"The criticism of basic improbability that can be made against all stories about private detectives can be made against them. In real life we never run across these extraordinary crimes or at the most once in a lifetime."
(Hollis 179)

"In real life crimes are more often than not commited by the person who from the first looked the most prbable perpetrator. Not so in the detective story, and in Chesterton's stories both the crime and the solution are almost always of bizarre complexity that quite challenges probability."
(Hollis 179-180)

"...the notion of creating a priest-detective was suggested to Chesterton by his discovery that Monsignor O'Connor knew through the confessional so very much more about the secrets of the sould than the simple young Cambridge undergraduates who thought of him as a man innocent of the world."
(Hollis 180)



Hollis, Christopher. _The Mind of Chesterton_. University of Miami Press: Coral Gables, Florida. 1970