::READERS REVIEWS::

Should mysteries be mysterious? - A.C. Doyle created Sherlock Holmes as a satire of the purely rational man. G.K. Chesterton created this book with Doyle/Holmes in mind, except that Chesterton's virtuoso detective has abandoned logic and has embraced intuition instead.

Chesterton of course is a famous theologist and/or philosopher, so it's hardly unexpected that this work of fiction is mainly interesting for philosophical reasons. Stylistically it is not satisfying as just entertainment -- as "just" detective fiction. There are a variety of stylistic reasons it isn't up to par with typical mystery books, but the main reasons are a result of Chesterton's philosophical goals. Thus, the book only succeeds if you read the stories with an eye toward philosophical implications.

Each story's arc begins much like a typical mystery: the stage is set with characters and events, then people begin trying to resolve the mystery by thinking and investigating. In a typical mystery, this would lead to a climax where the characters and readers would both puzzle over the accumulated evidence; the successful reader and detective will reason out the puzzle. A typical climax comes when there is no apparent explanation for events, and the amazing detective, a la Holmes or Poirot, shows us how the explanation was really obvious all along. In contrast, the climax of these Chesterton mysteries comes when there is no way to ferret the truth out by logic. Generally, the clues point to a fatuously false explanation. Unlike Sherlock Holmes, who withholds judgment at first and slowly fits a theory to the facts, Chesterton's character Basil Grant apprehends the essential truth of the matter from the beginning in an instant of intuition, and doesn't fret over seemingly contradictive facts. Whereas with each unexpected new fact Holmes must be even cleverer in "deducing" a working theory, in Chesterton's stories all the evidence will eventually be shown to accord with Basil's first impression. After many lines in which Basil laughs at other characters (and the readers) for not knowing the answer, he gifts everyone with an explanation of what's really going on.

This is unsatisfying in the normal detective fiction way because the evidence is not helpful and neither the readers nor other characters have a chance to participate in the quest for truth, other than by waiting for Basil to stop laughing at us and let us in on the secret. Whereas Holmesian sleuthing is based on discrete facts, which readers discover as the characters do, intuition has a basis in subtle and numerous intangibles that Chesterton simply can't share with the readers adequately. Moreover, the final explanation, which reconciles Basil's intuition with the accumulation of contrary-seeming facts, ends up being rather out of nowhere. Indeed, the implicit mystery of each story is "What queer trade will turn up here?" even though the explicit mystery is something apparently totally unrelated. Each explicit mystery is solved by the unexpected, behind-the-scenes involvement of a "queer trade," which is of course a trade no one's done before and thus which no one suspects. In other words, each story is resolved by deus ex machina.

But Chesterton's dei ex machinae (sp?) are not cop-outs. With each new trade, he suggests a plausible way of making money in existing society that no one has yet tried. Assuming Chesterton overcomes the challenge of thinking up a novel job, such a job's invocation in the solution to an explicit mystery actually contributes to a larger sense of mystery. How much of what we can't understand has a perfectly reasonable basis behind the scenes? How many of the roles in society are the arbitrary outcome of human imagination? It is this transfer of mysteriousness from the particular to the overall, by exchanging some immediate mystery for even bigger questions, that makes the idea of a "queer trade" a subtle double entendre.

Thus Chesterton makes an interesting philosophical push that might be appreciated by theists and postmodernists alike. Both appreciate a good joke at modernism's expense -- as do G.K. Chesterton and Basil Grant. In a Holmesian story, each mystery is "reduced" (to use a conspicuously scientific term) to an explanation that has nothing mysterious about it. In Chesteron's stories, our sense of mystery is not annihilated, it is amplified.

Join the club - G.K. Chesterton always had a knack for making ominous situations that turned out to be... pretty normal. And that's what "The Club of Queer Trades" is all about, a string of Sherlock-Holmes-style mysteries that spoof the elaborate deduction process. And show readers some of the bizarrest jobs Chesterton could think of.

The book introduces us to Basil Grant, a judge who came to realize that law and justice aren't the same thing, and who ended up giving sentences like "Get a soul" before leaving the courtroom. Then his detective brother Rupert introduces him to Major Brown, an army officer who suspects that his neighbor is plotting to kill him. It isn't too surprising, since there are pansies spelling out "Death to Major Brown."

But with his deductive processes, Basil reveals the bizarre truth behind the Major's problem: an adventure company which is part of the Club of Queer Trades, a "society consisting exclusively of people who have invented some new and curious way of making money."

