The Club of Queer Trades

Basil Grant, a retired judge, and his brother investigate a series of impossible situations — a man paid to be a professional detainer, an agency that supplies real adventures to bored gentlemen — and the solution is always that someone has invented a trade nobody had thought of. Chesterton was six foot four and twenty stone and created Father Brown; this 1905 book is his first detective work and his most purely delighted.