The Man Who Knew Too Much

The Man Who Knew Too Much, Classic Detective Stories, Complete New Edition, By Gilbert K. Chesterton, The Man Who Knew Too Much and other stories (1922) is a book of detective stories by English writer G. K. Chesterton, published by Cassell and Company in 1922. The book contains twelve stories, the first eight of which are about The Man Who Knew Too Much, while the final four are individual stories featuring separate heroes/detectives.The Man Who Knew Too Much is the main protagonist of the first eight stories, Horne Fisher. In the final story, ''The Vengeance of the Statue'', Fisher notes: ''The Prime Minister is my father's friend. The Foreign Minister married my sister. The Chancellor of the Exchequer is my first cousin.'' Because of these intimate relationships with the leading political figures in the land, Fisher knows too much about the private politics behind the public politics of the day. This knowledge is a burden to him in the eight stories, because he is able to uncover the injustices and corruptions of the murders in each story, but in most cases the real killer gets away with the killing because to bring him openly to justice would create a greater chaos: starting a war, reinciting Irish rebellions or removing public faith in the government.In the seventh story, ''The Fad of the Fisherman'', the Prime Minister himself is the murderer, who kills the financier whose country house he is visiting because the financier is trying to start a war with Sweden over ''the Danish ports''. By killing his host, the Prime Minister seeks to avoid a war in which many more people would die, and the financier would profit at the cost of thousands of lives.