Rare G.K. Chesterton essay on mystery writing is itself a mystery
AP National Writer
NEW YORK (AP) — When he wasn’t working on mystery stories, and he completed hundreds, G.K. Chesterton liked to think of new ways to tell them. Detective fiction had grown a little dull, the British author wrote in a rarely seen letter from the 1930s published this week in The Strand, which has released obscure works by Ernest Hemingway, Truman Capote and many others. Suppose, he suggested, that you take an unsolved death from the past, like that of the 17th century magistrate Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, and come up with a novel that explores how he might have been murdered?
