Featured Author:
G. K. Chesterton
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) was an English author and speaker who wrote on a wide variety of topics, mostly involving religion in some way. He had a major role in the political world in the first third of the twentieth century as a newspaper editor and columnist, and participated in numerous public debates with prominent figures of the time.
Among his writings, mostly on worldly subjects, he wrote a total of 53 short detective stories about a Catholic priest named Father Brown. Through these stories he was able to present morality tales, introduce the idea of a religious figure knowing much more of the dark side of the world than you might expect, and most importantly, indulge his own desire to both read and write detective stories.
A Brief History of Father Brown
There are 53 short stories featuring Father Brown. Chesterton wrote the first 25 from 1910-14, whereupon he suffered a complete physical collapse and much of his writing was suspended for a time.
Over the next decade he traveled to America, and converted to Catholicism, two separate events which both showed up in his stories. Returning to Father Brown, he wrote another 18 stories from 1923-27. Some were based in America, part of the long tradition of authors setting stories in places they visited. Agatha Christie herself would do the same many years later, writing A Caribbean Mystery after one vacation trip.
Oddly enough, after Chesterton’s very public conversion to Catholicism, reviewers complained about the amount of religion permeating the new stories. This seems like a case of them looking for something to complain about, given the job of the starring character.
Chesterton continued writing the stories, adding another 10 to the list from 1930 until his death in 1936. Almost all of them were first published in monthly magazines, and he freely admitted writing them for the money as much as anything. An editor would ask him to write a series of the stories and would pay him well for them.
Why Write Detective Fiction?
I think it only fair to confess that I have myself written some of the worst mystery stories in the world.
Chesterton loved stories about detectives and crimes. He read them voraciously, and turned to writing them for a simple reason: he hoped to inspire others to write more of them.
I did unto others as I would they would do unto me. I provided them with more stories about crime, in the faint hope that they in turn might provide me with more stories about crime.
Surprisingly, this worked. It worked so well that it is not unreasonable to consider Chesterton as one of the progenitors of the cozy mystery genre, giving rise to such authors as Agatha Christie. Before Father Brown, the detective genre was dominated by Sherlock Holmes and his ilk, the genius who used their great knowledge and flashes of inspiration to solve crimes, with the reader knowing half of what they knew about the puzzle.
Chesterton preferred a mystery where the reader had all the clues, and tried to solve the crime alongside the detective. He didn’t like the tricks authors used to hide things, making the reader look foolish when they couldn’t solve the puzzle. Chesterton didn’t mind being fooled, as long as it was done fairly.
Dale Ahlquist, the world’s leading authority on Chesterton, suggests that the way he wrote his stories changed the way other authors wrote theirs:
The leading mystery writers of his day quickly embraced this new style of murder mystery. They began writing stories of domestic crimes with human motives, with a limited list of suspects, with obvious (though well-disguised) clues, and with an unlikely detective who solves his puzzles without relying on superhuman knowledge or intelligence. Indeed, whenever you think of the great detectives of mystery fiction’s golden age-Hercule Poirot, Lord Peter Wimsey, Miss Marple, Ellery Queen, Philo Vance, or Nero Wolfe-remember their parentage. Remember that they had a father. His name was Father Brown.
Indeed, Chesterton was so well-known and liked that he became the first president of The Detection Club, the group of mystery authors formed in 1930 to advance their genre.
On Detective Stories
My name achieved a certain notoriety as that of a writer of these murderous short stories, commonly called detective stories.
Chesterton is now perhaps best remembered for his detective stories, largely due to the success of the Father Brown television series. As a public intellectual, much of his writing has little relevance to today, being based on the squabbles of a century ago. But his stories retain a timeless sense because of the moral questions they approach.
There is evidently a very general idea that the object of the detective novelist is to baffle the reader. Now, nothing is easier than baffling the reader, in the sense of disappointing the reader.
Many of the detective novels of the time hid crucial evidence from the reader. Sherlock Holmes was guilty of this, resulting in what appeared to be a flash of inspiration to solve the puzzle. The success of the Holmes books meant a lot of other authors followed suit. Chesterton despised this style of writing, and wrote to treat the reader as an intelligent partner of the story’s sleuth.
It is not merely that it is not artistic, or that it is not logical. It is that it is not really exciting.
As a reader you can follow everything on the page, thinking you have it worked out, only to discover the detective knows something you don’t. In these books it’s hard to get interested when you know the rug will be pulled out from under you.