Throughout the stories, he, Rupert and the narrator encounter other people who have found weird ways of making a living: an ex-lieutenant who seems to be telling tall tales, the "the wickedest man in England," an Essex vicar who was kidnapped by men disguised as old ladies, a dancing professor who has apparently lost his mind, and finally a lady being imprisoned in a basement who flat out refuses to leave -- and it may have something to do withBbasil.

Only the guy behind "The Man Who Was Thursday" could pull off a book like "The Club of Queer Trades," or a concept like the club itself. And as an added humorous twist, this book is apparently meant as a sort of spoof to the Sherlock Holmes mysteries -- Rupert is sort of Holmesian in his elaborate deductions, but he never gets it right.

These are some of Chesterton's frothier stories, but he still peppers his stories with little moral and philosophical moments ("they have not merely no notion, they have an elaborately false notion of what the words mean"), but never enough to bog down the light banter and funny action scenes. And there are moments of Chesterton's prose that are pure poetry ("... a mystic, elvish, nocturnal hunting").

Basil himself is a bit of a know-it-all, but at least he's a funny, slightly offbeat one, and perfectly at ease with talking to a tied-up criminal about Darwinism. His brother Rupert introduces himself as being a detective, but gets more and more upset as the book goes on, until he desperately grasps at the idea of a villainous milkman giving "secret signs."

"The Club of Queer Trades" is a deliciously quirky little book, and leaves readers wishing that they could hear a few more tales of these wonky jobs. Definitely worth employing.

Well . . . - I couldn't help but get the idea that Chesterton had a good idea, but fluffed the execution because he couldn't think of enough "queer trades" (i.e., jobs new to the economy that no one else had ever made a living at before). Is it a satire on technology--surely in 1905 there must have been hundreds of these new jobs happening all the time--typists, for example, or auto mechanics. The book starts off well with the adventure of Major Brown, and in fact the opening tale made me think that THE CLUB OF QUEER TRADES must been a tremendous influence on Agatha Christie's MR. PARKER PYNE INVESTIGATES (I don't want to give many spoilers, so I'll leave it at that, but Parker Pyne/Ariadne Oliver fans will see right away where Christie got her charming idea from 25 years later.) I think Christie did it better, but GKC scores points from me for thinking of it first.

Swinburne (the narrator) tells the stories of Rupert and Basil, the two brothers, but he was unable to differentiate them significantly, and I wonder why he even bothered creating a brother for Rupert? I'm not getting any Sherlock Holmes/Mycroft Holmes one brother is a genius vibes here, both of them seem equally equipped for sussing out the truth.

By the time you get to the story of the "wickedest man in England" (Aleister Crowley? If so, a significantly early appearance for Crowley in fictional form) and how he maintains his reputation as a wit, it's still cute, but the next story about the house agent takes a one-paragraph anecdote and blows it up to novella size through sheer padding. Same with the old lady imprisoned in the basement, and as for the dancing professor, I didn't understand how that fit into the club of queer trades, except that Basil forced the Museum to pay the professor money, and that was so implausible I was throwing the book against the wall.

I'm reading the "Hesperus Modern Voices" edition, with Gilbert Adair's skillful introduction. He ALMOST persuades me that GKC was a postmodernist on the order of Borges... too bad you then have to read the six stories that follow, for they contradict Adair at every turn. Sapphire sky my a**!

Funny and quick romp, though not his best. - G.K. is witty, and even his weaker works will still make you laugh out loud. This book is no different, a parody of the classic Sherlock Holmes type deductive reasoning. They are really several sub-stories that all merge together for a fitting conclusion, involving the queerest trade of them all. A lot of G.K.'s familiar themes are here, such as emphasis on atmosphere as opposed to details, and how things seemingly ridiculous not only make sense, but are actually necessary. Probably not the best place to start with his works, but if you're a fan these short stories will not disappoint.

Clever and Entertaining - This is a nice collection of stories, all well done in Chesterton's infectious style. There are little bits of social dogma stuffed into the margins, but the stories are primarily amusements.

One odd note - this edition of the book contains some very strange artifacts - noticably occasions where the word "die" is substituted for the word "the". Almost as if it were translated from German and somebody missed a few articles. There were several other instances, which I've forgotten, but the number of errors in the text is surprising. The binding is also not vey sturdy - it's pretty clear that this Elibron Classics edition has been rapidly put together and not intended to last through more than one or two readings.

