The Council is comprised of six other men, all named for a different day of the week. To do this, he tricks a real anarchist poet, Lucian Gregory, and is elected to the council in his place. Syme’s task is to go underground and join the Central Anarchist Council and uncover their plans. But it would obviously be undesirable to employ the common policeman in an investigation which is also a heresy hunt.” I am a democrat myself, and I am fully aware of the value of the ordinary man in matters of ordinary valour or virtue.

It is their business to watch the beginnings of this conspiracy, not merely in a criminal but in a controversial sense. He has, therefore, formed a special corps of policemen, policemen who are also philosophers. He is certain that the scientific and artistic worlds are silently bound in a crusade against the Family and the State. “This is the situation: The head of one of our departments, one of the most celebrated detectives in Europe, has long been of opinion that a purely intellectual conspiracy would soon threaten the very existence of civilisation.

“I will tell you,” said the policeman slowly.

He is recruited to a special anti-anarchist unit of the British police by a mysterious figure who remains hidden in the shadows. Gabriel Syme is a poet who fears the world is destined for destruction under a wave of moral relativism and nihilism. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton, is a wondrous amalgam of thriller, mystery, boys’ adventure, and Christian allegory wrapped in a ripped-from-the-headlines tale of a cabal of anarchists plotting to blow things up. The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare (1908), by G.K. The more his mother preached a more than Puritan abstinence the more did his father expand into a more than pagan latitude and by the time the former had come to enforcing vegetarianism, the latter had pretty well reached the point of defending cannibalism.īeing surrounded with every conceivable kind of revolt from infancy, Gabriel had to revolt into something, so he revolted into the only thing left-sanity. Hence the child, during his tenderer years, was wholly unacquainted with any drink between the extremes of absinth and cocoa, of both of which he had a healthy dislike. His father cultivated art and self-realisation his mother went in for simplicity and hygiene. One of his uncles always walked about without a hat, and another had made an unsuccessful attempt to walk about with a hat and nothing else.

He came of a family of cranks, in which all the oldest people had all the newest notions. His respectability was spontaneous and sudden, a rebellion against rebellion. He had not attained it by any tame tradition. He was one of those who are driven early in life into too conservative an attitude by the bewildering folly of most revolutionists. Nor was his hatred of anarchy hypocritical. Gabriel Syme was not merely a detective who pretended to be a poet he was really a poet who had become a detective.

The man who was thursday a nightmare