A RECIPE FOR WRITING DETECTIVE STORIES

New Zealand Tablet, 23 November 1911, Page 2390

A RECIPE FOR WRITING DETECTIVE STORIES

Although Mr. G. K. Chesterton writes detective stories, he has a small opinion of their originality or of their literary value. Here is his recipe for the benefit of those who may be tempted to try their hand at a kind of story-writing that is always popular. Mr. Chesterton says: 'I like detective stories; I read them, I write them; but Ido not believe them. The bones and structure of a good detective story are so old and well known that it may seem banal to state them even in outline. A policeman, stupid but sweet-tempered, and always weakly erring on the side of mercy, walks along the street, and in the course of his ordinary business finds a man in Bulgarian uniform killed with an Australian boomerang in a Brompton milk-shop. Having set free all the most suspicious persons in the story, he then appeals to the bulldog: nrofessional detective, who appeals to the hawklike amateur detective. The latter finds near the corpse a bootlace, a French newspaper, and a return ticket from the Hebrides, and so, relentlessly, link by link, brings the crime home to the Archbishop of Canterbury.'