WORDSWORTH CLASSICS

Father Brown

G. K. CHESTERTON

Father Brown, one of the most quirkily genial and lovable characters to emerge from English detective fiction, first made his appearance in The Innocence of Father Brown in 1911. That first collection of stories established G. K. Chesterton's kindly cleric in the front rank of eccentric sleuths.

This collection contains all the favourite Father Brown stories. They represent the quiet wit and compassion which is so different from his moody and caustic predecessor, Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes. Father Brown solves his mysteries by a mixture of intuition and sympathetic worldliness in a totally believable manner.

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ISBN 1-85326-003-7

Inhalt
Stories from THE SECRET OF FATHER BROWN
The Mirror of the Magistrate	202
Stories from THE SCANDAL OF FATHER BROWN
The Blast of the Book	218
The Green Man	230
The Point of a Pin	246
The Insoluble Problem	263

INTRODUCTION

G. K. CHESTERTON wrote forty-nine Father Brown stories, and this selection contains the eighteen which Mgr Ronnie Knox judged to be the most ingenious. Martin Gardner considers Father Brown to be "the second most famous mystery-solver in English literature". Whilst this claim is disputable, the kindly East Anglian cleric is without doubt the most distinguished immediate successor to Sherlock Holmes. Unlike his moody and caustic predecessor, Father Brown has a quality of wit that is both kindly and reflective. One of the most rewarding aspects of the Father Brown stories is their deep insight into the nature of humanity, and the sympathetic affection and understanding that run through them.

Father Brown was based on Mgr John O'Connor of Bradford who received Chesterton into the Catholic Church. As Knox remarks of O'Connor, "he may have had difficulties in folding his umbrella, but instinctively you feel that this priest was a shrewd judge of men, with a reading of history and literature beyond the common". This worldly shrewdness which the author attributed to Father Brown may seem a surprising quality in one trained in a seminary, but Chesterton was well aware that a man who spent hours listening to other people's sins would have some acquaintance with the byways of human depravity. Indeed, he acknowledged it in the final exchange between the master criminal Flambeau and Father Brown at the end of The Blue Cross. In addition to this surprising but wholly believable worldliness is the intuitive skill which stems from it. Father Brown could place himself into the darker recesses of the criminal mind, and being a moralist rather than a psychologist he could imagine the limits of normal behaviour; he could guess at what point envy, fear or resentment would spill over so that a man might be driven to crime. It is here that the Father Brown stories excel, in ingenuity and plausibility rather than sensation and horror.