Chaos Is Dull: G.K. Chesterton and Detective Fiction (Part II)

Detective Fiction, Fairy Tales, and Eucatastrophe

This series is drawn from a talk I gave at this year’s Chesterton Conference in Minneapolis. I’m hoping to share more pieces like this for my Substack subscribers in addition to This Week’s Miscellany and weekly Jane Austen reflections. If you’re not a subscriber it’s a great time to subscribe because…

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Last week in Part One, I reflected on G.K. Chesterton’s claim in his strange detective story, The Man Who Was Thursday, that “chaos is dull.” Order is what makes poetry and art possible. Today I’ll continue by considering the structure of detective fiction, what it has to do with fairy tales, and why we’re drawn to it.

G.K. Chesterton was the first president of The Detection Club, a secret society for crime writers. It was founded in 1930 and included Dorothy Sayers and Agatha Christie among other writers of mysteries. Imagine that you time travel to 1930 to attend one of Chesterton and Sayers and Agatha Christie’s Detection Club meetings. On your way in to the event, Chesterton himself would prompt you to swear on a skull that your story’s detective never resort to using “Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery, Coincidence, or Act of God”; and that you would “conceal no vital clues from the reader” and “honour the King’s English”. Woe to the writer who does not hold fast to this vow! They would be cursed with: “May other writers anticipate your plots, may total strangers sue you for libel, may your pages swarm with misprints, and your sales continually diminish.” A terrifying prospect indeed!

Detection Club member and Catholic priest Ronald Knox came up with a 10 Commandments of Detective Fiction including: “Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable” and “Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.” I find these very specific rules absolutely delightful, but I’d like to zoom out and consider the big picture of what a detective mystery is because I think detective mysteries are stories that point to a deeper story, the Deepest Story.

In detective fiction, we enter an environment of chaos. Justice has been breached. The world is in disorder. And from this chaos, the detective must enter the scene and bring order from chaos. And this restoration of order results in wonder and delight. The detective might be Chesterton’s Fr. Brown, a simple priest. Or he might be Dorothy Sayers’ Lord Peter Whimsey, or Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot.

My dear friend Boze Herrington once pointed out to me that the most popular modern stories draw on this detective fiction structure. (For example, detective Harry Potter and his sidekicks Ron and Hermoine, work out mysteries at Hogwarts!) And many popular TV show genres are similar as well.  Dr. House of the series “House” is a detective with a medical mystery to solve. There is something in disorder that must be made sense of. But this structure is not new.

Genesis 1:2 reads “the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep.” That’s the beginning of the Great Story. We enter an environment of chaos, in Hebrew tohu wabohu. But God sets the world in order. He separates the light from the darkness and the oceans and sky and land. Every created thing is properly ordered and there is joy and wonder to be found in that glorious order.¹ 

In fairy tales, we see this same movement from chaos to order, from wrong to right. There is often a great injustice in fairy tales. Cinderella, who is loving and kind, is tyrannized and isolated. Then there is some catalyst–for Cinderella, it’s her fairy godmother–who sets things in motion so that justice can be restored. The great-souled young woman is acknowledged by all to be the princess she has always been by merit of her virtues. The evil stepmother is revealed to be the villain she has always been as her crimes are revealed. Darkness is separated from light and what was in turmoil and chaos is now set right. There is the delight of order restored.

And this work of restoring order is something we do as human beings in imitation of God. When we bring things from chaos to order, we are imitating the Creator who has made us in his image. When an editor takes my draft and sets right what is wrong, that is a thing of wonder. When a parent puts away all of the shoes and water bottles and art projects all over the living room where the children leave them–is it the same wondrous action of restoring something good from the chaos. When my husband, who is the good cook in the family, takes many ingredients and put them together into a beautiful meal. It makes the heart sing, doesn’t it? A thing of beauty and a joy forever.  This is part of what it means to be human: to bring order from chaos.

And in literature or films, there is an undeniable comfort to this story structure. Most readers of detective fiction and viewers of mystery shows will note this comforting feature of these sorts of stories. We’ll talk of cozying up with a murder mystery. Is murder cozy? Perhaps not, but you enter a world in chaos and by the end of the novel (or the end of the TV episode) justice and order have been restored. Against all odds, the detective will solve the mystery. He will not fail. 

The world we live in often feels chaotic. It is not as easily set right as things in an episode of “Miss Marple” or “Endeavor” are. Summer of 2022 we were moving our four children, our very grumpy cat, and our enormous dumb dog Samwise from Texas to Florida. We had to get our house ready to sell, pack up and move all our belongings across the country. We needed to buy a new house, move in, and unpack. I had just started a new job and we were moving so that my husband could start a new job, too. So much needed to happen to set up our children’s schooling, summer camps, new health care providers, new pharmacy for our kids asthma prescriptions. It was chaos.

