G K Chesterton is best known for his series of quirky stories about amateur sleuth and Roman Catholic priest, Father Brown. However, it is his 1908 novel The Man Who Was Thursday which is for me his abiding masterpiece, a piece of literature I have returned to perhaps five or six times in order to recapture its delicious prose and otherworldliness. I even put this old and wonderfully designed book cover onto a T-shirt!
At first glance, The Man Who Was Thursday is a suspenseful mystery story, a thriller, but it soon becomes apparent that this is no mere detective story; little is as it seems in this mystery, and we find ourselves in deeper waters than expected. The novel’s subtitle offers us a clue to this: A Nightmare.
Gabriel Syme is a poet and a police detective; Lucien Gregory, a poet and bomb-throwing anarchist. At the beginning of the novel, Syme infiltrates a secret meeting of anarchists and gets himself elected to it as “Thursday,” one of the seven members of the Central Anarchist Council, in the sudden full knowledge of a hamstrung and petrified Gregory.
Syme soon learns, however, that he is not the only one in disguise, and even as the masks come off, the biggest question – for both the reader and the characters – is who is Sunday? What is the true identity of the larger than life character who is the supreme head of the anarchists? The story unfolds thrillingly, and throughout it all we are treated to Chesterton’s exuberant prose, clever dialogue and gripping style. His wit shines through every scene.
Let’s read an example of this style, and how Chesterton constructs a creeping sense of jeopardy. Syme, the detective who is disguised as a poet, has engaged the anarchist Gregory and, on condition of having sworn himself to absolute secrecy, is taken to meet the highly dangerous anarchist council. Just prior to the arrival of the rest of the anarchists, Syme lets Gregory into his own secret…
“Gregory, I gave you a promise before I came into this place. That promise I would keep under red-hot pincers. Would you give me, for my own safety, a little promise of the same kind?”
“A promise?” asked Gregory, wondering.
“Yes,” said Syme, very seriously, “a promise. I swore before God that I would not tell your secret to the police. Will you swear by Humanity, or whatever beastly thing you believe in, that you will not tell my secret to the anarchists?”
“Your secret?” asked the staring Gregory. “Have you got a secret?”
“Yes,” said Syme, “I have a secret.” Then after a pause, “Will you swear?”
Gregory glared at him gravely for a few moments, and then said abruptly—
“You must have bewitched me, but I feel a furious curiosity about you. Yes, I will swear not to tell the anarchists anything you tell me. But look sharp, for they will be here in a couple of minutes.”
Syme rose slowly to his feet and thrust his long, white hands into his long, grey trousers’ pockets. Almost as he did so there came five knocks on the outer grating, proclaiming the arrival of the first of the conspirators.
“Well,” said Syme slowly, “I don’t know how to tell you the truth more shortly than by saying that your expedient of dressing up as an aimless poet is not confined to you or your President. We have known the dodge for some time at Scotland Yard.”
Gregory tried to spring up straight, but he swayed thrice.
“What do you say?” he asked in an inhuman voice.
“Yes,” said Syme simply, “I am a police detective. But I think I hear your friends coming.”
