The biggest mystery in this collection of mystery stories is why G. K. Chesterton is so renowned for writing them. Going by the evidence of this book alone, building a mystery was not something the man did well.
The eight tales all feature Horne Fisher, a brilliant yet somewhat languid product of upper-class Great Britain, back when class still meant something. In each story, Fisher analyzes a particular situation, offers up a few paradoxical aphorisms, leaps to some bizarre conclusion that Chesterton strains to show as somehow exactly right, then explains to his reporter friend Harold March why he won’t do a single thing to right whatever wrong has been committed.
His problem, he explains, boils down to the title of this book, as he explains in the first story, “The Face in the Target.”
“I know too much,” he said. “That’s what’s the matter with me. That’s what’s the matter with all of us, and the whole show; we know too much. Too much about each other, too much about ourselves.”
What he knows are too many people of influence who commit casual atrocities and rightly count on Fisher’s acquiescence to let them off.
These aren’t terrible stories, exactly. Most are written well. All blaze at times with a cagey, fierce wit. But as mysteries, they are just so bizarrely off-point in establishing such things as suspense, motive, or a satisfying resolution that they don’t merit the effort of figuring them out.
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| Before being collected in a single book, the Horne Fisher stories were published individually in magazines. Above is how "Fad of the Fisherman" was presented in MacLean's magazine in its March 1, 1921 issue. Image from https://archive.macleans.ca/article/1921/3/1/the-man-who-knew-too-much |
To put one thing straight: None of these stories have anything to do with the two Alfred Hitchcock movies of the same name. The title does come from this book, but nothing else. The movies are about espionage with an element of crime, while these stories are about crime with an element of espionage.
The first of the stories, “The Face in The Target,” introduces both to Horne Fisher and his friend March. While taking in the pastoral surroundings of a country estate, March happens upon Fisher, a stranger, sitting beside a stream, collecting the phosphorescent coating on small fish. Fisher introduces himself by explaining why he is there:
“I think it’s because the place itself, so to speak, seems to happen and not merely to exist. Perhaps that’s what old Picasso and some of the cubists are trying to express with angles and jagged lines.”
Before March can consider the wisdom of this sentiment, the pair are interrupted by a car suddenly rearing up on a nearby hill and depositing its driver on the grass. It turns out he is quite dead, and from a gunshot. The rest of the story is about finding out who the killer is from among the upper-class set occupying the surrounding area.
So far, okay. But then it gets wonky. Fisher pieces it all together from such odd clues as a damaged weathervane and the victim having troubled himself to pack a lunch. Those phosphorescent scrapings are even used to call out the killer, by somehow recreating the victim’s face on a target and using the killer’s recognition of this as proof of guilt.
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| Nothing to do with G. K. Chesterton. Just move along. Image from https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0025452/ |
Why the killing actually happened is never explained, but no matter. Fisher gives the killer a talking-to, then explains to March the man is too high up in society for an accusation against him to be believed:
“If you people ever happen to blow the whole tangle of society to hell with dynamite, I don’t know that the human race will be much the worse. But don’t be too hard on me merely because I know what society is. That’s why I moon away my time over things like stinking fish.”
This becomes the running theme through the rest of the book; from his high station, Fisher sees corruption all around him, but also the folly of trying to stop it. Not only are the rich too mighty to be prosecuted, but Fisher, however bothered, feels too much like one of them to take a stand. “He was much too hot to be anything but cool,” Chesterton writes.
All of which might make for an interesting single story; certainly in line with the enduring view of society’s elites getting away with everything they do wrong. Here, it produces the sort of dreary ennui people read mysteries to escape from.
The next story, “The Vanishing Prince,” offers more action and a moodier setting, Ireland during the Troubles. A group of Britishers, including Fisher, seek to apprehend renegade Republican Michael O’Neill. Here the crime occurs during the attempted arrest, two officers shot dead as they tried to enter a tower where O’Neill had been located.
The mystery is where O’Neill disappeared to. Then suddenly he turns up, a bit put out and saying he is innocent of the killings. It is up to Fisher to explain to the others just how everything went down, and why.
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| Also nothing to do with the Chesterton stories, although someone breaking into "Que Sera, Sera" in mid-story might have been an improvement. Image from https://thenewbev.com/blog/2017/09/the-man-who-knew-too-much/ |
Yes, the killing this time has a kind of reason, but the matter of bringing it off is much too contrived. Again Fisher lets the killer off, though at least this time the guy loses his job over it. To prosecute might cost the British respect in their Irish colony, Fisher says regretfully.
