The Man Who Knew Too Much
By G.K. Chesterton

I’ve know about this book my whole life—my parents were both Chesterton fans. I’ve read a lot of other Chesterton, but never this one, and I’d totally blindsided myself about what kind of book it was. Chesterton wrote so many things that I’d figured this for one of his political novels. Which it kind of is, but it’s really a set of short mystery stories with overarching government-corruption and suppression-of-truth-for-the-good-of-the-people themes.
There are some powerful political ideas here. At one point the hero, Horne Fisher, stands for Parliament, running a bold new sort of campaign where he tells the truth all the time and tells his opponents that he’ll happily drop out of the race if they can convince him they’d be decent at the job. Many of the solutions to the separate mysteries involve people in high places excusing the crimes because of the necessity of a cover-up to avoid a scandal or public panic. That these anti-ethical expediencies are set during the First World War adds whole layers of philosophy to the book, about the nature of conflict and patriotism and ego and self-justification and plain old abuse of power. The best of the stories fuse Chesterton’s sociopolitical essays with his ability to construct a compelling whodunnit. The worst of the stories show up the author’s own vanities and bigotries.
So before I opened the cover I thought I was embarking on a literary novel, only to realize that it was light genre fiction, only to realize that it was actually a lot deeper, and a lot more political than Chesterton’s Father Brown mysteries. A roller coaster ride, from a book published in 1922 that I’d always meant to crack.
As for my sense that this was a more sustained work, I think I was confusing this book with Chesterton’s novel The Man Who Was Thursday, which I also haven’t read but have just downloaded and will start soon. Boy, was Chesterton good with titles. (Personal faves include The Thing: Why I Am a Catholic, All I Survey, As I Was Saying, On Lying in Bed and Other Essays, Lunacy and Letters and Come to Think of It). It’s unfortunate that the title The Man Who Knew Too Much was purloined for a couple of Hitchcock thrillers that have nothing to do with Chesterton.
The title confusion will make it that much harder for someone to ever adapt the Horne Fisher stories for stage or screen, which would be cool and apparently has never happened.