The Queer Feet: The Innocence of Father Brown

“The Queer Feet” revolves around a clever piece of deduction by Chesterton’s priest/detective Father Brown, but it depends on a highly contrived situation and a statement about human behaviour that, if it applied in 1911, certainly does not do so today.

The situation is the annual dinner of an exclusive men’s club called The Twelve True Fishermen. Their dinner is at the equally exclusive, not to say bizarre, Vernon Hotel in London’s Belgravia. The restaurant only has one table, at which 24 people can sit, but if there only 12 diners, as on this occasion, they can sit in a row and have a view of the hotel garden. The restaurant employs fifteen waiters, who therefore outnumber the guests.

short story, mysteries story, detective story, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, The Man Who Was Thursday, Orthodoxy, Father Brown stories, The Everlasting Man