvat bs guvf vf gung ur unf cresbezrq gurz n terng xvaqarff sbe juvpu gurl zvtug or tengrshy. Gur pbhagrevaghvgvir, Purfgregbavna ernqvat vf gung “gur hasngubznoyr vafhyg va gung zbzrag jura ur qnerq gb xabj gurz ng n tynapr” vf na npg bs pbzcyrgr qruhznavmngvba, bs erqhpgvba gb fbzrguvat gung pna or gerngrq, naq guhf zbgvir sbe zheqre.

The premise of my treatment of Chesterton is that even if we cannot always count upon him to deliver the kind of fair-play rigor that characterizes the work of his successors, we can nonetheless learn a great deal from his handling of solution, cluing, and misdirection in those stories in which he chooses to engage in such techniques.

With that, let us take a look at the five stories. I will address three stories in this post: “The Sins of Prince Saradine,” “The Secret Garden,” and “The Queer Feet.” I will address “The Invisible Man” and “The Wrong Shape” in my next one.

SPOILER BEGIN HERE

As usual, to see the connections I draw between these stories and others in the canon, please consult the Spoiler Index. (I updated this today; so, you may wish to update your personal index if you have been keeping one.)

I have gone with this rather odd grouping of the five stories because the three I address here all involve dual identities: the two brothers in “The Sins of Prince Saradine,” the two heads in “The Secret Garden,” and the two types of man (diner and waiter) in “The Queer Feet.”

“The Sins of Prince Saradine” is not really a mystery story—or, at least, not what would come to count as a mystery story in the Golden Age. It is closer to a literary tale, of the kind that makes it clear why Chesterton was revered by Borges. Nonetheless, there is camouflage worth attending to. In this case, it is an identity swap: the murderer switches identities with his intended victim. 

14581 ROT13: Purfgregba hfrf inevnagf bs guvf qrivpr va guerr pbafrphgvir fgbevrf va guvf pbyyrpgvba: “Gur Phefr bs gur Tbyqra Pebff,” “Gur Qbbz bs gur Qneanjnlf,” naq “Gur Qnttre jvgu Jvatf.” V jba’g tb vagb shegure qrgnvy urer, fvapr gur cebkvzvgl bs gubfr gnyrf creuncf cebivqrf cergrkg sbe n shgher cbfg.

10156 ROT13: Purfgregba vapyhqrq gjb shegure rknzcyrf bs zheqrere-ivpgvz fjncf va Gur Frperg bs Sngure Oebja, va gur fgbevrf “Gur Jbefg Pevzr va gur Jbeyq” naq “Gur Puvrs Zbheare bs Znear.”

The hints of what is to come, then, are (in keeping with what I said in my introduction) not so much “cluing” as “foreshadowing.” 

First, when we are introduced to the housekeeper, we are told that she is “of no little majesty.” This seems to be about her bearing, but also is about her lineage as she is the “married woman of high rank” mentioned in the story’s third paragraph. Her Italian accent is an additional hint. It’s a little less clear to me what to make of the narrator’s claim that the butler “had a faintly foreign air, but he was in tongue and training English, as are many of the most polished men-servants of the cosmopolitan nobility.” How could Paul Saradine be “in tongue and training English”? Is the narrator lying to us? Or is this Flambeau’s misperception?

Two paragraphs later, Father Brown says that they have “come to a wrong place,” but “one can sometimes do good by being the right person in the wrong place.” When one rereads the story, the ideas of “right person” and “wrong place” have certainly acquired further meaning.

In the next paragraph, we are told that the butler:

[…] betrayed a sullen and almost animal affection for his master; who, he said, had been very badly treated. The chief offender seemed to be his highness’s brother, whose name alone would lengthen the old man’s lantern jaws and pucker his parrot nose into a sneer. Captain Stephen was a ne’er-do-well, apparently, and had drained his benevolent brother of hundreds and thousands.

No wonder the butler is so sullen and has so much affection for the prince, since he is talking about himself!

