“Believe me, you never know the best about men till you know the worst about them.”
— Horne Fisher, the sleuth of The Man Who Knew Too Much
These are mystery stories, eight of them, deeply immersed in the world of Edwardian England. The stories are atmospheric. They present between the lines a picture of a deep culture of money and privilege, from drawing rooms and great houses. This culture is not just food and dress and conveyances and secluded places. There are communications and behavioral conventions, party games, fields, and fences. More than anything, an idea. The idea of British Empire. A closed culture. A culture of those who know.
And, as the title says, the one who knows too much.
The Title of Two Movies
The title is familiar. This is because of a pair of movies made by Alfred Hitchcock in 1934 and 1956. Both movies were entitled “The Man who Knew too Much.” Hitchcock purchased the movie rights for this book. However, in the end he used only the title. His movies do not follow the plotlines in the stories. Chesterton’s sleuth Horne Fisher is nowhere to be seen, nor is Edwardian England. The two movies center on the idea of an American travelling abroad who becomes aware of an assassination plot. This is a rather common type of man who knows too much. Chesterton’s Horne Fisher is something different.
Fisher is trapped among his close knit and highly-placed friends. Among them, he cannot speak the truth. Elections and peace treaties depend on the truth not coming out. Saddled with his own quaint and generous progressivism, Fisher is relegated to the sidelines by a famous politician brother.
A British Catholic
There is some nuance in all this. Horne is an insider who’s actually an outsider. G.K. Chesterton understood. Chesterton was Catholic and this faith has had a radical political life. When it’s not the law of the land, often it’s outside the law. In particular, Catholicism was illegal in England from Elizabeth the 1st’s reign in 1559 until the Catholic Relief Act of 1778. By 1922, when The Man Who Knew Too Much was published, British Catholics had been restored to almost all civil liberties. They were excluded only from holding the throne. But the feeling of aggrievement remained for Catholics like Chesterton. It shows up in his writing. A nobleman who becomes a bigamist in order to legitimize a child is compared to Henry the Eighth. A long discussion of names and how we believe that they don’t mean what they say — and yet they mean exactly what they say — points to the Catholic and Protestant argument about transubstantiation.
The Man in the Middle
In the middle of the book’s closed culture is Horne Fisher. He is a man of leisure and a black sheep of his family. Fisher sees with eyes both knowing and knowledgeable. He is the cousin of the prime Minister, the nephew of another cabinet member. Even though he sees the true culprit in murderous crimes, he cannot make it public. Fisher shares these secrets with his young friend Harold Marsh.
Marsh is a journalist. Fisher’s foil for these stories is like an innocent observant child. Chesterton calls Marsh “the kind of man who knows everything about politics, and nothing about politicians.” Fisher explains to Marsh how things really are — the Realpolitik of the Edwardian era.
The Art of Knowing too Much
There is an irony in the title of the book because in this culture knowing things is the coin of the realm. Being knowledgeable about history, art, writing, foreign lands and military technology is expected of men of Fisher’ circle. And yet he knows too much. He knows too much to be useful and too much to be safe. He knows too much about people.
The murder mysteries here are the kind you think of as being “hushed up.” Often as not, the criminal is an insider whose motives are tied up in the empire upon which the sun never sets. Trapped in their service to this imperial machine, these men serve themselves first. They turn a blind eye to Injustice. But Horne Fisher is a different type of man. In the end, he finds a way to strike a blow for the Homeland and the British people.
The Character of Murder
Never quite so ingenious as Agatha Christie, Chesterton nevertheless has the jump on her in terms of matters of deep human character. Murderous motives come out of pride, more often than not. Subtleties and eccentricities of the same are rife. The financier in his dosage insists on fishing from dawn to dusk every day. The new money man seeks to cover his tracks and appear one of the old nobles. The man at the highest levels of government has an obsession with Middle Eastern swords. And the historic old homes where the mysteries take place provide not just the backdrop but the machinery for the solutions of the mysteries.
Expedients and Pretenses
Chesterton shows how, once men make an expedient of religion, they soon begin to make expedient decisions about the lives of other men. It’s said that fictional stories are often somehow more true than fact. The truths of these stories are often matters of character. The antagonists have a pronounced character of false pretense of service. The reader sees and recognizes these people from the current day.
Horne Fisher declares to Marsh, when complimented that he knows everybody, that “I know too much, that’s what’s the matter with me, that’s what’s the matter with all of us, and the whole show. We know too much about one another, too much about ourselves … ” It is something to meditate on. In a world such as our own, we often think if we only knew more, and knew ourselves more, we would do better. Chesterton tells us differently. We do not, actually, need to know more. We all know the difference between right and wrong. That is all you really need.
