What I’m asking you to do in this essay is to consider a similar causal relationship between the
odd idiosyncrasies of character in the fictional detectives we meet in G.K. Chesterton’s short
story, “The Blue Cross.” Aristide Valentin, the Chief of the Paris Police, and Father Brown, the
bumbling country priest from Essex, are both fairly brilliant and fairly eccentric. I want you to
contrast the unusual methods of reasoning that each of them deploys and I want you to look
specifically at the ways in which those unusual methods of reasoning derive from odd traits in
the respective personality of each man.