The Wisdom of Father Brown

Description

Those who like masterfully written detective fiction, especially short stories, will absolutely love Chesterton’s Father Brown series, particularly The Wisdom of Father Brown. The Father Brown stories are lesser known than Chesterton’s other work, the name of the author sounding more familiar as a philosopher, a political thinker, a literary critic, a lay theologian and a Christian apologist (his most famous work is Eugenics and Other Evils, written to state his opposition against the Mental Deficiency Act in 1913 and the principle of eugenics as such), but these short stories come with an essential feature that is common in all texts written by Chesterton: logic and clear reasoning.

The book is the second in the Father Brown series and an exquisite example of poetic prose that is spiced up with strange happenings, thrilling mysteries and almost permanent suspense. Father Brown is an investigator like no one else – a kind little priest who uses simple logic to solve even the seemingly most complicated case. Father Brown is unique in his appearance as well – a small figure who always wears plain clothes and always carries a large umbrella.

The reader accompanies Father Brown as he resolves a number of mysterious cases: there is murder, blackmail, curses, voodoo cults and bizarre characters such as Italian gangs, an aristocrat with a strange ear and there is always an unexpected twist that helps Father Brown put all the pieces in the puzzle together. Brown is a Catholic priest, but his belief in God and in mysteries never clouds his logic. He never fails to recognize the clues in his way, not even the smallest one, but unlike Sherlock Holmes, he uses intuition, too and he combines the two approaches to find the natural explanation to the happenings he is faced with – actually the only explanation that makes sense.
[amz_corss_sell asin=”1775424901″]