While packing up boxes, I would watch an episode of Call the Midwife– a series about an order of Anglican nuns in Poplar who minister to local pregnant women and help bring their babies safely into the world. At the beginning of each episode, there is a medical mystery or problem. And the charming sisters of St. Raymond Nonnatus figure it out. They determine a solution. They bring a new life into the world. And it was cathartic. I would pack while I watched and then at the end of the episode a baby would be born and I would cry and then I would pack another box. The structure of the story, knowing that the nuns would figure it out in the end, was a comfort amidst my own personal chaos. 

So it’s easy to see why we find detective fiction comforting and why so many people read murder mysteries during the Covid pandemic. We are wired with a natural longing for order to be restored. But I think this structure is more than merely comforting. The structure of chaos to order rings true to us. And as Christians we believe that against all odds, order can be restored, what’s broken can be fixed, what’s lost can be found. 

I think it is related to what J.R.R. Tolkien calls Eucatastrophe in his long essay On Fairy Stories:

"But the 'consolation' of fairy-tales…I will call it Eucatastrophe. The eucatastrophic tale is the true form of fairy-tale, and its highest function…The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous “turn” (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially 'escapist', nor 'fugitive'. In its fairy-tale—or otherworld—setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.

It is the mark of a good fairy-story, of the higher or more complete kind, that however wild its events, however fantastic or terrible the adventures, it can give to child or man that hears it, when the “turn” comes, a catch of the breath, a beat and lifting of the heart, near to (or indeed accompanied by) tears, as keen as that given by any form of literary art, and having a peculiar quality."

I’ve recently had the pleasure of diving back into George MacDonald’s fairy tales because Word on Fire Spark is releasing a new illustrated edition of three of MacDonald’s stories: “The Golden Key,” “The Light Princess,” and “Little Daylight.” MacDonald was a 19th century Scottish writer and minister that C.S. Lewis and Chesterton both loved. Lewis said that MacDonald’s stories baptized his imagination–Chesterton considered MacDonald to be “one of the three or four greatest men of 19th century Britain.” And of MacDonald’s book The Princess and the Goblin, Chesterton said that it “made a difference to my whole existence.”

“The Light Princess” is a great example of a story with that joyful turning Tolkien describes in “On Fairy Stories.” It’s a lovely fairy tale, although less popular than some of MacDonald’s other stories like The Princess and the Goblin. It’s the story of a princess who is cursed at her christening by an evil witch. The witch takes away the princess’s gravity. This has a double meaning. She is not affected by gravity and floats around everywhere, but she also has no gravity or seriousness. She laughs at everything, no matter how sad. She cannot cry or experience real depth of feeling. Her one real joy is swimming because in water she has weight, she can swim like everyone else and not be in danger of flying off into the sky.

One day, a prince from a distant realm sees her  on a moonlight swim and falls in love with her just before disaster strikes. The evil witch has her snake drink the lake dry. The princess cannot swim, and the people of kingdom have lost their source of water and are dying of thirst. In the mud of the shrinking lake, they find a prophecy written:  “Death alone from death can save. Love is death, and so is brave–Love can fill the deepest grave. Love loves on beneath the wave.”  And they determine that a man must give his life for all by staunching the leak in the lake. Because the prince cannot bear for the Light Princess to be unhappy or for the people of the kingdom to perish, he offers himself. He asks only that the princess stay with him while he drowns. The princess fails to fully comprehend what is happening to the prince until the lake starts to refill and his face is covered with water. Then she realizes that she loves him and pulls him out of the lake, weeping. His life and saved and through her tears she overturns both curses–the curse of lightness and the curse of the drought. Mirroring her tears, the sky pours down rain, bringing water to the kingdom. There is the sudden joyous turning, the ending of all the truest stories.

Eucatastrophe forms the imagination for hope. As G.K. Chesterton famously said about fairy tales, “The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.” 

This eucatastrophe that we find in fairy tales is the echo of the Great Story that turns at the moment of seeming despair, Christ on the Cross–the moment that surprises us because it turns loss into victory. And in their way, detective mysteries can also reflect this Eucatastrophe in which justice and order are restored in the most surprising ways.

To be continued….

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1.  Joe Grabowski pointed out when we were chatting about this the other day on the Uncommon Sense podcast that the end of The Man Who Was Thursday points back to the seven days of creation! There’s a connection between the creation story and the structure of this detective novel. Each of the undercover detectives who believed each other to be anarchists is given an outfit that’s decorated according to one day of creation for the end of the story.