“I am too tangled up with the whole thing, you see, and I was certainly never born to see it right,” Fisher tells March in a postscript.
No one dies in “The Soul of the Schoolboy;” rather a prize coin disappears from an underground vault. Fisher is able to figure out what happened by observing the actions around a rambunctious lad who is easily bored, and offering up his usual droll nonsense in place of Sherlock Holmes deduction. The story is pleasant, quaint, and utterly without importance or aim, even within the context of the story itself.
By this time I was realizing the joke was on me for expecting anything of value from Chesterton. He is one of those writers everyone who mattered in his time had some opinion of, usually a very good one. His other mystery series, involving one Father Brown, remains one of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction stalwarts still widely recognized and celebrated today.
Not so much Horne Fisher, though. I think I know why.
Even when they begin promisingly, the stories become rather busy and self-important, allowing Chesterton room to have Fisher discourse on certain matters like the failure of those around him to properly take in the value of rustic honor or Irish spirituality.
Many of these topics are age-worn at best. In “The Hole in the Wall,” the crime involves some particularly convoluted, unlikely planning on the part of the murderer, Fisher opines at the end how the killing was delayed retribution for the theft of property owned by Catholics during the British prosecutions of the 1500s-1600s:
“I dare say every cigar I smoke and every liqueur I drink comes directly or indirectly from the harrying of the holy places and the persecution of the poor.”
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| Another MacLean's illustration, from "The Bottomless Well." "It’s what I do know that isn’t worth knowing. All the seamy side of
things; all the secret reasons and rotten motives and bribery and blackmail
they call politics." Image from https://www.bookswagon.com/book/alfred-hitchcock/9780544456228 |
The best story in the bunch, “The Bottomless Well,” is set in a mysterious Middle Eastern locale where Fisher visits the colonial government. This is the only story that offers a solid motive, a clever denouement, and a satisfying resolution. It also throws in this comment from Horne Fisher at the end:
“It’s bad enough that a gang of infernal Jews should plant us here, where there’s no earthly English reason to serve, and all hell beating up against us, simply because Nosey Zimmern has lent money to half the Cabinet.”
Yes, I know, anti-Semitism is bad and all that. But here’s what really got me: those “infernal Jews” he mentions do not figure at all in the story. It is about a pair of British officers, a matter of infidelity, and a fatal blunder involving a revolving bookcase. The Jew baiting is just venting by Chesterton’s alter-ego Fisher for no discernable point.
Some quick Wikipedia-ing shows some back-and-forth regarding Chesterton’s attitudes about Jews. He was friendly to Jews in some ways, notably so for his time and station, but also made enough disapproving comments like the above to cause many to wonder. A decade before the publication of The Man Who Knew Too Much, there was something called the Marconi Scandal which implicated some English Jews of influence and was the target of fulmination by several British pundits, including Chesterton. That episode seems echoed here.
To read just a little on Chesterton is to discover a man, like Fisher, of enormous paradox, wedded to establishment values but also radical ideals; tackling popular fiction and abstruse philosophy with equal gusto; renowned for both his high seriousness and his ready humor.
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| G. K. Chesterton. Horne Fisher offers several nuggets of wisdom that seem to speak the author's mind directly: "There nearly always is method in madness. It's what drives men mad,
being methodical." Image from https://www.chesterton.org/category/discover-chesterton/ |
There is humor in The Man Who Knew Too Much, but not nearly enough of it. Fisher himself is so encased in virtue as to be insufferable. Most events, however absurd, are played out with strident glumness.
The last story, “The Vengeance of the Statue,” is easily the worst of the lot. Fisher and March must answer some existential threat to Great Britain by an unnamed foreign power which, as the story unfolds in a dream-like manner, eventually involves an all-out invasion by these foreigners Fisher and March must ride out in bicycles to repel.
After uncovering a traitor in his family, Fisher leads March to some high place to witness a final act of bravery. What exactly he does, and what it is accomplished, is hard to say, but as we are assured “the man who knew too much knew what was worth knowing.”
I
guess that is meant to satisfy the reader in some way, alluding to a deeper
metaphysical truth than the fate of nations. If so, I missed the point, making
it consistent with the rest of my experience with G. K.
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