Where are the other Horne Fisher stories?

G. K. Chesterton wrote eight stories featuring Horne Fisher, the man who knew too much. These were published in the collection The Man Who Knew Too Much (along with the novella The Trees of Pride) in 1922. You may notice that I've included only five of the eight Horne Fisher stories on my website, and you may wonder why I didn't include all of them.

In Horne Fisher, Chesterton concentrated all his frustration at what he considered a great English tragedy in the first decades of this century: the behind-the-scenes control of the British government by a small number of Jewish financiers. To Chesterton, the scandal involved both hidden control of government officials by their creditors and the purchase of titles by "foreign" Jews.

The subject of Chesterton and anti-semitism is a complicated one; a brief treatment may be found in this fact sheet presented by the G. K. Chesterton Institute. For my part, I accept the verdict of the Wiener Library in London that Chesterton "was not an enemy [of Jews], and when the real testing time came along he showed what side he was on."

Nevertheless, there are passages in Chesterton's writings, including the Horne Fisher stories, that I find distasteful. Rather than bowdlerize them for public consumption, I have decided to leave them off my website entirely. Martin Ward's "G. K. Chesterton's Works on the Web" has a plain-text version of The Man Who Knew Too Much, which I used for the material here, that contains all eight stories.

Etext prepared by Dianne Bean of Phoenix, Arizona, for Project Gutenberg.
HTML formatting by Tom Kreitzberg, tak@smart.net. Page created May 21, 1999.