Christie and Chesterton

On the one side, she can pattern her work after Arthur Conan Doyle. Hercule Poirot becomes the modern day Sherlock Holmes, using his little gray cells to solve puzzles. (Or as Christie would actually write, his little grey cells.) The clues are all handed to the reader along with an array of red herrings. The reader tries to be as clever as the detective and notice the real clues and uncover the culprit. The novel ends satisfactorily with all the puzzles being resolved and the reader exclaiming either “I knew it!” or “I should have seen it!”

Agatha Christie became world famous following that model. In very many ways she outdoes Doyle in the quality of the stories, even though none of her detectives ever quite become as instantly recognizable as Sherlock Holmes.

But, there is an alternate reality when Christie emulates not Doyle, but G.K. Chesterton. The Father Brown stories also have a detective, in this case an unassuming priest. He roams around and solves mysteries, and the stories are quite nice as mysteries, but there is no doubt at all that Chesterton thinks solving the crime is only a part, and a relatively unimportant part, of the story. Instead, Chesterton constantly draws attention to theological puzzles and mysteries. The stories are merely ways for Chesterton to indulge himself in working out a paradox or an oddity of life and drawing the reader’s attention to larger matters.

What would have happened if Christie had gone that route? You need not wonder. You just need to read The Mysterious Mr. Quin. I started this book having absolutely no idea that it was in a different category than Christie’s usual fare. The first story seems like a conventional Christie style mystery, but it is not really her best. Then the same with the second one. Mr. Quin is indeed mysterious; he just sort of pops into the story, but it seems like it is Mr. Satterthwaite who is doing the actual solving of the mysteries… mysteries that seem less and less like mysteries as they go along.

Eventually it dawned on me. The individual stories weren’t really the mysteries in this book. The real mystery is “Who in the world is this Mr. Quin guy?” (Slaps forehead: Hence the title of the book!) He just sort of pops up, looking oddly like a harlequin (Ah, Mr. Harley Quin!) as the light shining on him seems rather consistently filtered through a stained glass window or some such thing.

How is he always there at just the right moment? Why does he keep crossing Satterthwaite’s path just as there is some crisis in the life of someone Satterthwaite meets? Why does each story seem less and less like a Whodunit?

By two thirds of the way through the book, Mr. Quin stops even seeming like a real character in the stories—he emerges as a sort of deus ex machina, showing up in time to have a brief conversation with Satterthwaite or one of the other characters before he vanishes again.

And then, he really does start showing up magically as if he just climbed an impossible to climb cliff and he departs by heading straight back to the impossible to climb down cliff. Wait, the Reader exclaims. Is Mr. Quin even a human? Is he like some sort of Spirit Being or Guardian Angel? We never find out.

By this point, I had to remind myself this was Christie, not Chesterton. If this was a Chesterton collection, the solution to the mystery is obvious. There are more things in heaven and earth, Dear Reader, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Why shouldn’t Mr. Quin be some sort of non-human spirt wandering the earth doing good? Why do you assume that all mysteries must be solved by tell-tale clues interpreted by clever human agency? Why do you discount the fact that some mysteries are only revealed by knowing the details of the human heart?

This all seems so very unlike an Agatha Christie novel, but her name is right on the cover. She wrote these stories very early in her career, quite literally at the same time when was working out Hercule Poirot. The Mysterious Mr. Quin is the Road Not Taken.

Does this mean that Christie decided to go the more realistic route? Can we say that Hercule Poirot is more realistic than Harley Quin? Only if we deny the existence of ethereal beings.

This Christie-Chesterton mashup has my mind reeling in exactly the same way that Chesterton always jolts one out of lazy patterns of thought.

On the one hand, I have a solid faith in the existence of non-corporeal beings. God exists. Angels and demons exist. Of this I have no doubt.

But, if I am reading a story about angles and demons, I have zero doubt I am reading fiction. I never once paused to wonder if Good Omens was non-fiction. But, that isn’t really all that surprising—everyone thinks Good Omens is fiction.

What about Paradise Lost or The Divine Comedy? There I still stick with fiction, but suddenly I am a lot less willing to say there is nothing real there at all. Fictional stories about real things. Sure the stories are fiction, but angels and demons are real.

If Hercule Poirot shows up to solve a mystery, I know the story is fiction, but it seems like a plausibly true story. It is realistic. If, on the other hand, Poirot could suddenly call down lightning bolts to slay the murderer, I would think the story was rather unrealistic. If Mr. Quin is just an angel who shows up to help out at a moment of crisis, why do I think that story is unrealistic? Why? Just because to the best of my knowledge, I have never seen an angel roaming the earth, I cannot deny the possibility that they are out there. So, why do I instantly think Mr. Quin is unrealistic? Why am I constantly looking for explanations of how he could both be human and do the things he does?

In other words the real mystery of The Mysterious Mr. Quin is why I find Mr. Quin to be mysterious at all.

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Chesterton, G.K. Orthodoxy “Chesterton and the Elves”
James, Henry The Turn of the Screw “Faith and Uncertainty”