Father Brown: Selected Stories

Setting aside the person who mistook a complaint to the seller as a review and the reviews from the people who seem to be reviewing some other editions, I would like to assure buyers that The Wordsworth Classics Complete Father Brown Stories with the isbn number 9781853260032 is in fact the most complete collection on the market. Not only does it contain every single story from each of the individual collections, it also includes The Donnington Affair & Father Brown solves The Donnington Affair, a story never before included in any "complete" collection. The merits of the stories have been well covered by other reviewers. This is being written solely as a corrective to inaccurate & misleading information.

The mystery story is exemplified by the Sherlock Holmes stories. Those who haven't read them will probably know much about them from the way they have (justly) been added to the public imagination. So a good way of describing the Father Brown stories is to compare the two, as the images of Holmes are probably known to all.Holmes is a private detective. As such, his main objective is to solve the crime. Father Brown is (obviously) a Catholic priest. His objective is to serve God by trying to better society. These two goals say a lot about how they go about solving crimes. Unlike Holmes, Brown gets close to crimes by accident (yes, that's a big suspension-of-disbelief) - as they happen amongst the families and coworkers of friends. He does not seek to "catch" the crook for the police but rather to find out what happened. At times, he lets the criminal go - and unlike the grumpy Holmes his speech (full of philosophical discussions) and actions reek of a love of humanity.Holmes solves by logical deduction. Brown solves by a combination of intiution and a deep insight into character and circumstance. As such, the crux of many of the stories is psychological. Others rely on assumptions that people make about, say, people subservient to them. The Brown stories are therefore great satires of the early 20th century London society.This edition has 18 stories - a quite eclectic collection and very recommended if you haven't encountered Brown before. The first one (the Blue Cross) introduces him marvelously as one of the great detectives.

If you enjoy Agatha Christie's Miss Marple, I think you will appreciate Father Brown. This edition is a great bargain-priced introduction.Father Brown is the archetypal bumbler who is actually quite adept at finding out who committed the crime. He is the ordinary citizen who beats the police at their own game.I got addicted to short stories about 35 years ago when I was at high school. I began reading them in the yellow-covered Gollancz science fiction short story collections. There is something to be said for a story that you can read at a sitting.Chesterton's stories are now public domain. You can sample them online, but it is much nicer to have a book to browse away from the computer!And this is such an unbeatable price, I am buying several copies to give as excellent, but inexpensive gifts.Highly recommended.

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." (p.17) 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." (p.18)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, Presbyte