The Defendant by G.K. Chesterton

In attempting to reach the genuine psychological reason for the / popularity of detective stories, it is necessary to rid ourselves of / many mere phrases. It is not true, for example, that the populace prefer / bad literature to good, and accept detective stories because they are / bad literature. The mere absence of artistic subtlety does not make a / book popular. Bradshaw's Railway Guide contains few gleams of / psychological comedy, yet it is not read aloud uproariously on winter / evenings. If detective stories are read with more exuberance than / railway guides, it is certainly because they are more artistic. Many / good books have fortunately been popular; many bad books, still more / fortunately, have been unpopular. A good detective story would probably / be even more popular than a bad one. The trouble in this matter is that / many people do not realize that there is such a thing as a good / detective story; it is to them like speaking of a good devil. To write a / story about a burglary is, in their eyes, a sort of spiritual manner of / committing it. To persons of somewhat weak sensibility this is natural / enough; it must be confessed that many detective stories are as full of / sensational crime as one of Shakespeare's plays.

There is, however, between a good detective story and a bad detective / story as much, or, rather more, difference than there is between a good / epic and a bad one. Not only is a detective story a perfectly legitimate / form of art, but it has certain definite and real advantages as an agent / of the public weal.

The first essential value of the detective story lies in this, that it / is the earliest and only form of popular literature in which is / expressed some sense of the poetry of modern life. Men lived among / mighty mountains and eternal forests for ages before they realized that / they were poetical; it may reasonably be inferred that some of our / descendants may see the chimney-pots as rich a purple as the / mountain-peaks, and find the lamp-posts as old and natural as the trees. / Of this realization of a great city itself as something wild and obvious / the detective story is certainly the 'Iliad. ' No one can have failed to / notice that in these stories the hero or the investigator crosses London / with something of the loneliness and liberty of a prince in a tale of / elfland, that in the course of that incalculable journey the casual / omnibus assumes the primal colours of a fairy ship. The lights of the / city begin to glow like innumerable goblin eyes, since they are the / guardians of some secret, however crude, which the writer knows and the / reader does not. Every twist of the road is like a finger pointing to / it; every fantastic skyline of chimney-pots seems wildly and derisively / signalling the meaning of the mystery.

This realization of the poetry of London is not a small thing. A city / is, properly speaking, more poetic even than a countryside, for while / Nature is a chaos of unconscious forces, a city is a chaos of conscious / ones. The crest of the flower or the pattern of the lichen may or may / not be significant symbols. But there is no stone in the street and no / brick in the wall that is not actually a deliberate symbol -- a message / from some man, as much as if it were a telegram or a post-card. The / narrowest street possesses, in every crook and twist of its intention, / the soul of the man who built it, perhaps long in his grave. Every brick / has as human a hieroglyph as if it were a graven brick of Babylon; every / slate on the roof is as educational a document as if it were a slate / covered with addition and subtraction sums. Anything which tends, even / under the fantastic form of the minutiae of Sherlock Holmes, to assert / this romance of detail in civilization, to emphasize this unfathomably / human character in flints and tiles, is a good thing. It is good that / the average man should fall into the habit of looking imaginatively at / ten men in the street even if it is only on the chance that the eleventh / might be a notorious thief. We may dream, perhaps, that it might be / possible to have another and higher romance of London, that men's souls / have stranger adventures than their bodies, and that it would be harder / and more exciting to hunt their virtues than to hunt their crimes.

But since our great authors (with the admirable exception of Stevenson) / decline to write of that thrilling mood and moment when the eyes of the / great city, like the eyes of a cat, begin to flame in the dark, we must / give fair credit to the popular literature which, amid a babble of / pedantry and preciosity, declines to regard the present as prosaic or / the common as commonplace. Popular art in all ages has been interested / in contemporary manners and costume; it dressed the groups around the / Crucifixion in the garb of Florentine gentlefolk or Flemish burghers. / In the last century it was the custom for distinguished actors to / present Macbeth in a powdered wig and ruffles. How far we are ourselves / in this age from such conviction of the poetry of our own life and / manners may easily be conceived by anyone who chooses to imagine a / picture of Alfred the Great toasting the cakes dressed in tourist's / knickerbockers, or a performance of 'Hamlet' in which the Prince / appeared in a frock-coat, with a crape band round his hat. But this / instinct of the age to look back, like Lot's wife, could not go on for / ever. A rude, popular literature of the romantic possibilities of the / modern city was bound to arise. It has arisen in the popular detective / stories, as rough and refreshing as the ballads of Robin Hood.