The Napoleon of Notting Hill is a futuristic novel set in London in 1984. Chesterton envisions neither great technological leaps nor totalitarian suppression. Instead, England is ruled by a series of randomly selected Kings, because people have become entirely indifferent. The joker Auberon Quin is crowned and he instates elaborate costumes for every sector of London. All the city's provosts are bored with the idea except for the earnest young Adam Wayne - the Napoleon of Notting Hill.

The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up. And one of the games to which it is most attached is called Keep to-morrow dark, and which is also named (by the rustics in Shropshire, I have no doubt) Cheat the Prophet. The players listen very carefully and respectfully to all that the clever men have to say about what is to happen in the next generation. The players then wait until all the clever men are dead, and bury them nicely. They then go and do something else. That is all. For a race of simple tastes, however, it is great fun. For human beings, being children, have the childish wilfulness and the childish secrecy. And they never have from the beginning of the world done what the wise men have seen to be inevitable. They stoned the false prophets, it is said; but they could have stoned true prophets with a greater and juster enjoyment. Individually, men may present a more or less rational appearance, eating, sleeping, and scheming. But humanity as a whole is changeful, mystical, fickle, delightful. Men are men, but Man is a woman.

Source documents compiled by insurance investigator Ralph Henderson are used to build a case against Baron "R___", who is suspected of murdering his wife. The baron's wife died from drinking a bottle of acid, apparently while sleepwalking in her husband's private laboratory. Henderson's suspicions are raised when he learns that the baron recently had purchased five life insurance policies for his wife. As Henderson investigates the case, he discovers not one but three murders. Although the baron's guilt is clear to the reader even from the outset, how he did it remains a mystery. Eventually this is revealed, but how to catch him becomes the final challenge; he seems to have committed the perfect crime.

G. K. Chesterton, London and Modernity is the first book to explore the persistent theme of the city in Chesterton's writing. Situating him in relation to both Victorian and Modernist literary paradigms, the book explores a range of theoretical and methodological approaches to address the way his imaginative investments and political interventions conceive urban modernity and the central figure of London. While Chesterton's work has often been valued for its wit and whimsy, this book argues that he is also a distinctive urban commentator, whose sophistication has been underappreciated in comparison to more canonical contemporaries. With chapters written by leading scholars in the field of 20th-century literature, the book also provides fresh readings and suggests new contexts for central texts such as The Man Who Was Thursday, The Napoleon of Notting Hill and the Father Brown stories. It also discusses lesser-known works, such as Manalive and The Club of Queer Trades, drawing out their significance for scholars interested in urban representation and practice in the first three decades of the 20th century.

Innocent Smith is a man full of boyish exuberance. Deliberately defying convention, he is involved in a series of madcap pranks. He picnics on rooftops, breaks into his own house and has an affair with his own wife. This unconventional behaviour makes him mistrusted and extremely unpopular with those around him. But things are not always what they seem?