In this post—my second and last on G.K. Chesterton’s The Innocence of Father Brown (1911)—I analyze two of the five stories that employ the technique of camouflage, including a variant on what I have called the “Chesterton’s Forest” principle. If you have not done so already, I suggest beginning by reading my two previous posts on this subject, in which I address the other three stories. As usual, to decipher the connections I draw between these stories and others in the mystery canon, you may wish to consult my Spoiler Index.
SPOILERS BEGIN HERE
“The Invisible Man” is surely the most famous story in the collection, with its fame resting on its solution, which was tremendously influential in mystery fiction. The solution appears to be rather divisive these days.
In a post on The Innocence of Father Brown for his blog The Grandest Game in the World, Nick Fuller is full of praise for every story in the collection. (Note to the spoiler-averse: if you are planning on reading that post, stop before you reach his entry on “The Sign of the Broken Sword,” unless you have also read 11615 and 11892, as he spoils a key element of both of them. This is a recurring problem on this otherwise quite enjoyable blog—one which has required me to largely stop consulting its individual entries.) But in particular, he says that “The Invisible Man” has “one of the most staggeringly surprising, brilliant and audacious solutions in the genre.” At the other extreme is L. Stump at Solving the Mystery of Murder who writes:
I simply do not enjoy this story or consider it even remotely possible — not merely implausible, but I believe this story would never work out the way as described in real life. It utilizes Chesterton’s well-worn trick, but in this case brought to the point of absurdity so to not even be conceivable. It ultimately relies on a false premise that Chesterton tries to explain away as a quirk of language, but all I know is that the way Father Brown *claims* people answer questions is not the way *I* answer questions, that’s for certain! The solution could’ve involved the killer paying off everyone in the city to lie on his behalf, and I’d find it more believable and more enjoyable than the solution Chesterton gives us here. Hokey and overrated.
I suppose that my opinion falls somewhere between those of these two bloggers. I do think that the basic idea here deserves its fame. At its base it might seem like merely an application to human beings of a principle originally applied to objects in 10252—that people are mentally invisible if they are too ordinary to earn notice. But I think Chesterton is not just making a point about perceiving the man himself; he’s also making a point about how language works, and one that many analytic philosophers would agree with. Notes Father Brown:
“Suppose one lady says to another in a country house, ‘Is anybody staying with you?’ the lady doesn’t answer ‘Yes; the butler, the three footmen, the parlourmaid, and so on,’ though the parlourmaid may be in the room, or the butler behind her chair. She says ‘There is nobody staying with us,’ meaning nobody of the sort you mean. But suppose a doctor inquiring into an epidemic asks, ‘Who is staying in the house?’ then the lady will remember the butler, the parlourmaid, and the rest. All language is used like that; you never get a question answered literally, even when you get it answered truly.”
If we keep to the metaphor of Chesterton’s forest, we might imagine someone who, if asked if there were any objects lying on the forest floor would reply “none,” even if the floor were littered with leaves. This is the part of the solution that carries a genuine philosophical truth. The difficulty in employing this truth in a mystery story is that someone who understood themselves to be a witness in a murder investigation would surely answer as the lady does when questioned by the epidemic doctor rather than by a fellow gentlewoman. I think Chesterton realized this and that is why the four witnesses (the chestnut seller, the policeman, the commissionaire, and the man with the pail) answer before/without being told there is a hunt on for a potential murderer.
We can see this in the way the four witnesses answer the question. The chestnut seller swears “that he had watched the door and seen no visitor enter.” (A mailman is not a visitor.) The man with a pail “asseverated that he had let no intruder pass.” (A mailman is not an intruder.) The language in the answers from the policeman and commissionaire requires a little more analysis. The former says “he had had experience of crooks of all kinds, in top hats and in rags; he wasn’t so green as to expect suspicious characters to look suspicious; he looked out for anybody, and, so help him, there had been nobody.” We have to take what comes before the semicolon (“suspicious characters”) to be the definition of “anybody” after the semicolon. Because a mailman does not satisfy the former, he is nobody. In the commissionaire’s case, one once again has to interpret his statement “I’ll swear there’s been nobody to ask since this gentleman went away” in light of the beginning of the sentence it appears in: “I’ve got a right to ask any man, duke or dustman, what he wants in these flats.” So, to be “anybody,” one has to be someone whose business in the flats is not already apparent.
