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A review by rui_leite
The Club of Queer Trades by G.K. Chesterton
3.0
Even though I’ve been curious about G.K. Chesterton for quite some time, ever since I’ve read that some of my favourite writers were influenced by his style, I’ve never read anything by him. To tell the truth I was slightly worried I would not enjoy his writing because I’ve also read that he had some rather strong conservative leanings. But a few days ago I found this small book at a very affordable price and decided it was about time I picked it up.
I am pleased I did. Maybe it’s this particular book, or maybe I had judged the man too harshly without ever really knowing what he wrote, but the thing is that within this pages I found not so much the overly-conservative kind of social criticism I was fearing, but a smarter, kinder, type of conservatism I can live well with. Most of the stuff pointed out was simple common sense and, surprisingly, I found myself agreeing with Basil Grant, the main character, more often than not.
Chesterton seems to be very apt at creating quirky and strange stories, populated by quirky and strange characters that, nevertheless, are easy to picture walking down a street in real life and engaging in that very sort of adventures. He is strange and funny but never “nonsensical” and it is a rather hard balance he achieves in these six short-stories.
Basil Grant is both a kind of Sherlock Holmes, in that he is amazingly competent and seemingly infallible, but also his exact opposite, using a mix of common sense, knowledge of human nature and instinct to solve his cases instead of formal logic. But, and this is the really clever bit, truth be told, all the cases can be solved by the readers if they use the kind of “grantian logic” instead of its “holmesian” counterpart. Chesterton does play fair, the rules of “the game” are well established early on, all clues are on page, even if they often come from unexpected sources and the endings actually made a lot of sense most of the time.
On the other hand Rupert Grant, Basil’s younger brother, is a well done parody of the style of detectives that followed Holmes school of investigation. There is, for example, a delightful scene where he is trying to find out “The Truth” about a milkman using deductive reasoning and the results are...well... memorably hilarious…
My only complaint might be the very ending of the book… even if I loved Basil’s speech about the profession of Judge there (full of shrewd observations, if you ask me) what we find out about him might just undermine the understanding we thought we had about his prowess as an investigator. It doesn’t necessarily do that, but it can. That disappointed me a bit because I came to admire the way he acted throughout the book and the way he reached his conclusions.
But, all in all, The Club of Queer Trades was quite a humorous light read filled with some very quotable lines, and a very nice and different take on the mystery genre.
(By the way... 3 stars because I read a translation and it was quite a bit of rubbish - para a malta tuga: Europa-America, colecção vampiro...yeah... - but I guess that in this particular case I got exactly what I paid for, so I can't complain much.)
I am pleased I did. Maybe it’s this particular book, or maybe I had judged the man too harshly without ever really knowing what he wrote, but the thing is that within this pages I found not so much the overly-conservative kind of social criticism I was fearing, but a smarter, kinder, type of conservatism I can live well with. Most of the stuff pointed out was simple common sense and, surprisingly, I found myself agreeing with Basil Grant, the main character, more often than not.
Chesterton seems to be very apt at creating quirky and strange stories, populated by quirky and strange characters that, nevertheless, are easy to picture walking down a street in real life and engaging in that very sort of adventures. He is strange and funny but never “nonsensical” and it is a rather hard balance he achieves in these six short-stories.
Basil Grant is both a kind of Sherlock Holmes, in that he is amazingly competent and seemingly infallible, but also his exact opposite, using a mix of common sense, knowledge of human nature and instinct to solve his cases instead of formal logic. But, and this is the really clever bit, truth be told, all the cases can be solved by the readers if they use the kind of “grantian logic” instead of its “holmesian” counterpart. Chesterton does play fair, the rules of “the game” are well established early on, all clues are on page, even if they often come from unexpected sources and the endings actually made a lot of sense most of the time.
On the other hand Rupert Grant, Basil’s younger brother, is a well done parody of the style of detectives that followed Holmes school of investigation. There is, for example, a delightful scene where he is trying to find out “The Truth” about a milkman using deductive reasoning and the results are...well... memorably hilarious…
My only complaint might be the very ending of the book… even if I loved Basil’s speech about the profession of Judge there (full of shrewd observations, if you ask me) what we find out about him might just undermine the understanding we thought we had about his prowess as an investigator. It doesn’t necessarily do that, but it can. That disappointed me a bit because I came to admire the way he acted throughout the book and the way he reached his conclusions.
But, all in all, The Club of Queer Trades was quite a humorous light read filled with some very quotable lines, and a very nice and different take on the mystery genre.
(By the way... 3 stars because I read a translation and it was quite a bit of rubbish - para a malta tuga: Europa-America, colecção vampiro...yeah... - but I guess that in this particular case I got exactly what I paid for, so I can't complain much.)