The true object of an intelligent detective story is not to baffle the reader, but to enlighten the reader; but to enlighten him in such a manner that each successive portion of the truth comes as a surprise. […] The object is not darkness, but light; but light in the form of lightning.
When the reader knows everything, when the clues are lined up in your face, when all roads point in one direction, that is the time to surprise the reader. It is, as Chesterton said, the lightning which is the thrill the reader looks forward to, and what makes a book memorable.
The best part of [the Sherlock Holmes stories] is the comedy of the conversations between Holmes and Watson; and that for the sound psychological reason that they are characters always, even when they are not actors at all.
Is it better to have great characters and a disappointing story, or vice versa? I suspect you’ll do fairly well with one or the other, but you need both for true and lasting success. I’m not sure G. K. Chesterton does that in his own stories.
On Father Brown
A large number of my little crime stories were concerned with a person called Father Brown; a Catholic priest whose external simplicity and internal subtlety formed something near enough to a character for the purposes of this sketchy sort of story-telling.
Chesterton reportedly based Father Brown on a priest he knew, although he was quick to say he took the thoughts and ideas of his friend, but not his physical appearance. He noted that he deliberately downplayed describing the character, because he wanted his ideas to be his defining quality. This in many ways has a parallel in Columbo, who had a slovenly appearance but sharp mind.
In Father Brown, it was the chief feature to be featureless. The point of him was to appear pointless; and one might say that his conspicuous quality was not being conspicuous. His commonplace exterior was meant to contrast with his unsuspected vigilance and intelligence; and that being so, of course I made his appearance shabby and shapeless, his face round and expressionless, his manners clumsy, and so on.
It is clear as we go through the Father Brown stories that his featureless appearance actually helps him again and again. He is a character who sits on the sidelines, or hides in the shadows, and this fact is noted over and over. You could almost make a catchphrase of “Oh, Father, I didn’t see you there,” or something similar. The point is to quietly observe everything and then give all the answers. This is surprisingly boring in its own way as the series goes along.
And there sprang up in my mind the vague idea of making some artistic use of these comic yet tragic cross-purposes; and constructing a comedy in which a priest should appear to know nothing and in fact know more about crime than the criminals.
The interesting thing Chesterton learned from his priest friend was how much he knew about the bad side of the world. The priest explained that he heard the worst of the world from criminals during confession, and this is what Chesterton was trying to translate in his stories. It was the dichotomy of the person believed to be so good, but knowing more than most about the bad, which helped Chesterton form the foundation of the character. We see how successful he was in doing so.
In Conclusion
The Father Brown stories are a wonderful slice of life from a century ago. They are very much of their time, with words and phrases you would not hear nowadays. I refer here not just to offensive terms – of which there are some – but to an archaic sense of writing. A author setting their historical mystery in the 1910s or 1920s would do well to read these stories and follow their writing style.
To be honest the stories aren’t all that good, especially from a modern perspective. They are all short stories, but I’d say in at least half the cases I figured out whodunnit by the middle of the story. Not only that, but a number of them petered out as a mystery while we got a small homily from Father Brown. A few of them surprised, and there are gems scattered throughout, but I think it is a set of stories one has to have a taste for. If you aren’t interested in the 1920s, or in reading short stories, these might not be your cup of tea.
The good news is they are all freely available online for you to try, having mostly passed out of copyright in at least some places. You could purchase them from our Chesterton page, or you could go to Project Gutenberg and read many of them for free. If you are interested in the period or the author, these short books could be well worth your time to read.
Of course, the Father Brown television show might be an easier way to discover the character. The stories are set in the 1950s, and very loosely based on Chesterton’s character. It appears that only a few of his stories were used for the show, and were heavily adapted. It might be fair to say these are different looks at the same character, and reading and viewing would be completely different experiences.
Do you have anything to say about this article? Agree or disagree with what we have to say? Let us know in the comments below.
Sources
All quotes from Chesterton are from either an article he wrote or his autobiography:
Errors about Detective Stories by G. K. Chesterton, first published in 1920. Available at https://www.chesterton.org/errors-about-detective-stories/
Autobiography by G. K. Chesterton, first published in 1936. Available at https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks13/1301201h.html
The Ahlquist quote is from:
Lecture 20: The Innocence of Father Brown by Dale Ahlquist. https://www.chesterton.org/lecture-20/
In addition, the https://www.chesterton.org site has much more interesting content about G. K. Chesterton and his writings.
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