The Complete Father Brown Stories – July 31, 2012 Author: Visit Amazon's G.K. Chesterton Page | Language: English | ISBN:
0141193859 | Format: EPUB
The Complete Father Brown Stories – July 31, 2012 Description
About the Author
G. K. Chesterton (1874–1938) also wrote The Napoleon of Notting Hill, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and The Man Who Was Thursday.
Michael D. Hurley has written widely on English literature and is the author of a book on Chesterton. He teaches English at Robinson College and lives in Cambridge, England.
- Series: Penguin Classics
- Paperback: 768 pages
- Publisher: Penguin Classics; Reprint edition (July 31, 2012)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0141193859
- ISBN-13: 978-0141193854
- Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5 x 1.7 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
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.
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