Thus, I think Chesterton is fairly cluing the source of the invisibility itself. (And, of course, Father Brown lists all of the clues Chesterton has given us that the murderer was a mailman, including the stamp paper and the fact that Laura heard the voice after receiving the letter.) The reason this well-constructed edifice ultimately should fall apart—even during the course of events we witness in the story—is that the same policeman later finds Smythe’s body. At that point, it does indeed become ridiculous that he doesn’t say, “Oh, now that I know that you’re looking for a murderer, and whatever human being visited the building must have done it, I should mention that someone delivered the mail!” Once we reach that point in the story, criticisms like L. Stump’s become entirely reasonable.
I think “The Wrong Shape” sits alongside “The Secret Garden” as the two strongest stories in The Innocence of Father Brown when examined solely from the viewpoint of puzzle construction and cluing. There are three key elements to the mystery: (a) the method, (b) the motive, and (c) the supposed suicide note. (Of course, the first two of these also indicate the identity of the murderer.)
The story is a locked-room mystery of sorts. Quinton is heard alive, calling out to Atkinson, at a moment when no one is in the room with him. Then, Dr. Harris locks the door. The one flaw in Chesterton’s description of this situation is that he does not make it sufficiently clear that Dr. Harris is in or around the doorway of the room when Quinton calls out, and thus too far away to kill the latter after he speaks. This is merely implied:
In about four minutes the door was opened again. Atkinson was quicker this time. He sprang forward, held the door open for an instant, and called out: “Oh, I say, Quinton, I want—”
From the other end of the study came the clear voice of Quinton, in something between a yawn and a yell of weary laughter.
“Oh, I know what you want. Take it, and leave me in peace. I’m writing a song about peacocks.”
Before the door closed half a sovereign came flying through the aperture; and Atkinson, stumbling forward, caught it with singular dexterity.
“So that’s settled,” said the doctor, and, locking the door savagely, he led the way out into the garden.
After the door is shut, everyone is accounted for up until Father Brown and Dr. Harris re-enter Quinton’s room: the three main men (Father Brown, Flambeau, and Dr. Harris) are together in the garden; they can see Atkinson, the Indian, and the shadow of Mrs. Quinton on the blind in her room upstairs.
The solution is an old chestnut. It is the seventh option in Gideon Fell’s Locked Room Lecture in The Hollow Man (1935) and the eighth in the excellent taxonomy from Solving the Mystery of Murder. This is when the victim is still alive at the point at which the locked room is opened, and then the murderer rushes to the victim’s side and kills them while any potential witnesses are unable to see exactly what is happening. Chesterton was, of course, not the first to use this trick. (Carr/Fell credits the invention to 11244.) But it was not such a cliché in 1910—when the story was first published individually—as it is now.
Chesterton’s execution of this trick is rather neat. Father Brown and Dr. Harris enter the study. They see the telltale piece of paper. And then the murder takes place during this sentence:
The doctor snatched it up, glanced at it, handed it to Father Brown, and crying, “Good God, look at that!” plunged toward the glass room beyond, where the terrible tropic flowers still seemed to keep a crimson memory of the sunset.
This is followed by a description of Father Brown reading the piece of paper. Thus, we actually get to witness Dr. Harris misdirect Father Brown and our vision is distracted along with Father Brown’s as he reads. We too are blind to what is happening in the conservatory.
The motive for the murder is that Dr. Harris loves Quinton’s wife and wants to save her from Quinton’s depravity. Of course, this motive cannot be stated outright. But there are three passages where Chesterton hints at this:
- Dr. Harris (of Atkinson): “He’s a dirty little scamp, though he is Mrs. Quinton’s brother, and she’s as fine a woman as ever walked.” [Note the high compliment]
- “Good evening, Mrs. Quinton,” said the little doctor heartily. “I am just going to give your husband his sleeping draught.” [Note the “heartily”]
- “That woman’s over-driven,” said Father Brown; “that’s the kind of woman that does her duty for twenty years, and then does something dreadful.” The little doctor looked at him for the first time with an eye of interest. [Father Brown too has noticed Mrs. Quinton’s suffering, which is what Harris cares about.]
The “Chesterton’s Forest” element comes into play with the piece of paper with the corners cut off to eliminate the quotation marks that were present. Growing the forest consists of cutting the rest of the sheets of paper to match. This is a wonderful use of this idea.
11110 ROT13: N zhpu jbefr hfr bs gur gbea pbeare gevpx bpphef va Ybeq Rqtjner Qvrf jurer gur ynpx bs pnzbhsyntr znxrf vg dhvgr boivbhf jung unf bppheerq. (The connection between these works was previously noted in this entry from the blog Seven Storeys High.)
