I just read “The Blue Cross” by G. K. Chesterton, and I’m really puzzled why I had the impression that he was a good author.
This story relied purely on contrivance.
The protagonist, the great detective Valentin, is looking for the famous criminal Flambeau in London, which is, I will note, a very large city. On the train coming in, he’s watching for Flambeau, who is very tall, but doesn’t see him. He does, however, see a bumbling little priest who fumbles with his packages and tells anyone who will listen that he’s carrying a cross with blue stones.
Valentin doesn’t know where Flambeau might be, so he just wanders around and eventually strolls into a nice little restaurant, where he finds some prankster had swapped the sugar and salt. Asking about this, he learns that two pastors, one tall and one short, had been in there, and that one of them had thrown soup at the wall. So he asks where they went, and he follows. In a shop, he notices placards for oranges and nuts have been interchanged, so he asks about pastors, and sure enough, they’d been there. So he keeps going and finds where one of the pastors had broken a window. And so on and so forth, and eventually he catches up with them in the nick of time before Flambeau attacks Father Brown for sending the “blue cross” out of his reach.
This is so silly.
Even if we allow that Valentin just miraculously happened to wander into the right restaurant — out of tens of thousands in London — we must also allow that he just miraculously happened to sit at the one table where Father Brown had swapped the sugar and salt (without the clever and alert Flambeau noticing), before some other customer alerted the waiter to fix the problem. And then when he got to the shop, he just miraculously happened to get there before the shopkeeper noticed the interchanged placards and switched them back. And so on and so forth.
It wasn’t coincidence that Father Brown had left all those clues, but the intolerable coincidences are Valentin reaching all those clues before they naturally disappeared. And there’s also the fact that Father Brown was bumbling around with his packages and talking about the cross, intentionally attracting attention, but Flambeau wasn’t there to see him with his packages. We know that because Valentin was, and Valentin didn’t see Flambeau. I guess we’re supposed to think that Father Brown was trying to get the attention of international criminals, and that Flambeau somehow heard about it, but that, again, seems so contrived.
On top of that, the famous criminal Flambeau, famous for escaping every attempt to catch him, is not aware that Valentin and two bobbies are stalking him, but Father Brown, the little priest, is. Flambeau had switched packages with Father Brown to get hold of the blue cross, but Father Brown had sneakily switched them back and then arranged for his package to be delivered to someone else.
It was just a very unimpressive story.