SOURCE: “The Fairy Tale and the Secret,” in The Puritan Pleasures of the Detective Story, Victor Gollancz, Ltd., 1972, pp. 104–16.

‘I won't discuss whether we can be killed by something that happened in the thirteenth century; but I'm jolly certain that we can't be killed by something that never happened in the thirteenth century, something that never happened at all.’¹

Sentimentality about history and religion is inevitably attributed by Chesterton to Americans, but a readiness to believe in mystery and the supernatural intervention of irrational forces is the chief impediment to the rational explanation of problems wherever anybody lives. That is what Father Brown firmly believes. There is a close connection, his theology teaches him, between error and unreason. Some of the stories naturally emphasise the error, some equally naturally the unreason, but in the best of them the two are joined. Just as in his argumentative and polemical...