As we look at the pictures of the brothers, we get two lines hinting at the fact that the brothers are hard to tell apart (and that neither brother is good). Flambeau says: “They both look innocent enough. It would be hard to say which is the good brother and which the bad.” (Note: Father Brown would surely never say that they look innocent enough.) The housekeeper adds: “He is right enough in one way, your friend. He says it would be hard to pick out the good and bad brothers. Oh, it would be hard, it would be mighty hard, to pick out the good one.” And then she confirms: “There isn’t a good one.” 

When we are finally introduced to the supposed Prince (who is actually Stephen), there are constant references to mirrors (evoking the trick mirrors of a magician or carnival) and playing a part on the stage. Thus, Stephen enters “crossing the sunlit pane like a lighted stage,” passing “many mirrors.” His mustache gives “an effect slightly theatrical.” His features make him look “like the outfit of a figure behind the footlights.” Then stage and mirror collide in this description:

The nameless interest lay in something else, in the very framework of the face; Brown was tormented with a half memory of having seen it somewhere before. The man looked like some old friend of his dressed up. Then he suddenly remembered the mirrors, and put his fancy down to some psychological effect of that multiplication of human masks.

Father Brown immediately notices something about the relationship between the characters that will take on new meaning later:

[The Prince] neither had, nor professed to have, his hand on the helm of household affairs. All these were left to the two old servants, especially to the butler, who was plainly the central pillar of the house. Mr. Paul, indeed, was not so much a butler as a sort of steward or, even, chamberlain; he dined privately, but with almost as much pomp as his master; he was feared by all the servants […]

It makes sense that the servants would fear a real prince. And he’s “not so much a butler” indeed, since he’s not a butler at all!

Father Brown soon says a line that sums up the story’s true ending: “Somewhere else retribution will come on the real offender. Here it often seems to fall on the wrong person.” This causes the impostor to repeat the phrase “the wrong person,” perhaps realizing that he is the wrong person whom the retribution will befall. But the “somewhere else” Father Brown refers to is surely hell, where Paul is doomed to suffer, even if he temporarily triumphs at the end of the story.

After Antonelli arrives and Father Brown realizes that Mrs. Anthony’s surname is an Anglicized form of Antonelli, “he resolved one of the riddles of the house of mirrors,” thus making the carnival analogy explicit.

The final piece of foreshadowing occurs when Paul at last arrives with the police. Father Brown, realizing that the timing is off, mutters “[W]hy on earth couldn’t he have come before?”. Of course, he eventually realizes that Paul didn’t want to intervene until his brother was killed.

One could argue that the identity swap in “The Secret Garden” is also between murderer and victim, albeit in a different sense than usual: the victim is presumed to be the murderer, because his own body has been camouflaged as the body of a fictitious victim. (If we stick with the forest metaphor, this is as if you were asked to hide an oak log and you did this by surrounding it with maple leaves, so it would be mistaken for a maple instead.)

I think this story is one of Chesterton’s masterpieces and indeed one of the masterpieces of mystery short fiction, because of how much content is compressed into it. The density of puzzles and clues is staggering.

According to Dr. Simon, the murder presents five puzzles:

First difficulty: Why should a man kill another man with a great hulking sabre, when he can almost kill him with a pocket knife and put it back in his pocket? Second difficulty: Why was there no noise or outcry? Does a man commonly see another come up waving a scimitar and offer no remarks? Third difficulty: A servant watched the front door all the evening; and a rat cannot get into Valentin’s garden anywhere. How did the dead man get into the garden? Fourth difficulty: Given the same conditions, how did Brayne get out of the garden? […] [Fifth difficulty:] When I first saw how the head had been slashed, I supposed the assassin had struck more than once. But on examination I found many cuts across the truncated section; in other words, they were struck after the head was off. Did Brayne hate his foe so fiendishly that he stood sabring his body in the moonlight?

