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 to bestow upon them and not placing reliance on nor making use of Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery, Coincidence or Act of God?