After my disappointment with Chesterton’s “The Blue Cross”, I read the next story in the collection, “The Secret Garden”.
This didn’t rely on coincidence; it just relied on an amazingly stupid murder plot.
The great detective Valentin invites a bunch of people to his house for a dinner party, including an American (Brayne) and an Irishman in the French Foreign Legion (O’Brien). The house features a garden which is entirely enclosed by an unclimbable wall, and the doorways are guarded. Valentin arrives late, but the dinner goes on, and afterwards he argues with Brayne. Then a decapitated body (with separate head) is found in the garden. The head matches a criminal who was guillotined yesterday, but he’s known to have a twin, so they suppose this is the twin.
Brayne has disappeared and is thought to have murdered the stranger and run away. They suppose the body was decapitated with O’Brien’s saber, which he left on a table somewhere and which is now missing. But how did this strange man get into the garden, since he couldn’t have climbed the wall or sneaked in through the door? And how did Brayne get out without being noticed? Then the saber is found outside the garden, followed by a second head, which turns out to be Brayne’s.
Father Brown deduces that the body is also Brayne’s, that he was decapitated with O’Brien’s saber, and that the saber and his head were tossed over the wall. The replacement head really did come from the criminal who was guillotined yesterday. Valentin had brought it in and killed Brayne.
None of this makes a lick of sense.
Why murder a man in a garden that can only be accessed through a guarded house? Why do it with a bunch of witnesses? Obviously the murder was planned, since Valentin brought the severed head, but it depended on O’Brien leaving his saber unguarded. And why replace the head at all? Why not just have Brayne mysteriously murdered instead of adding what appears to be a murdered stranger and risking Brayne’s head being found? Why not just lure Brayne somewhere, cosh him over the head, and leave him to be found as another American tourist who wandered into the wrong part of town?
Valentin kills himself rather than humiliate himself by explaining this idiotic murder plot.
I genuinely don’t understand why Chesterton is regarded as a great writer. Maybe his non-fiction is better. But I’m not going to read any more of these Father Brown stories.