The answers to four of the five puzzles—all but the second—stem from the same fact: that Brayne has been decapitated and his head has been replaced with that of another man (the criminal Louis Becker). The solution to the second is given to us by the broken twigs. This is the kind of physical clue that requires imagination rather than pure logic to figure out, but is no weaker for that. The only oddity is that it is Valentin himself who draws attention to their existence. Perhaps this is intended to be misdirection on either Valentin’s part or Chesterton’s part, to reduce our suspicion of him. (Although readers who proceed through the Father Brown stories in order are unlikely to be suspicious of Valentin, as the previous story—“The Blue Cross”—seems to set him up as one of the heroes of the series.)

To make his solution fully fair-play, Chesterton needs to clue three elements: (1) that the mysterious body is Brayne’s, (2) that Valentin had access to a head with which to perform the substitution, and (3) that Valentin had a motive. 

(As if cluing all of this were not enough, Chesterton adds another hint. Even before the murder is discovered, the weather is described thus: “The moon with her scimitar had now ripped up and rolled away all the storm-wrack.” This mimics how the actual murder was achieved: something was ripped off with a sword and then rolled away—only, it has been rolled far away, and something else has been rolled into its place.)

Let’s start with (1). Here is how Brayne’s physique is first described:

He was a huge fellow, as fat as he was tall, clad in complete evening black, without so much relief as a watch-chain or a ring. His hair was white and well brushed back like a German’s; his face was red, fierce and cherubic, with one dark tuft under the lower lip that threw up that otherwise infantile visage with an effect theatrical and even Mephistophelean.

Later, the corpse is described as:

the body of a very tall and broad-shouldered man. He lay face downwards, so they could only see that his big shoulders were clad in black cloth, and that his big head was bald, except for a wisp or two of brown hair that clung to his skull like wet seaweed.

The only problem with this description is that Chesterton says “his big head,” even though the body and head don’t actually belong together. That is, the narrator is not describing neutrally: by saying “his,” the narrator endorses (or adopts from the onlookers) the belief that the head belongs to the body. A later author—one more scrupulous about fair play—might have written “the big head,” so that the reader is assuming the connection, rather than being directly misinformed. What is good here, though, is that Chesterton is not overdoing the contrast between Brayne’s head and the head we will eventually discover to be Becker’s. He is content to make it mostly bald with a few brown tufts, as opposed to having well-brushed, white hair. (Chesterton could have easily overdone this by making Becker’s head feature-for-feature the opposite of Brayne’s.)

The rest of this paragraph does its work quite cleanly. “Broad-shouldered” is a clever substitute for “fat” from before—they mean quite different things, but can sometimes describe what is effectively the same shape. We have a repetition of “tall” and we have a repetition of being clad in black. These are well-chosen similarities, because they establish a kinship between the bodies, but are generic enough that one’s mind doesn’t leap to assuming they’re the same person. And indeed, Brayne’s lack of “a watch-chain or a ring” is surely there to ensure that his appearance beyond the neck is devoid of anything identifying. Later, Chesterton will make it clearer that the outfit the corpse is wearing is not merely any old black thing, but rather exactly the sort of dinner jacket worn by guests at the party: “As Dr. Simon said, the man had never been of their party. But he might very well have been trying to join it, for he had come dressed for such an occasion.” (How laced with irony this is!)

After that, the clues come fast. First, O’Brien notes that “the dead man had a Yankee dollar in his pocket. So he was a countryman of Brayne’s.” Next, when the second head is found, we learn that it “had been much battered against trees or stones as it tossed in the water.” Genre-savvy readers should know that nearly anytime a corpse’s face has been damaged beyond what is strictly necessary in causing death, that is a sign that the killer meant to obscure the identity of the corpse (often for some kind of identity swap). It should therefore not come as an immense surprise when Father Brown reveals that the second head is Brayne’s.

Let’s consider (2) next. The second paragraph of the story tells us that Valentin is late to arrive because “[h]e was, in truth, making some last arrangements about executions and such ugly things; and though these duties were rootedly repulsive to him, he always performed them with precision.” How interesting this sentence is once one knows the truth! The murder of Brayne was also surely repulsive to him in some ways, and yet Valentin executed what he thought to be his duty with equal precision.

