Rare G.K. Chesterton essay on mystery writing is itself a mystery

NEW YORK — When he wasn’t working on mystery stories, and he completed hundreds, G.K. Chesterton liked to think of new ways to tell them.

Detective fiction had grown a little dull, the British author wrote in a rarely seen essay from the 1930s published this week in The Strand Magazine, which has released obscure works by Louisa May Alcott,Raymond Chandler and many others. Suppose, Chesterton wondered, that you take an unsolved death from the past, like that of the 17th century magistrate Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, and come up with a novel that explores how he might have been murdered?

“I suggest that we try to do a little more with what may be called the historical detective story,” Chesterton wrote. “Godfrey was found in a ditch in Hyde Park, if I remember right, with the marks of throttling by a rope, but also with his own sword thrust through his body. Now that is a model complication, or contradiction, for a detective to resolve.”

Chesterton’s words were addressed to a small and exclusive audience. He remains best known for his Father Brown mysteries, but in his lifetime he held the privileged title of founding president of the Detection Club, a gathering of novelists whose original members included Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and AA Milne among others. They would meet in private, at London’s Escargot restaurant; exchange ideas and even work on books together, including such “round-robin” collaborations as “The Floating Admiral.”

The club, established in the late 1920s, is still in existence and has included such prominent authors as John le Carre,Ruth Rendell and P.D. James. Members are serious about the craft if not so high-minded about the club itself. Among the sacred vows that have been taken in the past: No plots resolved through “Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo-Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery, Coincidence or the Act of God” and “seemly moderation” in the use of gangs, conspiracies, death-rays and super-criminals.

According to the current president, Martin Edwards, the Detection Club meets for three meals a year — two in London, and a summer lunch in Oxford, and continues to work on books. In 2016, the club honored one its senior members, Peter Lovesey, with “Motives for Murder,” which included tributes from Ann Cleeves, Andrew Taylor, Catherine Aird and David Roberts.

Next March, it will release “Playing Dead: Short Stories by Members of the Detection Club,” with Edwards, Lovesey, Abir Mukherjee and Aline Templeton listed as among the contributors.

Asked if new members are required to take any oaths, Edwards responded, “There is an initiation ceremony for new members, but all I can say is that it has evolved significantly over the years.”

No one ever acted upon Chesterton’s idea for a book if only because no evidence has been found of any response to his essay or that anyone even had a chance to read it.

In a brief foreword for the Strand, written by the president of the American Chesterton Society, Dale Ahlquist sees the document’s journey as its own kind of mystery. One copy was found in the rare books division of the University of Notre Dame, in South Bend, Indiana. Another is included among Chesterton’s papers in the British Museum, with a note from the late author’s secretary, Dorothy Collins, saying that his work had sent on to “The Detective Club Magazine.”

There was no Detective Club Magazine.

“So the original manuscript was sent to a magazine that never existed. But how did it end up in the Special Collections at Notre Dame? Another mystery,” Ahlquist writes. “Obviously, Dorothy Collins sent it somewhere. She probably meant ‘Detection Club’ in her note but wrote ‘Detective Club.’ Some member of the Detection Club or hired editor received it, but since the magazine never materialized, whoever held the manuscript continued to hold it, and it remained in that person’s papers until it didn’t.”

“After Chesterton’s death (in 1936),” he added, “it was either sold or given away or went into an estate through which it was acquired. Collectors acquire things. Then, either before they die or after they die, their collections get donated. At some point it was donated to Notre Dame. A real detective … would track all this down.”