in which he had no success.

Shaw's name for Gilbert and Belloc--the Chesterbelloc--had come by
the public to be used for the novels in which they collaborated.
Belloc wrote the story, Chesterton drew the pictures, and the
resulting product was known as the Chesterbelloc. A number of letters
from Mr. Belloc beg Gilbert to do the drawings early in order to help
the story. "I have already written a number of _situations_ which you
might care to sketch. I append a list. Your _drawing_ makes all the
difference to my _thinking:_ I see the people in action more
clearly." And again, "I can't write till I have the inspiration of
your pencil. For the comedy in me is ailing."

Belloc would come over to Beaconsfield for a day or a night and the
two men retire into Gilbert's minute study whence hoots of laughter
would be heard. At the end of a couple of hours they would emerge
with the drawings for a book complete, indeed several more than were
needed.

Father Rice asked Gilbert once what he was writing and he replied,
"My publishers have demanded a fresh batch of corpses." The little
detective-priest ("I am very fond," said one reader to Chesterton,
"of that officious little loafer") became a feature in crime
anthologies, and when Anthony Berkeley in 1929 wanted to found the
Detective Club he wrote that it "would be quite incomplete without
the creator of Father Brown."

Gilbert soon became President. "Needless to say," writes Dorothy
Sayers, "he read his part of the initiation ceremony with tremendous
effect and enormous gusto."

In an article Gilbert wrote about the Club, he called it "a very
small and quiet conspiracy, to which I am proud to belong." Meeting
in various restaurants its members would "discuss various plots and
schemes of crime." Some results of these discussions may be seen in
the Initiation ceremonies which he made public in the article
"thereby setting a good example to the Mafia, the Ku Klux Klan, the
Illuminati . . . and all the other secret societies which now conduct
the greater part of public life, in the age of Publicity and Public
Opinion."

_The Ruler shall say to the Candidate:_

M.N. is it your firm desire to become a Member of the Detection
Club?

_Then the Candidate shall answer in a loud voice:_

That is my desire.

_Ruler:_

Do you promise that your detectives shall well and truly detect the
crimes presented to them using those wits which it may please you