What’s happened to the cheap, sensational booklets called “penny dreadfuls,” and to detective fiction? Penny dreadfuls, for a start, have evolved, big time. How so? G. K. Chesterton, we recall, champions them. His “In Defence of Penny Dreadfuls” (1901) calls them “The center of a million flaming imaginations.” He presents them as a “bewildering mass” of adventure fiction noteworthy for being “rambling, disconnected, and endless.” Therein flourish, often in serial form, “the medieval knight, the eighteenth-century duelist, and the modern cowboy.” To update the cast, writers introduced Dick Deadshot and the Avenging Nine. Their characters “recur with the same stiff simplicity as the conventional human figures in an Oriental pattern.” As such, Chesterton continues, “I can quite as easily imagine a human being kindling wild appetites by the contemplation of his Turkey carpet as by such a dehumanised and naked narrative as this.”

Yet penny dreadfuls incurred the wrath of magistrates. For Chesterton, their complaints amount to stuff and nonsense. While sober citizens “curse the Penny Dreadful for encouraging thefts upon property, we canvass the proposition that all property is theft.” While “we accuse it (quite unjustly) of lubricity and indecency, we are cheerfully reading philosophies which glory in lubricity and indecency.” What’s worse, while “we charge it with encouraging the young to destroy life, we are placidly discussing whether life is worth preserving.”

Nonetheless, acute as Chesterton’s analysis is, penny dreadfuls have evolved. At best, they have become comic books. The graphics of camp and color are thriving. More worrisome, the medium itself has morphed. Video games don’t come on cheap paper, and so they cost more. Put them on techno steroids, and they become very noisy toys. It’s remarkable, isn’t it, that in “the land of the loudest music” youngsters read at all. Heavy Metal, like Rock ’n Roll, is here to stay. But Rap is the latest entry. Raunch rules the unruly.

Aping the adolescents, fewer and fewer adults read—and they read less and less. Often, their motive is escape. Yes, the classics are fine, on a shelf, and good literature has its place, in the library. (Present company excepted!) And so, we come to detective stories and murder mysteries. They, too, are serialized. Think of Sue Grafton’s alphabet adventures. They, too, have a familiar cast of characters: hard-nosed investigators, menacing mobsters, the duplicitous and the disturbed. And so many lonely hearts!

Chesterton also championed detective stories. Indeed, his own Father Brown would become one of their foremost protagonists. In his A Defence of Detective Stories (1901, again), Chesterton tells us that “By dealing with the unsleeping sentinels who guard the outposts of society,” the genre reminds “us that we live in an armed camp, making war with a chaotic world, and that the criminals, the children of chaos, are nothing but the traitors within our gates.”

In Chesterton’s eyes, the hero of such fables “is the agent of social justice who is the original and poetic figure,” while its villains, “burglars and footpads,” typify “apes and wolves.” Warming to his theme, he ventures to say that “The romance of the police force is thus the whole romance of man.” How could it be otherwise, since “morality is the most dark and daring of conspiracies.” A final flourish: “the whole noiseless and unnoticeable police management by which we are ruled and protected is only a successful knight-errantry.”

Like penny dreadfuls, the detective story has fallen on hard times. Yes, we still are making war with a chaotic world, but the genre seems ready to embrace the chaos. In my own escapist experience, its practitioners are keen to explore ghoulish murders, detailing every blood spatter. They are chroniclers of twisted sex limned with the leer of voyeurism. Meanwhile, every family turns out to be a nest of vipers.

To be sure, the times themselves can turn boy scouts into cynics. Scout masters have sexually abused their charges; priests have done so as well. Police management, pledged to serve and defend, has tolerated the physical abuse of prisoners. Now comes an Iceman and his ICE, ready to deport the innocent to desperate countries that countenance brutality.

Even in a financial depression, people still go to the movies to escape for just a bit. Can we add that in our cruel times, people need to escape more than ever? I think so, and it’s still just possible with a detective story. I’m reading one about art theft and forgery. Not half bad, and so far, no description of a Glock.

To readers looking for a detective fiction recommendation, I suggest Alan Bradley’s Flavia de Luce series, which includes 12 titles published by Penguin. And with that, my friend, I wish you the best of luck!