The Paradoxes of Mr. Pond
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The Paradoxes of Mr Pond is G. K. Chesterton's final collection of detective stories published after his death in 1936. Of the eight mysteries, seven were first printed in the Storyteller magazine. The Unmentionable Man was unique to the book.
The stories centre around a civil servant named Mr Pond (we are not told his first name). He is described as a very ordinary and fish-like man who has a habit of startling those who meet him with outrageous paradoxes of thought; otherwise he is a thoroughly unremarkable and even boring person.
For various reasons he comes to know of, or finds himself in the middle of, a dramatic, usually criminal, paradox. For instance, in The Three Horsemen of the Apolocalypse, a general's career is ruined by his subordinates' ability to following his orders perfectly.
Although written at the end of his career, and though the stories contain narrative stretches and improbabilities, they do not lack from Chesterton's flashes of insight. In the story The Crime of Captain Gahagan Chesterton observes, through the character of Mr Pond, that "Love never needs time. But friendship always needs time. More and more time, until up past midnight."
The last story, A Tall Tale has a remarkable ending. It starts with the paradox that sometimes things are too big to be seen (a popular theme in Chesterton), and the reader is then left to guess, most often wrongly, which of the far too obvious characters committed the murder described.
