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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Father Brown- the unexpected detective,
By Vince Murphy "Murph" (Lincoln, NE, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: THE FATHER BROWN OMNIBUS. (Hardcover)
Any time I can read a Father Brown mystery story by G. K. Chesterton I do. They are guaranteed to be interesting from beginning to end. Many times they will leave you with a smile on your face, because Father Brown is so nice, but calls things as he sees them. I bought the Father Brown Omnibus because it has EVERY Father Brown Story in it. Hours and hours of pleasant diversion!
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Father Brown Solves the Unsolvable by Thinking the Unthinkable,
By
This review is from: THE FATHER BROWN OMNIBUS. (Hardcover)
"More pines, more pathway slid past him, and then he stood rooted as by a blast of magic. It is vain to say that he felt as if he had got into a dream; but this time he felt quite certain that he had got into a book. For we human beings are used to inappropriate things; we are accustomed to the clatter of the incongruous; it is a tune to which we can go to sleep. If one appropriate thing happens, it wakes us up like the pang of a perfect chord. Something happened such as would have happened in such a place in a forgotten tale." (page 406, The Strange Crime of John Boulnois, @1951 Dodd, Mead and Company)
Gothic and classic crime fiction combine in these enjoyable short stories. Father Brown, parish priest by day, famous amateur detective by night, is Chesterton's unassuming affable apologist for Christianity and the Catholic faith. Sometimes alone and sometimes teaming up with a few recurring characters Brown solves the unsolvable by thinking the unthinkable. Foreshadowing Christie's great Poirot and his concern with the psychology of the crime, Father Brown imagines himself a murderer who would commmit the specific kind of murder being examined and forges the facts from that point. In order to perform this psychological feat Father Brown must stay in the shadows and throughout the many stories the reader does not get a full characterization of the man himself. He is short. He is plain. He likes people. He does not care how others judge his appearance. Standing apart and unconstrained by superficial social convention he is free to act upon his instincts and insights. But you will never find out what he likes for dinner. Or how he developed his razor sharp mind. The palatability and novelty of these stories prove Chesterton to be a very clever man himself. His language is spot on and he so brilliantly uses setting to describe small nuances of mood that we humans notice but can rarely put to words. However he doesn't stint himself when lingering over a setting or description as evinced by this nearly 1000 page volume of every Father Brown published. Though a quick reader it took me about two months of bedside reading to finish the book. Additionally the modern reader will find the mannerisms and stereotyping dated. Were he a real person Father Brown would have been a contemporary of my great-grandmother born in 1887, therefore he and his cohorts display the late Victorian traits of a certain flowery formality of language combined with a mind that accepts no bunk and cuts right to the chase. This can be quaint or disconcerting and the modern reader will need to read a story or two to become accustomed to the pacing and storytelling devices used in the first half of the twentieth century. Thankfully Chesterton branched out from his great non-fictive philosophies and apologetics to gives us this perennially fresh rendering of classic crime fiction. A wonderful rediscovery for the contemporary mystery reader interested in the early days of detective fiction.
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