GK Chesterton
I like crime detection by moral deduction, a technique practiced by Father Brown in the G K Chesterton stories…After a decade on the probate bench, I began to see the characters in will and trust contests as moral archetypes: the prideful one; the envious one; the angry one; the greedy one; etc. And I do believe that Chesterton has a point, that we are governed by our wretched excesses of the spirit, that our spirits are visible through our actions, and that we can divine a great deal of the workings of a crime from a keen observation of the character of the suspect, or the characters of multiple suspects. And in the probate arena, these qualities are easily observable, as indeed these qualities may lead to heinous crimes, attested by Agatha Christie’s plots as well as many other writers.