If there is a flaw in Chesterton’s handling, it is this: Dr. Harris snipped the upper left corner of the pages, thus eliminating the open quotation mark. But what happened to the closed quotation mark? Dr. Harris’s confession suggests that it was present in the original version. This execution would have been better if Dr. Harris had snipped off both corners: one for each mark. But then, perhaps, the shape wouldn’t have been as bizarre and the story’s theme would not have emerged. (I should add that in retrospect, we can see Dr. Harris get nervous when Father Brown examines the paper too closely: “Oh, stop fooling with that scrap of paper,” said the doctor emphatically.)
There is also a minor flaw in the logic Father Brown uses to solve the case. He declares that Quinton’s artistry was at such a high level that he would never have cut the paper into such an aesthetically displeasing shape. This won’t do, because in the opening of the story we are told that Quinton the artist “indulged his lust for colour somewhat to the neglect of form–even of good form.” Surely, when one says that an artist is brilliant with color but poor with form, we include shape in the latter category?
In my opinion, none of these flaws is sufficient to compromise the status of “The Wrong Shape” as one of the great detective stories. I originally considered including coverage of it in my post for Ellery Queen’s blog, but I refrained because of one other flaw in the story, which an audience for that sort of blog might have been unhappy to see go unaddressed: bigotry.
Chesterton has a reputation as a racist—with his antisemitism coming up most often. This view of him is so prevalent that The Society of G.K. Chesterton has a very long page on its website devoted to dispelling such views. I will not engage here with the question of whether Chesterton was a biological racist. But at the level of culture rather than biological race, Chesterton was certainly a bigot. Father Brown makes it clear in story after story that he believes that Oriental cultures stand for savagery and evil. Oriental cultures seemingly include anything from the continent of Asia and there appear to be traces of it in Judaism. In “The Sign of the Broken Sword,” here is Father Brown’s explanation for how someone as devoted to the Bible as St. Clare could become depraved; he describes St. Clare as:
a man physically formidable living under a tropic sun in an Oriental society, and soaking himself without sense or guidance in an Oriental Book. Of course, he read the Old Testament rather than the New. Of course, he found in the Old Testament anything that he wanted—lust, tyranny, treason.
In “The Wrong Shape,” we have the character of the Indian, whose savagery manifests in a kind of apocalyptic nihilism. Here is Father Brown’s account of the Indian’s use of the phrase “I want nothing”:
“When that Indian spoke to us,” went on Brown in a conversational undertone, “I had a sort of vision, a vision of him and all his universe. Yet he only said the same thing three times. When first he said ‘I want nothing,’ it meant only that he was impenetrable, that Asia does not give itself away. Then he said again, ‘I want nothing,’ and I knew that he meant that he was sufficient to himself, like a cosmos, that he needed no God, neither admitted any sins. And when he said the third time, ‘I want nothing,’ he said it with blazing eyes. And I knew that he meant literally what he said; that nothing was his desire and his home; that he was weary for nothing as for wine; that annihilation, the mere destruction of everything or anything—”
True, this is Father Brown’s analysis of one character, not a whole culture. Yet, it is hard to read in the context of Chesterton’s other works and not think that the Indian is a stand-in for Oriental culture more broadly. Lastly, there is the whole premise of something being “the wrong shape”:
“Don’t you ever feel that about Eastern art? The colours are intoxicatingly lovely; but the shapes are mean and bad—deliberately mean and bad. I have seen wicked things in a Turkey carpet.”
“Mon Dieu!” cried Flambeau, laughing.
“They are letters and symbols in a language I don’t know; but I know they stand for evil words,” went on the priest, his voice growing lower and lower. “The lines go wrong on purpose—like serpents doubling to escape.”
That’s right. Father Brown’s opinion—which we are meant to credit as wisdom, not narrow-mindedness—is that letters and symbols in a language he admits to not knowing must stand for evil things simply because the shapes disconcert him.
I don’t wish to linger on this point any further. The purpose of this blog is to appreciate the craft of these stories as mysteries, not to engage in social critique. But it is an unavoidable problem in this story. It represents the best of Chesterton as a constructor and the worst of him as a cultural commentator.
COMING UP NEXT
Next up, I’m going to analyze the use of the “Chesterton’s Forest” trope in five episodes from the TV series Monk, showing that the trope is alive and well in the 21st century.
The Encluesiast 
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