The Man Who Knew Too Much.






No, it’s not just the two (Hitchcock) movies, though Hitchcock used the title because he had bought the rights to the stories that were published under that title by…as if you hadn’t already guessed…




...G.K. Chesterton.

I know, enough about Chesterton already, and you’re right, it’s time to move on…but first:

What a terrific premise for a series of detective stories!

The Man Who Knew Too Much is a man named Horne Fisher, and his “Watson” is a journalist named Harold March. And in a series of 8 stories, our hero unravels the mystery behind a variety of crimes and misdemeanors in much the same deductive reasoning fashion as Sherlock Holmes. But here’s the twist. The criminals can never be brought to justice because they’re either too rich, too powerful, too well connected or protected by the privileges of the ruling class, political ties or wealth. He truly is The Man who knows too much! And it’s a hoot. The stories are almost formulaic and often predictable, but the fun is in discovering how and why the criminals are able to get away with it. Chesterton is constantly saying that logic is never enough. The world is a goofy, illogical, unfair place, but it's still fun trying to figure it out as long as you're willing to concede that you'll never really make sense of it. If G.K. were writing now, I’m sure he’d have just as much fun with Wall St. scammers and covert operations in the war on terror and drugs. And Horne is such an eccentric and unique character—sharp, observant, and a philosophical loner completely resigned to the fact that he can never (and will never) be able to prove anything in a court of law or popular opinion. To my knowledge, there’s no one else like him in the genre…though you could say that Hammett and Chandler gave Spade and Marlowe similar burdens to bear from time to time.


Okay, now for what I hope is a smooth and clever transition… bear with me.


The poverty of looking at things solely from the “logical side of things” was a central plank of the Chestertonian gospel.

“The madman,” he observed in Orthodoxy, “is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.”

In The Defendant (1901), Chesterton’s first collection of prose he says:

“The simple sense of wonder at the shapes of things, and at their exuberant independence of our intellectual standards and our trivial definitions, is the basis of spirituality as it is the basis of nonsense.”


In short: Nonsense and faith (strange as the conjunction may seem) are the two supreme symbolic assertions of the truth.


And G.K. put his pen where his mouth was when he wrote …

I wish I were a jellyfish
That cannot fall downstairs;
Of all the things I wish to wish
I wish I were a jellyfish
That hasn't any cares
And doesn't even have to wish
'I wish I were a jellyfish
That cannot fall downstairs.'

What is that? So simple, and yet not at all. Appears almost random but clearly follows a structure. And I suspected it was a formal form of some kind and I was right…it’s a Triolet!

A Triolet is a three stanza poem of eight lines.
The rhyme scheme is ABaAabAB --(where the A's and B's are identical lines)
and often with all lines in iambic tetrameter:
a la:

da DUM da DUM da DUM da (FLY)
da DUM da DUM da DUM da (CRY) etc.

The first, fourth and seventh lines are identical,
so are the second and eighth
So that means the first and last couplets are identical as well.

Once you get the format, you think the poem would almost write itself since so much is repeated, only two sounds have to rhyme and the first and last couplet are the same…so what’s left to do? Easy, right?...


…that is once the triple-repeating line, from which the form is named, is taken care of. This line is your opener, the primary inspiration for the middle section, and the set-up for the conclusive final line. Simply pulling a punch line out of thin air doesn’t work though…unless you’re willing to settle for true nonsense and what's the sense in that? But it’s nice to know once you’ve reached line six, all that’s left is repeating lines one and two.

So armed with the thought that Limericks are for sissies, and Triolets are the true calling for drifters with drifting brains, I'm jumping in.

Writing triolets should be fun
For I’ve no better thing to do
I may write lots before I’m done
Writing triolets should be fun
But here I am still stuck on one
Till I can find a rhyme for do
Writing triolets should be fun
For I’ve no better thing to do

Oy so tricky, and oy such rules?
foolish things these silly verses
A big time waste for us poor fools
Oy so tricky, and oy such rules
is there a secret set of tools?
whoops too late, it now reverses
Oy so tricky, and oy such rules?
foolish things these silly verses.


Will they won’t they bomb Iran?
In boldface asks the New York Times
Ehud Barak sure thinks he can
Will they won’t they bomb Iran?
Some say that that’s why Bibi ran
Serious shit for making rhymes
Will they won’t they bomb Iran?
In boldface asks the New York Times