A short, shabby Essex priest with a broken umbrella turns out to know more about crime than the police, because he has spent his life hearing men confess it. Twelve stories: a cross of sapphires, a waiter who is also a gentleman, an invisible man who walks past four witnesses. Chesterton took the priest from John O'Connor, a real Yorkshire curate who shocked him one afternoon by knowing more of human evil than the novelist did. Fifty-seven plates of Victorian and Edwardian painting, from Frith's crowded railway platform to Watts's portraits, mirror the book's gallery of ordinary faces hiding extraordinary secrets.
