The Man Who Knew Too Much

Gilbert Keith Chesterton

Jan 1922 · Binker North

About this ebook

The Man Who Knew Too Much and other stories (1922) is a book of detective stories by English writer G. K. Chesterton, published in 1922 by Cassell and Company in the United Kingdom, and Harper Brothers in the United States.

The book contains eight connected short stories about "The Man Who Knew Too Much", and additional unconnected stories featuring separate heroes/detectives. The United States edition contained one of these additional stories: "The Trees of Pride", while the United Kingdom edition contained "Trees of Pride" and three more, shorter stories: "The Garden of Smoke", "The Five of Swords" and "The Tower of Treason".Horne Fisher, "The Man Who Knew Too Much", is the main protagonist of the first eight stories. In the final story, "The Vengeance of the Statue", Fisher notes: "The Prime Minister is my father's friend. The Foreign Minister married my sister. The Chancellor of the Exchequer is my first cousin."

Because of these intimate relationships with the leading political figures in the land, Fisher knows too much about the private politics behind the public politics of the day. This knowledge is a burden to him in the eight stories, because he is able to uncover the injustices and corruptions of the murders in each story, but in most cases the real killer gets away with the killing because to bring him openly to justice would create a greater chaos: starting a war, reinciting Irish rebellions or removing public faith in the government.In the seventh story, "The Fad of the Fisherman", the Prime Minister himself is the murderer, who kills the financier whose country house he is visiting because the financier is trying to start a war with Sweden over "the Danish ports". By killing his host, the Prime Minister seeks to avoid a war in which many more people would die, and the financier would profit at the cost of thousands of lives.In "The Vanishing Prince", an Irish rebel, Michael, is cornered in a tower, but a junior policeman named Wilson kills two senior police officers to be promoted in the field to become officer in charge of the case.

Ratings and reviews

I think Maddi Lund is an idiot who wouldn't know a classic if it crawled up inside her kootch and died. Maybe it should stick to Dr. Suess books or Fun with Dick and Jane readers. Friggin moron.

This series of short stories starts out very strong and is well written. However, it suddenly becomes clear the author is racist and anti-Semitic. The obviousness of these views in his writing ruined the stories for me. I was quite disappointed.

I really enjoyed this collection of stories. Very Good reading. First the inexplicable, mysterious . . Then the surprising mystery solved. Great Fun.

About the author

Gilbert Keith Chesterton, (29 May 1874 - 14 June 1936), was an English writer, poet, philosopher, dramatist, journalist, orator, lay theologian, biographer, and literary and art critic. Chesterton is often referred to as the prince of paradox.Time magazine has observed of his writing style: Whenever possible Chesterton made his points with popular sayings, proverbs, allegories-first carefully turning them inside out. Chesterton is well known for his fictional priest-detective Father Brown, [5] and for his reasoned apologetics. Even some of those who disagree with him have recognised the wide appeal of such works as Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man.[4][6] Chesterton routinely referred to himself as an orthodox Christian, and came to identify this position more and more with Catholicism, eventually converting to Catholicism from High Church Anglicanism. George Bernard Shaw, his friendly enemy, said of him, He was a man of colossal genius.[4] Biographers have identified him as a successor to such Victorian authors as Matthew Arnold, Thomas Carlyle, Cardinal John Henry Newman, and John Ruskin. Chesterton was born in Campden Hill in Kensington, London, the son of Marie Louise, née Grosjean, and Edward Chesterton.[8][9] He was baptised at the age of one month into the Church of England, [10] though his family themselves were irregularly practising Unitarians.[11]According to his autobiography, as a young man Chesterton became fascinated with the occultand, along with his brother Cecil, experimented with Ouija boards. Chesterton was educated at St Paul's School, then attended the Slade School of Art to become an illustrator. The Slade is a department of University College London, where Chesterton also took classes in literature, but did not complete a degree in either subject. In September 1895 Chesterton began working for the London publisher Redway, where he remained for just over a year.[14] In October 1896 he moved to the publishing house T. Fisher Unwin, [14] where he remained until 1902. During this period he also undertook his first journalistic work, as a freelance art and literary critic. In 1902 the Daily News gave him a weekly opinion column, followed in 1905 by a weekly column in The Illustrated London News, for which he continued to write for the next thirty years.