Written in 1908 and set in the Edwardian era, The Man Who Was Thursday is a classic suspense novel sometimes termed a “metaphysical thriller”.  Detective Gabriel Syme is recruited by Scotland Yard to fight the anarchist movement. He meets Lucian Gregory, an anarchist poet, at a party and after debating the meaning of poetry he is invited to a meeting of the local branch of the European anarchist council.  The seven council members each use the name of a day of the week as a cover, and the council is set to elect the position of Thursday, which Gregory seeks but which Syme wins after making a rousing speech.  He discovers some surprising truths in seeking to thwart the council. Like many of Chesterton’s works, the story contains a helping of Christian allegory. The book’s popularity gave rise to a companion annotated edition by Martin Gardener called The Annotated Thursday. The book has been adapted for radio three times, the first by Orson Welles in 1938 for the Mercury Theatre.  It has enjoyed recent popularity, with an adaptation for film in 2016 by Hungarian Balazs Juszt and a2017 science fiction version by American Jake Kerr.

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