Customer Reviews

The Wisdom of Father Brown

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In the genre of the finely crafted English detective story, Chesterton's "Father Brown" stories are wholesome and stimulating detective tales surpassed by few others, except perhaps Doyle's legendary Sherlock Holmes. In contrast to the arrogant Holmes, however, Chesterton's protagonist is rather quiet, unassuming and modest, and makes an unlikely hero - a catholic priest. Father Brown's simple manner makes you quick to underestimate him, but the startling flashes of brilliance that spill from beneath his humble exterior soon make you realize that he has a firm grasp on the truth of a situation when you are as yet frustratingly distant from it. His perceptive one-liners make it evident that he has a clear insight into something that you see only as an apparently insoluble paradox.

Chesterton has been called the "prince of paradox", and the Father Brown stories are a clear testimony of his fondness for paradox. Ultimately it is not just crimes that Brown must solve, but the paradox underlying them. In fact, not all stories are crime stories - among them are mysterious situations that do not involve criminals, and it is the perceptive insight of Father Brown that is needed make apparent contradictions comprehensible by his ruthless logic. Father Brown is not so much concerned with preserving life or bringing a criminal to justice as he is with unravelling the strands of an impossible paradox. In fact, Chesterton's conception of Father Brown is itself a paradox - both a cleric and a crime-fighter, a priest and a policeman, a representative of God's mercy and an instrument of God's justice, a proclaimer of forgiveness and a seeker of guilt, a listener in the confessional and a questioner in the interrogation.

How a priest could possibly play the role of a detective is explained in the first story, "The Blue Cross". Brown apprehends the confounded criminal Flambeau and explains that his knowledge of the criminal mind is due in part to what he's heard at the confessional booth "We can't help being priests. People come and tell us these things." When Flambeau retorts "How in blazes do you know all these horrors?" Chesterton allows his humble priest to attribute his insight into human depravity to his experience as a priest: "Oh, by being a celibate simpleton, I suppose, he said. Has it never struck you that a man who does next to nothing but hear men's real sins is not likely to be wholly unaware of human evil."

But both Chesterton and Father Brown have insight into much more than just human depravity - they are both champions of Catholic orthodoxy. This gives the Father Brown stories a depth not found in Brown's compatriot Holmes. In the course of Chesterton's stories, we are treated to philosophical discussions about catholic theology, such as the relationship between faith and reason. We do not merely meet an assortment of cobblers, blacksmiths, magistrates and generals, but atheists, legalists, secularists, pagans, Presbyterians, Puritans, Protestants and Catholics, all with varying and vying affections for superstition, naturalism, rationalism, scepticism, agnosticism, materialism, anarchism, nihilism, or cynicism. Along with C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, G.K. Chesterton was one of the few writers in the twentieth century that made an important contribution to English literature that was stamped by Christian principles instead of the prevailing secularism of the day.

Readers who do not share Chesterton's theological convictions will not concur with all his insights, but they must concede that they are enjoyable, profound and stimulating. Somewhat surprising is the occasional use of blasphemous expletives such as "O my God", although generally from the mouths of others than Father Brown himself. And Brown does seem to degenerate more and more into a mouthpiece for Chesterton, with a sermonizing tone not present in the first stories.

But on the whole these are exemplary models of the English crime short story. The Penguin edition contains all the stories from all five of Chesterton's published Father Brown collections. Among my favorites are "The Blue Cross", where Father Brown follows a mysterious trail of clues and engages in some bizarre behaviour and fascinating theological discourse to apprehend Flambeau. "The Hammer of God" is also an outstanding whodunnit, as Brown solves the murder of a man who has been crushed by a huge hammer outside a church, seemingly the recipient of a divine thunderbolt of judgment from heaven. In the process Chesterton shares some thought-provoking insights, such as the memorable: "Humility is the mother of giants. One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak." Also unforgettable is "The Blast of the Book", which recounts the mysterious disappearance of five men whose only crime was to open a seemingly magical book. Father Brown is quick to unravel the paradox by explaining it as the work of an ingenious prankster.

Father Brown's tongue never fails to produce profound paradoxical gems such as "The point of the pin was that it was pointless." And: "I never should have thought he would be so illogical as to die in order to avoid death." It is Brown's unique perspective that allows him to see what others do not see. When his compatriots are awed at the eloquence of a magistrate's thundering sermon in "the Mirror of the Magistrate", Father Brown remarks: "I think the thing that struck me most was how different men look in their wigs. You talk about the prosecuting barrister being so tremendous. But I happened to see him take his wig off for a minute, and he really looks quite a different man. He's quite bald, for one thing."

