The Three Tools Of Death & Other Stories: “The traveler sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see.”

By G.K. Chesterton

The short story is often viewed as an inferior relation to the Novel. But it is an art in itself. To take a story and distil its essence into fewer pages while keeping character and plot rounded and driven is not an easy task. Many try and many fail. In this series we look at short stories from many of our most accomplished writers. Miniature masterpieces with a lot to say. In this volume we examine some of the short stories of GK Chesterton. Gilbert Keith Chesterton was born in Campden hill, Kensington on May 29th 1874. Originally after attending St Pauls School he went to Slade to learn the illustrators art and literature. In 1896 he joined a small London publisher and began his journalistic career as a freelance art and literary critic. In 1901 he married Frances Blogg, to whom he remained married for the rest of his life. Thereafter he obtained weekly columns in the Daily News and The Illustrated London News. For many he is known as a very fine novelist and the creator of the Father Brown Detective stories which were much influenced by his own beliefs. A large man – 6’ 42 and 21st in weight he was apt to be forgetful in that delightful way that the British sometimes are – a telegram home to his wife saying he was in one place but where should he actually be. But he was prolific in many other areas; he wrote plays, essays, loved to debate and wrote hundreds of poems. But in this volume we concentrate on his short stories especially those concerning a certain Father Brown. Chesterton died of congestive heart failure on 14th June 1936 and is buried in Beaconsfield just outside of London. Many of these stories are also available as an audiobook from our sister company Word Of Mouth. Many samples are at our youtube channel http://www.youtube.com/user/PortablePoetry?feature=mhee

• Language: English
• Publisher: Copyright Group
• Release date: Aug 20, 2013
• ISBN: 9781780009551

G.K. Chesterton

G.K. Chesterton (1874–1936) was an English writer, philosopher and critic known for his creative wordplay. Born in London, Chesterton attended St. Paul’s School before enrolling in the Slade School of Fine Art at University College. His professional writing career began as a freelance critic where he focused on art and literature. He then ventured into fiction with his novels The Napoleon of Notting Hill and The Man Who Was Thursday as well as a series of stories featuring Father Brown.

Book preview

GK Chesterton – The Three Tools Of Death & Other Stories

The short story is often viewed as an inferior relation to the Novel.  But it is an art in itself.  To take a story and distil its essence into fewer pages while keeping character and plot rounded and driven is not an easy task.  Many try and many fail. 

In this series we look at short stories from many of our most accomplished writers.  Miniature masterpieces with a lot to say.  In this volume we examine some of the short stories of GK Chesterton.

Gilbert Keith Chesterton was born in Campden hill, Kensington on May 29th 1874.  Originally after attending St Pauls School he went to Slade to learn the illustrators art and literature.   In 1896 he joined a small London publisher and began his journalistic career as a freelance art and literary critic.  In 1901 he married Frances Blogg, to whom he remained married for the rest of his life. Thereafter he obtained weekly columns in the Daily News and The Illustrated London News.  For many he is known as a very fine novelist and the creator of the Father Brown Detective stories which were much influenced by his own beliefs.  A large man – 6’ 42 and 21st in weight he was apt to be forgetful in that delightful way that the British sometimes are – a telegram home to his wife saying he was in one place but where should he actually be.    But he was prolific in many other areas; he wrote plays, essays, loved to debate and wrote hundreds of poems.  But in this volume we concentrate on his short stories especially those concerning a certain Father Brown. 

Chesterton died of congestive heart failure on 14th June 1936 and is buried in Beaconsfield just outside of London.

Many of these stories are also available as an audiobook from our sister company Word Of Mouth.  Many samples are at our youtube channel   http://www.youtube.com/user/PortablePoetry?feature=mhee

Index Of Titles

The Bottomless Well

The Eye Of Apollo

The Man In The Passage

The Painful Fall Of A Great Reputation

The Three Tools Of Death

GK Chesterton – A Biography

The Bottomless Well

In an oasis, or green island, in the red and yellow seas of sand that stretch beyond Europe toward the sunrise, there can be found a rather fantastic contrast, which is none the less typical of such a place, since international treaties have made it an outpost of the British occupation. The site is famous among archaeologists for something that is hardly a monument, but merely a hole in the ground. But it is a round shaft, like that of a well, and probably a part of some great irrigation works of remote and disputed date, perhaps more ancient than anything in that ancient land. There is a green fringe of palm and prickly pear round the black mouth of the well; but nothing of the upper masonry remains except two bulky and battered stones standing like the pillars of a gateway of nowhere, in which some of the more transcendental archaeologists, in certain moods at moonrise or sunset, think they can trace the faint lines of figures or features of more than Babylonian monstrosity; while the more rationalistic archaeologists, in the more rational hours of daylight, see nothing but two shapeless rocks. It may have been noticed, however, that all Englishmen are not archaeologists. Many of those assembled in such a place for official and military purposes have hobbies other than archaeology. And it is a solemn fact that the English in this Eastern exile have contrived to make a small golf links out of the green scrub and sand; with a comfortable clubhouse at one end of it and this primeval monument at the other. They did not actually use this archaic abyss as a bunker, because it was by tradition unfathomable, and even for practical purposes unfathomed. Any sporting projectile sent into it might be counted most literally as a lost ball. But they often sauntered round it in their interludes of talking and smoking cigarettes, and one of them had just come down from the clubhouse to find another gazing somewhat moodily into the well.

