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Notes human nature. This knowledge is drawn in part from his experience in the confessional box, but
also from his recognition of his own capacity for evil. “The little priest could see,” stated Ronald
Knox in his introduction to Father Brown: Selected Stories, “not as a psychologist, but as a moralist,
into the dark places of the human heart; could guess, therefore, at what point envy, or fear, or
resentment would pass the bounds of the normal, and the cords of convention would snap, so that
a man was hurried into crime.” “To Father Brown,” wrote Eric Routley in The Puritan Pleasures
of the Detective Story: A Personal Monograph, “any criminal is a good man gone wrong. He is not
an evil man who has cut himself off from the comprehension or sympathy of those who labour to
be good.” To this end, Brown is not primarily interested in solving the case, but in getting the
criminal to confess his sin and repent, thereby saving his soul.
Father Brown remains, in the minds of most readers, Chesterton’s greatest creation, although his
contribution to the art of mystery writing is also recognized. “If Chesterton had not created Father
Brown,” Leitch declared, “his detective fiction would rarely be read today, but his place in the
historical development of the genre would still be secure.” Even in his own day, Chesterton was
considered to be the father of the detective tale. As Leitch noted, when the Detection Club was
founded in 1928, “Chesterton, not Conan Doyle [creator of Sherlock Holmes] . . . became its first
president and served in this capacity until his death.” Not only did Chesterton write detective
stories, he also wrote several critical essays about the proper form and style of such works.
Under the influence of Chesterton’s Father Brown, the mystery story became less a portrait of the
detective’s personality, and more a puzzle that the detective and the reader could both solve.
“Chesterton’s determination to provide his audience with all the clues available to his detectives,”
stated Leitch, “has been so widely imitated as to become the defining characteristic of the formal
or golden age period (roughly 1920-1940) in detective fiction. . . . Modern readers, for whom the
term whodunit has become synonymous with detective story, forget that the concealment of the
criminal’s identity as the central mystery of the story is a relatively modern convention.” In the
end, H. R. F. Keating (himself a prominent mystery writer) concluded in the St. James Guide to
Crime and Mystery Writers, “Chesterton’s fame rests on the priest with ‘the harmless, human
name of Brown’ and it will endure.” Fellow British essayist Hilaire Belloc said of G.K. Chesterton that
the “intellectual side of him has been masked for many and for some hidden by his delight in the exercise of
words and especially in the comedy of words. . . . . [His] was a voice from which I learnt continually, from
the first day I heard it until the last; acquiring from it discoveries, explanations, definitions which continue
to increase my possessions” (The Observer, June 21, 1936). Chesterton’s frequently anthologized essay
“On Lying in Bed” originally appeared in the collection Tremendous Trifles (1909).

31.1 Text—On Lying in Bed

Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a coloured
pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling. This, however, is not generally a part of the domestic
apparatus on the premises. I think myself that the thing might be managed with several pails of
Aspinall and a broom. Only if one worked in a really sweeping and masterly way, and laid on the
colour in great washes, it might drip down again on one’s face in floods of rich and mingled
colour like some strange fairy rain; and that would have its disadvantages. I am afraid it would be
necessary to stick to black and white in this form of artistic composition. To that purpose, indeed,
the white ceiling would be of the greatest possible use; in fact it is the only use I think of a white
ceiling being put to.
But for the beautiful experiment of lying in bed I might never have discovered it. For years I have
been looking for some blank spaces in a modern house to draw on. Paper is much too small for
any really allegorical design; as Cyrano de Bergerac says: “Il me faut des géants.” But when I tried
to find these fine clear spaces in the modern rooms such as we all live in I was continually
disappointed. I found an endless pattern and complication of small objects hung like a curtain of
fine links between me and my desire. I examined the walls; I found them to my surprise to be

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