Customer Reviews

The Wisdom of Father Brown

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Great Mysteries! I loved this volume as well as the sister volume - not your usual short stories, but real mysteries, as well as good plots. Chesterton writes with 3 things that are not usual from one author; intelligence, wit, and great plotting.

Each of the mysteries is solved my little Father Brown, with the usual villian unexpectedly blindsided by him.

You don't have to be Catholic to enjoy these at all!

Enjoy!

Great British mysteries! Brilliant and interesting Detective! I have been reading a lot of Chesterton (again), but had always overlooked Father Brown, which was my loss.

I love Christie, Green, Doyle, and the other great 'lock door' mystery writers, so I don't know why I missed this delightful and charming but at the same time, quite brilliant detective Father Brown.

I too was a Columbo fan, and there is a little of Columbo in Father Brown, but they equally have a place at the table of odd dectectives...its always great fun to read how the perpetrator is foiled by a disarming little man of the cloth. I think we readers live for that moment.

Each crime is very good, the clues are there without being in your face, sometime I could suspect the right suspect but often I could not.

If you enjoy a great mystery story, a whodunit, an odd detective, you will love Father Brown!

First, I love odd ball detectives, in this I class FBI agent Aloysius Pendergast, Lt. Columbo, and Father Brown is one of them. I loved this book of Father Brown cases. Oddly enough, there is some interesting info on this fictitious character.

From the equally amazing free Wikipedia:

Father Brown is a short, stumpy Catholic priest, "formerly of Cobhole in Essex, and now working in London," with shapeless clothes and a large umbrella, and uncanny insight into human evil.

He makes his first appearance in the famous story "The Blue Cross" and continues through the five volumes of short stories, often assisted by the reformed criminal Flambeau. Unlike the more famous fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, Father Brown's methods tend to be intuitive rather than deductive. He explains his method in "The Secret of Father Brown":

You see, I had murdered them all myself.... I had planned out each of the crimes very carefully. I had thought out exactly how a thing like that could be done, and in what style or state of mind a man could really do it. And when I was quite sure that I felt exactly like the murderer myself, of course I knew who he was.

Father Brown's abilities are also considerably shaped by his experience as a priest and confessor. In "The Blue Cross", when asked by Flambeau, who has been masquerading as a priest, how he knew of all sorts of criminal "horrors," he responds: "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?" He also states a reason why he knew Flambeau was not a priest: "You attacked reason. It's bad theology." And indeed, the stories normally contain a rational explanation of who the murderer was and how Brown worked it out.

Despite his devotion, or perhaps, because of it, Father Brown always emphasizes rationality: some stories, such as "The Miracle of Moon Crescent", "The Blast of the Book" and "The Dagger With Wings", poke fun at initially skeptical characters who become convinced of a supernatural explanation for some strange occurrence, while Father Brown easily sees the perfectly ordinary, natural explanation. In fact, he seems to represent an ideal of a devout, yet considerably educated and "civilized" clergyman. This can be traced to the influence of neo-scholastic thought on Chesterton.

Father Brown is characteristically humble, and is usually rather quiet, but when he does talk, he almost always says something profound. Although he tends to handle crimes with a steady, realistic approach, he believes in the supernatural as the greatest reason of all.

As such, you will enjoy these stories and the intellect behind them. Enjoy!