The Paradoxes of Mr. Pond is G. K. Chesterton's final collection of detective stories, published after his death in 1936. Of the eight mysteries, seven were first printed in the Storyteller magazine. The Unmentionable Man was unique to the book. The stories revolve around a civil servant named Mr. Pond (we are not told his first name). He is described as a very ordinary and fish-like man who has a habit of startling those who meet him with outrageous paradoxical statements. He seems unaware of the oddness of his remarks, and his friend Sir Hubert Wotton explains: "he looks a very sedentary, scientific little cuss... but he's really had very extraordinary experiences. He doesn't talk about them; he doesn't want to talk about them... but when, in the course of talking in the abstract he comes on some concrete thing that he has actually done – well, I can only say he crumples it up. He tries to crush it into a small space and it simply sounds contradictory. Almost every one of those crazy sentences simply stands for one of the adventures in what would be called by most people a very unadventurous life." Chesterton himself was well known for using paradox in his writings, but in one story he explains that his kind of paradox is different from Mr. Pond's: In four of the stories Pond is induced to tell the dramatic tale which lies behind a baffling paradox; in another, "Pond the Pantaloon", Wotton tells the story. In two more, "The Crime of Captain Gahagan" and "The Terrible Troubadour", Pond's keen mind arrives at the truth when his friend Gahagan is accused of murder. In "Ring of Lovers" Gahagan tells a true story and trusts to Pond to guess the secret behind it. These stories written at the end of Chesterton's career contain narrative stretches and improbabilities, but they do not lack his familiar flashes of insight. In the story The Crime of Captain Gahagan Chesterton observes, through the character of Mr. Pond, that "Love never needs time. But friendship always needs time. More and more time, until up past midnight." Characters The main characters in the book are Mr. Pond, his friend Captain Peter Gahagan, a romantic and impulsive Irishman, and a well-known government official, Sir Hubert Wotton. Also mentioned in more than one chapter are Violet Varney, an actress, and her sister Joan, to whom