Simple innocents often see more clearly than knowing cynics - The Club of Queer Trades is classic Chesterton. A collection of loosely connected short stories each presenting some odd mystery, the solution of which is not the uncovering of a crime but the discovery of another member of the Club of Queer Trades, an elite society of people who earn their living by a wholly new trade which they have invented themselves. For example there is Mr. P.G. Northover, the founder of the Adventure and Romance Agency and Mr. Montmorency, the Arboreal House-Agent. In every case, it is the former judge, Mr. Basil Grant, whose clear insight into human nature pierces the paradox first and who, in the closing pages we discover is himself eligible for membership.

Should mysteries be mysterious? - A.C. Doyle created Sherlock Holmes as a satire of the purely rational man. G.K. Chesterton created this book with Doyle/Holmes in mind, except that Chesterton's virtuoso detective has abandoned logic and has embraced intuition instead.

Chesterton of course is a famous theologist and/or philosopher, so it's hardly unexpected that this work of fiction is mainly interesting for philosophical reasons. Stylistically it is not satisfying as just entertainment -- as "just" detective fiction. There are a variety of stylistic reasons it isn't up to par with typical mystery books, but the main reasons are a result of Chesterton's philosophical goals. Thus, the book only succeeds if you read the stories with an eye toward philosophical implications.

Each story's arc begins much like a typical mystery: the stage is set with characters and events, then people begin trying to resolve the mystery by thinking and investigating. In a typical mystery, this would lead to a climax where the characters and readers would both puzzle over the accumulated evidence; the successful reader and detective will reason out the puzzle. A typical climax comes when there is no apparent explanation for events, and the amazing detective, a la Holmes or Poirot, shows us how the explanation was really obvious all along. In contrast, the climax of these Chesterton mysteries comes when there is no way to ferret the truth out by logic. Generally, the clues point to a fatuously false explanation. Unlike Sherlock Holmes, who withholds judgment at first and slowly fits a theory to the facts, Chesterton's character Basil Grant apprehends the essential truth of the matter from the beginning in an instant of intuition, and doesn't fret over seemingly contradictive facts. Whereas with each unexpected new fact Holmes must be even cleverer in "deducing" a working theory, in Chesterton's stories all the evidence will eventually be shown to accord with Basil's first impression. After many lines in which Basil laughs at other characters (and the readers) for not knowing the answer, he gifts everyone with an explanation of what's really going on.

This is unsatisfying in the normal detective fiction way because the evidence is not helpful and neither the readers nor other characters have a chance to participate in the quest for truth, other than by waiting for Basil to stop laughing at us and let us in on the secret. Whereas Holmesian sleuthing is based on discrete facts, which readers discover as the characters do, intuition has a basis in subtle and numerous intangibles that Chesterton simply can't share with the readers adequately. Moreover, the final explanation, which reconciles Basil's intuition with the accumulation of contrary-seeming facts, ends up being rather out of nowhere. Indeed, the implicit mystery of each story is "What queer trade will turn up here?" even though the explicit mystery is something apparently totally unrelated. Each explicit mystery is solved by the unexpected, behind-the-scenes involvement of a "queer trade," which is of course a trade no one's done before and thus which no one suspects. In other words, each story is resolved by deus ex machina.

But Chesterton's dei ex machinae (sp?) are not cop-outs. With each new trade, he suggests a plausible way of making money in existing society that no one has yet tried. Assuming Chesterton overcomes the challenge of thinking up a novel job, such a job's invocation in the solution to an explicit mystery actually contributes to a larger sense of mystery. How much of what we can't understand has a perfectly reasonable basis behind the scenes? How many of the roles in society are the arbitrary outcome of human imagination? It is this transfer of mysteriousness from the particular to the overall, by exchanging some immediate mystery for even bigger questions, that makes the idea of a "queer trade" a subtle double entendre.

Thus Chesterton makes an interesting philosophical push that might be appreciated by theists and postmodernists alike. Both appreciate a good joke at modernism's expense -- as do G.K. Chesterton and Basil Grant. In a Holmesian story, each mystery is "reduced" (to use a conspicuously scientific term) to an explanation that has nothing mysterious about it. In Chesteron's stories, our sense of mystery is not annihilated, it is amplified.

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A note is due on the star rating. As a mystery story, for entertainment, I would award 2 stars, because each story is little more than some odd occurrence explained by a twist ending. As philosophical fiction, Chesterton's subversion of the Doylean mystery structure is worth 4 stars.