Both the Englishmen wore light clothes and white pith helmets and puggrees, but there, for the most part, their resemblance ended. And they both almost simultaneously said the same word, but they said it on two totally different notes of the voice.

Have you heard the news? asked the man from the club. Splendid.

Splendid, replied the man by the well. But the first man pronounced the word as a young man might say it about a woman, and the second as an old man might say it about the weather, not without sincerity, but certainly without fervor.

And in this the tone of the two men was sufficiently typical of them. The first, who was a certain Captain Boyle, was of a bold and boyish type, dark, and with a sort of native heat in his face that did not belong to the atmosphere of the East, but rather to the ardors and ambitions of the West. The other was an older man and certainly an older resident, a civilian official, Horne Fisher; and his drooping eyelids and drooping light mustache expressed all the paradox of the Englishman in the East. He was much too hot to be anything but cool.

Neither of them thought it necessary to mention what it was that was splendid. That would indeed have been superfluous conversation about something that everybody knew. The striking victory over a menacing combination of Turks and Arabs in the north, won by troops under the command of Lord Hastings, the veteran of so many striking victories, was already spread by the newspapers all over the Empire, let alone to this small garrison so near to the battlefield.

Now, no other nation in the world could have done a thing like that, cried Captain Boyle, emphatically.

Horne Fisher was still looking silently into the well; a moment later he answered: We certainly have the art of unmaking mistakes. That's where the poor old Prussians went wrong. They could only make mistakes and stick to them. There is really a certain talent in unmaking a mistake.

What do you mean, asked Boyle, what mistakes?

Well, everybody knows it looked like biting off more than he could chew, replied Horne Fisher. It was a peculiarity of Mr. Fisher that he always said that everybody knew things which about one person in two million was ever allowed to hear of. And it was certainly jolly lucky that Travers turned up so well in the nick of time. Odd how often the right thing's been done for us by the second in command, even when a great man was first in command. Like Colborne at Waterloo.

It ought to add a whole province to the Empire, observed the other.

Well, I suppose the Zimmernes would have insisted on it as far as the canal, observed Fisher, thoughtfully, though everybody knows adding provinces doesn't always pay much nowadays.

Captain Boyle frowned in a slightly puzzled fashion. Being cloudily conscious of never having heard of the Zimmernes in his life, he could only remark, stolidly:

Well, one can't be a Little Englander.

Horne Fisher smiled, and he had a pleasant smile.

Every man out here is a Little Englander, he said. He wishes he were back in Little England.

I don't know what you're talking about, I'm afraid, said the younger man, rather suspiciously. One would think you didn't really admire Hastings or – or - anything.

I admire him no end, replied Fisher. He's by far the best man for this post; he understands the Moslems and can do anything with them. That's why I'm all against pushing Travers against him, merely because of this last affair.

I really don't understand what you're driving at, said the other, frankly.

Perhaps it isn't worth understanding, answered Fisher, lightly, and, anyhow, we needn't talk politics. Do you know the Arab legend about that well?

I'm afraid I don't know much about Arab legends, said Boyle, rather stiffly.

That's rather a mistake, replied Fisher, "especially from your point of view. Lord Hastings himself is an Arab legend. That is perhaps the very greatest thing he really is. If his reputation went it would weaken us all over Asia and Africa. Well, the story about that hole in the ground, that goes down nobody knows where, has always fascinated me, rather. It's Mohammedan in form now, but I shouldn't wonder if the tale is a long way older than Mohammed. It's all about somebody they call the Sultan Aladdin, not our friend of the lamp, of course, but rather like him in having to do with genii or giants or something of that sort. They say he commanded the giants to build him a sort of pagoda, rising higher and higher above all the stars. The Utmost for the Highest, as the people said when they built the Tower of Babel. But the builders of the Tower of Babel were quite modest and domestic people, like mice, compared with old Aladdin. They only wanted a tower that would reach heaven,  a mere trifle. He wanted a tower that would pass heaven and rise above it, and go on rising for ever and ever. And Allah cast him down to earth with a thunderbolt, which sank into the earth, boring a hole deeper and deeper, till