The Innocence of Father Brown (G.K. Chesterton, 1911)

Ten years ago when I for period of time lived in Norway I chanced upon a provincial public library in one of the small towns along the Sogne fjord. The pride of the library was a collection of books by one G.K. Chesterton, donated to the library by the former mayor of the town, who must have been a big admirer of Chesterton. I remember noticing that Chesterton had written a lot of books. A few of those are centered around the character Father Brown, a Sherlock Holmes-like Catholic Priest who solves mysteries.

The reason I picked up the stories of Father Brown was on a recommendation of a friend, and they have been accompanying me the last couple of days. What sets them apart from a lot of other detective fiction is that these stories are almost like the writing in novel-of-ideas; what seems most important for Chesterton is to get an idea across, and a lot of the twists and turns are driven by this conceit. The author, famously converted to Catholicism in 1922, already leaves plenty of Catholic clues in the stories. Maybe paradoxical to some readers, Father Brown is very rational in his investigations, and it seems his secret weapon is his deep intuition in questions of the human soul. In one story he says “superstition is irreligious”.

I like the old prose and the settings of the stories. I might not return to the other collections of Father Brown, as these sated my curiosity for now. And the others seem to be more or less the same fare. Father Brown is actually based on the priest who inspired Chesterton to convert himself. One Bobby Bobby from Ireland, serving in Bradford. Father Brown is probably the original “priest-as-detective” literary character. Glaring lacunae in my own reading of this subgenre include Umberto Eco’s “In the Name of the Rose” and, perhaps Giovannino Guareschi’s stories about Don Camillo and Peppone. I have, on the other hand, read a story about the sleuth Rabbi Small by Harry Kemelman.