Father Brown Stories (Penguin Popular Classics)

Part of the pleasure of G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown stories is always waiting for his mild-mannered detective hero to move in from the margins of each mystery story and assume center stage halfway through when the central crisis becomes apparent. Unlike Sherlock Holmes, Father Brown never dominates the frame tales and so his inevitable ascendancy (after having been neglected by the other characters as ineffective and uninteresting) is always a real pleasure; it seems to play into Chesterton's ideas about Catholicism as being unfairly overlooked as anti-rationalist and superstitious when actually, he argues, it is the very reverse. Contemporary readers may take a bit of pause at father Brown's relationship with the French rogue Flambeau, who starts out as a supercriminal but then--after being repeatedly outwitted by the priest and having undergone many long mysterious talks with him--becomes his bosom companion, especially given Chesterton's odd emphasis given to Flambeau's tremendous physical virility and his lack of explanation about what the two are always doing traveling together in the later stories. All of these well-chosen short stories are terrific (and beautifully atmospheric), but the best include the brilliant "The Queer Feet" (which provides the famous quotation later used to such effect in BRIDESHEAD REVISITED, another study of Catholicism and class difference), "The Hammer of God," and "The Perishing of the Pendragons."

Reading this book as I ate my lunch provided me with some of the best food-reading I've done. I cannot eat without reading, and these short stories were clever and entertaining. I'd love to give this book as a gift.