With the finely crafted prose, depth of theological insight, and brilliant combination of perception and paradox, Chesterton has created in Father Brown a noble and enduring character, a worthy successor to Sherlock Holmes and in some respects his equal and superior. The Father Brown stories are unquestionably worthy of their designation as classics.

A friend of mine recently bought this omnibus volume as a gift for a lover of detective fiction. For that it's probably perfect. Having said that, I rather prefer the separate paperbacks of Father Brown's cases which consist of, I think, The Innocence, Incredulity, Wisdom, Secret and Scandal of Father Brown.

Why? Smaller to carry around and pass on to the next hungry reader. New readers can sample a few stories to see if these books are their cup of tea. The real reason, though, is if you get this big paperback it's too tempting to read right through the stories, one to the next, and quite soon you've devoured all the Father Brown. Of course, there are plenty of other Chesterton mysteries to go on to: Manalive, The Ball and the Cross, The Club of Queer Trades, The Man Who Was Thursday and Four Faultless Felons to name a few.

A while back on the History Channel I saw a documentary about how during the time of the Raj, before the independence of India, a group of British soldiers forged pictures of Indian "fakirs" climbing up ropes and mystically disappearing. Chesterton wrote his stories during the time of the Raj. He despised Imperialism and many of these short tales are concerned with debunking the "mystic East" and exposing just this sort of chicanery. In this regard Chesterton was prophetic, about a hundred years ahead of his time.

Of course there's often a corpse here and there as well since GKC was the first president of the Detection Club (the next president was Dorothy L. Sayers, author of the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries). Chesterton was a fan of Sir Connan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes mysteries, while at the same time disputing Doyle's belief in the spiritualism, ghosts and seances common in upper class Victorian circles. Therefore Chesterton's hero priest is a commoner and a skeptic as regards the spiritualist religion of the day. Which makes the Father Brown tales all the more intriguing.

This book compiles some short detective stories, with an unlikely protagonist, a priest. Father Brown is a rather quiet main character, unpretentious but remarkably assured. He uses logic in order to solve his cases, and he makes abundant use of good judgment and sound sense. Father Brown has an unique "worldly shrewdness", that probably stems from the fact that he spends many hours each day listening to the sins of other people. As a result, he is more or less acquainted with the bad side of human beings.

Father Brown is considered by many "the second most famous mystery-solver in English literature", the first being Sherlock Holmes. To tell the truth, I prefer Father Brown to Sherlock Holmes: he might not be as showy as Conan Doyle's character, but he is far more likeable, and his stories seem more likely to be real. Moreover, Chesterton's Father Brown doesn't just chase criminals, he allows the reader to learn about some interesting themes that were important when these stories were first published, but that also are important now, for example the relationship between faith and reason. He manages to that because he doesn't merely want to "catch the criminal", he also endeavors to understand human nature, and the reasons why a criminal becomes one.

The author of these mystery stories was Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936), a renowned English writer who wrote them between 1911 and 1936. His stories are as popular now as they were then, mainly to to the fact that Chesterton's style is compelling and refreshing, eminently readable and witty. Thus, these stories appeal not only to those who want to read a good book written in an exceptionally good english, but also to those who want to do exactly that without having to exhert themselves.

On the whole, I think this collection of short stories is worth buying and reading, not only once but many times. I highly enjoyed it, and I strongly recommend it to you :)

Belen Alcat

Father Brown is an intriguing and refreshing fictional detective. In addition to providing short glimpses into criminal puzzles, this book includes fascinating looks at the time period in which it was written (Father Brown meets the Futurists). Much more intelligent than many of the other entries into this genre, it also wasn't as dogmatically religious as I'd been lead to believe. I really enjoyed this book.

The Penguin Complete Father Brown (paperback)

This is the complete collection of Gilbert Keith Chesterton's "Father Brown" detective stories. Arthur Conan Doyle's "Sherlock Holmes" specialized in the collection and analysis of evidence, the new high-technology of criminalistics in the late 19th century. "Holmes" used deductive reasoning from the clues to solve a crime. "Brown" used the method of observation of people and inductive reasoning to solve a crime. "Brown" tries to think as the criminal would and solves crimes that way. If you can discover the motive then you can discover the perpetrator. It works very good in fiction, this does not seem to be in much use today.

