Free Silent Nights by Martin Edwards

redirected, or I should have taken the precaution of going to fetch the gentleman, whom you know as Mr Gornay, myself. He is a gentleman who is known to us at the Yard by more than one name, as well as by more than one handwriting, and now that we have so fortunately discovered his present whereabouts I can promise you that he will soon be laid by the heels. Perhaps Lord Churt will be kind enough to have my car ordered and to allow me to use his telephone.”
    â€œBut you’ll stay to dinner?” Churt asked. “It will be ready in a few minutes, and we shall none of us have time to dress.”
    â€œI am much obliged, my lord, but Mr Dale has done my work for me here in a way that any member of the Yard might be proud of, and now I must follow the tracks while they are fresh. It may not prove necessary to trouble you any further about this matter, but I think you are likely to see an important development in the great Ashfield forgery case reported in the newspapers before very long.”
    â€œWell,” Churt observed, “I think we may all congratulate ourselves on having got this matter cleared up without any unpleasant scenes. Now we shall be able to enjoy our Christmas. I call it a happy solution, a very happy solution.”
    His face beamed with relief and good humour as he once more produced his pocket-book. “Norah, my dear, you must accept an old man’s apology for causing you a very unpleasant afternoon; and you must accept this as well. No, I shall not take a refusal, and it will be much safer to send a cheque to the Red Cross.”
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    [The solution of the end-game given in this story, and the proof that a white queen must have been taken by the pawn at Q Kt 3, is given on page 285.]

The Flying Stars
    G.K. Chesterton
    Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936) was described by his “friendly enemy”, George Bernard Shaw, with whom he often crossed swords, as “a man of colossal genius”. His interests were extraordinarily wide-ranging, and he was a prolific writer, not least in his own paper, G.K.’s Weekly . At a Requiem Mass for Chesterton in Westminster Cathedral, Father Ronald Knox (himself a noted detective novelist) said, “All of this generation has grown up under Chesterton’s influence so completely that we do not even know when we are thinking Chesterton.”
    Father Brown was Chesterton’s most enduring fictional creation, and typically, “The Flying Stars” offers a literary parable, which sees the little priest urging Flambeau to abandon his life of crime. Chesterton was—unlike many of his contemporaries—a ferocious opponent of eugenics, but not all his views and attitudes have stood the test of time. His admirers continue to defend him against the charge that he was anti-Semitic, but there is a short passage at the start of this story which illustrates why the accusation is sometimes made.
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    â€œThe most beautiful crime I ever committed,” Flambeau would say in his highly moral old age, “was also, by a singular coincidence, my last. It was committed at Christmas. As an artist I had always attempted to provide crimes suitable to the special season or landscapes in which I found myself, choosing this or that terrace or garden for a catastrophe, as if for a statuary group. Thus squires should be swindled in long rooms panelled with oak; while Jews, on the other hand, should rather find themselves unexpectedly penniless among the lights and screens of the Cafe Riche. Thus, in England, if I wished to relieve a dean of his riches (which is not so easy as you might suppose), I wished to frame him, if I make myself clear, in the green lawns and grey towers of some cathedral town. Similarly, in France, when I had got money out of a rich and wicked peasant (which is almost impossible), it gratified me to get his indignant head relieved against a grey line of clipped poplars, and those solemn plains of Gaul over