It appears that Chesterton wrote some detective stories with other 'detectives' than Father Brown; they are collected in the bundle 'Thirteen detectives'. I must confess it is rather odd to continually have a new main character. On the other hand, some stories have some beautiful Chestertonian ideas.
In 'A hole in the wall', for example, Chesterton exposes our modern habit of demystifying the past. One character says: 'For instance, the very name of this place, Prior's Park, makes everybody think of it as a moonlit medieval abbey [-]. But according to the only authoritative study of the matter I can find the place was simply called Prior's as any rural place is called Podger's. It was the house of a Mr. Prior'. Later in the story, though, we hear the following: 'When some critic or other chose to say that Prior's Park was not a priory, but was named after some quite modern man named Prior, nobody really tested the theory at all. It never occurred to anybody repeating the story to ask if there really was any Mr. Prior, if anybody had ever seen him or heard of him.' I find this a rather beautiful illustration of some principles that may still be at work in some other historical perceptions we moderns have.
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