Most of these stories are quite short, as if written for a magazine. You get a description of events as seen by other people, then a solution follows, with an explanation. The clues are subtle and based on people's actions, the ending surprising. Most written stories don't reveal the ending until the last pages or chapters. In films you often know who did it, the suspense arises as to how they will get caught. But there are variations on these plots.

There are five sets of stories. "The Innocence of Father Brown" and "The Wisdom of Father Brown" consist of twelve stories. "The Incredulity of Father Brown", "The Secret of Father Brown", and "The Scandal of Father Brown" have eight stories listed. The last two have nine in my paperback.

G.K. Chesterton is a humorous writer, and he writes sterling prose; these two enviable qualities distinguish him as superior to Arthur Conan Doyle as a mystery writer, not to mention superior to most writers in any genre. This Penguin omnibus of nearly fifty stories featuring his clerical sleuth Father Brown is an excellent introduction to the man's classic English style of understated wit, taste for the exotic and the mythical, unbounded imagination, and worldly philosophy, helpfully reduced to easily digestible epigrams by the discursive priest. Chesterton doesn't cloister his protagonist in a strictly ecclesiastical environment; Father Brown's social realm lies far outside the church and well within the material world of theatrically colorful disguises, melodramatic villains and their not entirely innocent victims, big business, and fabulous wealth.

If Chesterton has anything in common with Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, it is the way he incorporates his strong religious convictions into his fiction. Two of the Commandments--the ones forbidding stealing and killing--are the most typically transgressed in these stories, the committers of these sins betrayed by moral weakness detected by Father Brown, a scholar of motives and the human tendency to do wrong in the absence of a solid spiritual anchor. Like Sherlock Holmes, he solves crimes by noticing small details that everybody else misses and applying the most rigid logic, but he is more human and animated than the stolid Holmes. He even has a professional cohort, a French private detective who goes by the name of Flambeau and who bedeviled the world as a master thief before the solicitous Father Brown showed him the error of his wicked ways.

Aside from his short, stout stature, mildly clumsy behavior, and the benevolent patience with which he tolerates atheists, socialists, skeptics, mystics, pagans, etc., Father Brown's greatest distinction as a character is his representation of the supreme logic and rationale Chesterton considers inherent in Roman Catholic theology; he is less a visual figure than an embodiment of a set of ideas, a projection of his author's conscience and intellect, clothed in black. Although Chesterton undoubtedly hopes to enlighten the heathens among his readers, he doesn't insult their intelligence with simplistic morality tales; he knows that we don't need Father Brown to remind us, however eloquently, that stealing and killing are wrong. Chesterton rather uses the conflict between good and evil as the context within which he can expound his philosophical opinions through a priestly voice.

I'm a teen in Boston and I love reading the Father Brown Omnibus, which is the same thing (it has all the stories) but was published in the 50s. I would have to give this 5 stars because Father Brown is almost as good as Sherlock Holmes, whom I gave 6 stars. 3 thumbs up!!!!!!!!!!

This is a great book to spend a long tim enjoying. Every Father Brown mystery every penned is included in this volume, each one more entertaining than the rest. Catholics will enjoy the attention to detail in various subtle ways, everyone will enjoy the good spinning of a tale. This would be a good book of mysteries to take on a summer vacation to hang out with.

Other authors may have excelled in the detective story, but it was G.K. Chesterton who elevated it to a higher intellectual and literary level. His writing combines wit, humor and whimsy with deep insights into psychology, philosophy, and even theology. While others viewed the detective story as a mere entertaining puzzle, G.K. treated it as a serious art form, with potential for symbolism and allegory. Father Brown is one of the classic fictional detectives of all time, a character more "real" than many living people. How wonderful to have all the Father Brown stories under one cover! Keep this volume by your bedside or near your favorite armchair, so you can dip into it on a rainy weekend, before you go to bed, or at any time you like. All confirmed Father Brown devotees must have the Penguin COMPLETE FATHER BROWN, and those who have not yet discovered this detective genius could find no better way to become acquainted with him.

Every story in this book reminds me of the "Sherlock Holmes" style of mystery story. They are all well crafted with excellent character description. The solutions are normally suprising, and when you do happen to figure one out, you feel quite good about it. It is amusing to see the bumbling little chubby priest stopping the most illustrious murderers and jewel thiefs, and even befriending them (presumably after hearing their confessions)

Excellent book, I recommend it highly.