The Complete Father Brown

The Father Brown stories are delightful, and I was excited to find a ‘complete edition’. What I didn’t realize was that the edition with a navy cover and red church, titled ‘The Complete Father Brown Mysteries’ isn’t an edition at all, just some amateur print at home job. The print is extremely small, the margins are odd for a book, it literally isn’t from a real publisher. It has only 24 stories, and this unreadable junk was $15. Avoid - you can get the penguin classics version, which is actually printed properly, has all the stores from the 5 separate editions + the 2 additional stories found after Chesterton’s death, for $21 or less if on sale.

Father Brown solves some excellent mysteries, which follow the cardinal (no pun intended) rule of providing the reader with enough of a clue to work out the solution without being obvious. At the same time, he clearly and beautifully articulates the importance of humility (which can do wonders for one's powers of observation) the distinction between good and evil, and forgiving sins without excusing them.

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."

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

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.

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!!!!!!!!!!