To date, the only one of Chesterton's novel-length works I have read in pretty much its entirety is
The Man Who Was Thursday. I thought that was pretty great. The chase across circa 1906 France was one of the most suspenseful things I have ever read. No synopsis I could provide could do justice to it. Alan Moore
wishes anything in his
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Volume III: Century (a.k.a.
The League of Extrordinary Gentlemen: Century: 1910) graphic novel set in roughly the same period (1910) was as gripping and edge-of-one's-seat as that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_League ... I:_Century Besides that I have read or glanced over several of Chesterton's essays.
BTW (and my apologies if this veers too far off-topic) but the presence and use of swords in many of Chesterton's (and Moore's) works set in the early Twentieth century is not quite as anachronistic as might be supposed.
The U.S. Army adopted a new model cavalry saber (designed by a young George Patton, said to have been heavily influenced by the design of the British 1908 pattern sabre) in 1913, and adopted its last model of naval cutlass in 1917. The
shashka, or Cossack sabre definitely saw use before and during the Bolshevik Revolution and afterwards during the Russian Civil War, and was carried at least ceremonially into the Second World War.
Japanese officers carried (and occasionally used)
katana (samurai swords) in WW II. The British 3 and 4 Commando units under Lord Lovat are said to have used vintage cutlasses on enemy crewmen during the ship-scuttling raid on Lofoten Island in 1941. And there are reports of American Marines using cutlasses in combat, on land and sea, as late as 1943 or '44. Everyone knows (and knew at the time) that Chesterton sported a real swordstick in public, and this was not that freakish in his day (though it would be highly illegal in most places now).
DWM
"It is when we try to grapple with another man's intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible, wavering, and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun." -- Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim(1899?)