[Chesterton] refused to follow Sinclair Lewis's elitist "Henry Jamesianism" and despise Main Street, but when Chesterton met Lewis at Marshall Field's State Street store in the rare book department, they liked one another....The writers sat down to talk books....Then someone suggested that they write a play together, an idea Chesterton happily agreed to...Lewis named their play "Mary, Queen of Scotch," and Chesterton said that if he wrote the first act it must be a detective play about a mysterious murder: "There's nothing like a nice murder...to get real human interest into the play..." He said Lewis could arrive at the solution and write the happy ending to a plot which he sketched out to be the story of "an American ex-distiller from Peoria found dead in his hotel, hit on the head with a quart bottle."
-The Outline of Sanity: A Life of G.K. Chesterton, Alzina Stone Dale (1982)
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