The Blue Cross by G.K. Chesterton

“The Blue Cross” by G.K. Chesterton is an excellently written detective story reminiscent of Sherlock Holmes, but with a greater focus on the unexpected. I enjoyed reading this story much more than I have any of the other short stories we have read thus far because while many of the stories from “Dubliners” and Kafka are concerned with feelings, moods, and themes presented through picturesque and often ambiguous language, Chesterton infuses his stories with far more logic. This is not to say that he leaves descriptions and themes out of the picture, but more that the stories are far more complete, clever, and satisfying.  A major theme in “The Blue Cross” is unexpected occurrences. From its very beginning, the main character, a detective, is not the common traveler that  any passerby would expect. Moreover, he is a French detective in England, which is slightly surprising. Throughout the story, the detective watches for anything unusual as he wanders about the city tracking Flambeau. It seems ridiculous that the detective should be able to connect switched salt and sugar, a star shaped hole in window, overturned apples, and switched merchandise signs With his target, but that is just another one of the unexpected aspects of the story. Even the criminal in the story is himself a man of incredible intellect. In the greatest unexpected occurrence of the whole story, the innocent looking priest seen at the beginning turns out to be clever enough to outwit the criminal and surprise the detective. The rationalizations used by the French detective, Valentin, for his seemingly foolish tracing of strange occurrences and the theological arguments between the two “priests” (one is Flambeau) show some of the added argumentation thrown into the story. Chesterton also adds a discussion of the type of intelligence possessed by the Valentin and sharply comments that he “was not ‘a thinking machine’; …a machine only is a machine because it cannot think.” This quote shows a little bit of the witty writing style of Chesterton.