Complete and unabridged, with 56 full-page plates by William Orpen, Spencer Gore and Walter Sickert. Horne Fisher knows everybody in England worth knowing, which is why he can solve any crime in the book and prevent almost none of them — the murderer is always a man the country cannot afford to hang. Chesterton was six foot four and twenty stone, created Father Brown, and wrote these eight stories in 1922 as a political indictment dressed as detection. The despair under the paradoxes is real. Fifty-six plates of painting, 1880 to 1925, by Walter Sickert and William Orpen, catch the same mood in the same years: rooms where something has already happened and no one has been made to answer for it.
