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The Secret of Father Brown (Father Brown 4) Kindle Edition
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- LanguageEnglish
- Publication dateJuly 1, 2010
- File size429 KB
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Product details
- ASIN : B003XYE7YU
- Publisher : Fair Price Classics (July 1, 2010)
- Publication date : July 1, 2010
- Language : English
- File size : 429 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 145 pages
- Page numbers source ISBN : 1785166972
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,188,499 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #12,268 in Fiction Classics
- #38,202 in Classic Literature & Fiction
- #148,761 in Literature & Fiction (Kindle Store)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936) was a prolific English journalist and author best known for his mystery series featuring the priest-detective Father Brown and for the metaphysical thriller The Man Who Was Thursday. Baptized into the Church of England, Chesterton underwent a crisis of faith as a young man and became fascinated with the occult. He eventually converted to Roman Catholicism and published some of Christianity's most influential apologetics, including Heretics and Orthodoxy.
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One of Chesterton’s principal philosophical propositions is that while strict materialism is bound by its own definition to rule out all things supernatural, the supernatural is free to include scientific method in its worldview. The quiet unassuming Father Brown, with his combination of sharp observation and incisive knowledge of human depravity, is the fictional personification of this idea, his answer to Sherlock Holmes. I wondered if Father Brown might be a Chesterton alter ego, but Wikipedia says the character is based on someone else – a priest named Father John O’Connor (1870-1952) who was involved in Chesterton’s 1922 conversion to Catholicism.
Father Brown appears in 51 short stories including the eight included in The Secret of Father Brown. These eight stories each illustrate a philosophical point or insight about human nature and are framed by two chapters, beginning with “The Secret of Father Brown” and ending with “The Secret of Flambeau.” Flambeau, a reformed criminal and Father Brown’s long-time friend, has married and settled down on an estate in Spain, and Father Brown has just arrived for a visit. An American neighbor stops by, and having heard of Father Brown’s uncanny ability to solve murder cases, asks him about his secret to solving murder mysteries. Father Brown reveals his secret without hesitation:
“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 think like that could be done, and in what state of mind a man could really do it. And when I was quite sure felt exactly like the murderer himself, of course I knew who he was.”
To loosely illustrate the point, the next eight stories each reveal a different situation in which Father Brown had the opportunity to apply his method. I suppose most crime stories must reveal something about human nature, but this book goes a little deeper, deliberately blurring the line between “the criminal” and the rest of us. To Father Brown, all people have the capacity to be both a murderer and a saint and committing a murder does not necessarily mean a person has reached the lowest point of depravity. His harshest judgment is reserved for people who set themselves up as superior beings with the right to classify other people with labels such as “criminal.”
Father Brown believes in the possibility of redemption for all who realize they are in need of it. In “The Man with Two Beards” for example, he is confessor and friend to one such reformed criminal who he believes has become a saint. Though he may have compassion for criminals he is not soft on crime; however his harshest judgment is reserved for comfortable hypocrites and crass materialists, not all of whom commit crimes in the legal sense.
In the final chapter the American neighbor raises several interesting objections to Father Brown’s method. For example he wonders if might damage one’s moral character by causing you to identify with evil. Father Brown’s view is that his method of “becoming the criminal” functions as a spiritual exercise because it facilitates the recognition of the truth: that we are all capable of evil and in need of redemption. In the end, the American must make his own moral choice when Flambeau, who he knows only as a respectable family man and by another name, reveals his own secret.
I will definitely now want to read all of the other Father Brown stories.
treat for the reader.