This crucial clue is well hidden, since it comes long before we could have any idea where the story is going. Far less subtle is the introduction of the Becker twins. Upon seeing the head, Valentin’s under-detective identifies the head as Arnold Becker’s, adding:

But, oddly enough, there was a twin brother of his, named Louis Becker, whom we had a great deal to do with. In fact, we found it necessary to guillotine him only yesterday. Well, it’s a rum thing, gentlemen, but when I saw that fellow flat on the lawn I had the greatest jump of my life. If I hadn’t seen Louis Becker guillotined with my own eyes, I’d have sworn it was Louis Becker lying there in the grass.

One might wonder why Chesterton felt the need to add this other element. He has played fair already and the element of a twin is a bit hokey (if nowhere near as hokey as it would become in future years). The answer is that if Valentin had chosen the head of someone who didn’t have a twin (e.g. Joe Schmo), then it would immediately be clear what happened. (“Why, that’s the head of Joe Schmo, the guy whose execution you just came from!”) It is essential that this head also be misidentified. Hence the need for the twin.

Last, we consider (3): the motive. We are given many clues to this. First, we are told that Valentin “was one of the great humanitarian French freethinkers; and the only thing wrong with them is that they make mercy even colder than justice.” This is the first sign of a character flaw in him. We then realize that Valentin is anti-Catholic when, upon hearing Father Brown speak, “Valentin’s black brows had come together somewhat crossly, as they did on principle at the sight of the cassock.” The next reference to this trait is in a passage that also contains a strong hint to the solution:

As [O’Brien] crossed the study he almost staggered at a shocking coincidence. Upon Valentin’s table lay the coloured picture of yet a third bleeding head; and it was the head of Valentin himself. A second glance showed him it was only a Nationalist paper, called The Guillotine, which every week showed one of its political opponents with rolling eyes and writhing features just after execution; for Valentin was an anti-clerical of some note.

It is only when we find out that Brayne’s philanthropic eye has turned from what Chesterton calls “small religions” to Catholicism that the full motive is in view:

[Father Brown:] “I’ve been about with [Brayne] for some weeks. He was thinking of joining our church.”

The star of the fanatic sprang into Valentin’s eyes; he strode towards the priest with clenched hands. “And, perhaps,” he cried, with a blasting sneer, “perhaps he was also thinking of leaving all his money to your church.”

“Perhaps he was,” said Brown stolidly; “it is possible.”

This fanaticism does not automatically mark Valentin as the murderer, as Chesterton is wont to lob such insults at all sorts of characters in his stories. But it does, in fact, turn out to be the motive.

Before I move on to the next story, I should address the plausibility of this motive. Both the blogger Aidan at Mysteries Ahoy and I. Stump at Solving the Mystery of Murder criticize this aspect. The former calls it “really unconvincing” and the latter says: 

I found the religious motive to be pretty random for what role the character was supposed to be playing in this series… It’s also pretty ludicrous, based on the idea that atheists are as religious about their atheism as theists are in their faith. No real human would ever commit murder for the reason provided in this story…

I think both of these bloggers are misunderstanding what Valentin is meant to represent: not atheism in general, but anti-clericalism (perhaps even just French anti-clericalism specifically). This story was written in 1911, only six years after official separation between Church and State was instituted in France. For those of you unfamiliar with the history of this moment and the struggle leading up to it, I recommend this article from the World History Encyclopedia. Suffice to say that there was indeed a political movement in France that regarded any possible re-ascendance of the Catholic Church as an existential threat to republicanism and social progress. So, Valentin is indeed an extremist, but he’s an extremist form of a then-current political ideology that goes beyond simple disbelief in God.

I conclude this post by considering “The Queer Feet.” Regarding this story, Aidan at Mysteries Ahoy says that it “features the most convincing example of an idea that I have seen used in a number of detective stories, including several times by Agatha Christie.” I wonder if he is referring to camouflage in general or if there is something about the specific type of camouflage employed here. (If I keep to my forest metaphor, this story uses the camouflage of a double-sided leaf—each side a different color.)

The basic premise is surely one of the most brilliant in all of mystery fiction. The problem is something that will plague future Father Brown stories: Chesterton gives away the solution in the opening hook of the story! Here are the first two sentences:

If you meet a member of that select club, “The Twelve True Fishermen,” entering the Vernon Hotel for the annual club dinner, you will observe, as he takes off his overcoat, that his evening coat is green and not black. If (supposing that you have the star-defying audacity to address such a being) you ask him why, he will probably answer that he does it to avoid being mistaken for a waiter.

Thus, we are told right away that were the club members dressed in black evening dress, they would be indistinguishable from waiters! From here, it is not difficult to figure out what’s going on. I really wish that Chesterton had written these sentences differently, using the green evening dress as a hook, but not yet explaining anything about how that custom came about.

To me, the key sentences in the story—the ones that provide all the set-up needed for what’s to come—occur when Father Brown asks Mr. Lever if there’s a room where he can write out the last wishes of the waiter who has just died:

Mr. Lever was torn in two. He was a kind man, and had also that bad imitation of kindness, the dislike of any difficulty or scene. At the same time the presence of one unusual stranger in his hotel that evening was like a speck of dirt on something just cleaned. There was never any borderland or anteroom in the Vernon Hotel, no people waiting in the hall, no customers coming in on chance. There were fifteen waiters. There were twelve guests. It would be as startling to find a new guest in the hotel that night as to find a new brother taking breakfast or tea in one’s own family.

These sentences do two things: First, they establish the source of the story’s mystery—how someone could successfully break into this closed circle and escape detection. Second, they contain the mistake that gives rise to the solution: the reader is being reminded that there are fifteen waiters even though there are now only fourteen, because one has just died. (The name of the club is also a hint: The Twelve True Fisherman. The number and the word “true” are built into this. The solution is that there was a thirteenth—and thus definitionally false—fisherman.)

The actual description of the title “queer feet” is so delightful that I must quote it here:

First, there came a long rush of rapid little steps, such as a light man might make in winning a walking race. At a certain point they stopped and changed to a sort of slow, swinging stamp, numbering not a quarter of the steps, but occupying about the same time. The moment the last echoing stamp had died away would come again the run or ripple of light, hurrying feet, and then again the thud of the heavier walking. It was certainly the same pair of boots, partly because (as has been said) there were no other boots about, and partly because they had a small but unmistakable creak in them.

Chesterton’s decision to have the boots creak is important, as it makes it unmistakable that this is the sound of one person.

The rest of the story is rather oddly structured, because Father Brown catches Flambeau (who doesn’t recognize him, despite their run-in in “The Blue Cross”) after the theft has taken place, but before the theft is noticed. Then, we cut to the diners before, during, and after their discovery of the theft.

Although I like the final two sentences of the story, I wish Chesterton had cut them, so Father Brown’s last line would be the true ending of the story. Chesterton has already established the snobbery of some of the members of The Twelve True Fisherman. (“Know the waiter?” answered Mr. Audley indignantly. “Certainly not!”). Father Brown gently puts them in their place in this exchange:

“One never knows what mistakes may arise when one looks so like a waiter.”

“Oh, hang it all!” said the young man, “a gentleman never looks like a waiter.”

“Nor a waiter like a gentleman, I suppose,” said Colonel Pound, with the same lowering laughter on his face. “Reverend sir, your friend must have been very smart to act the gentleman.”

Father Brown buttoned up his commonplace overcoat to the neck, for the night was stormy, and took his commonplace umbrella from the stand.

“Yes,” he said; “it must be very hard work to be a gentleman; but, do you know, I have sometimes thought that it may be almost as laborious to be a waiter.”

My next post will be on the two remaining camouflage stories from this collection: “The Invisible Man” and “The Wrong Shape.”