Father Brown

For other uses, see Father Brown (disambiguation).
Chesterton, G. K. (1981), The Complete Father Brown, Penguin 

Father Brown is a fictional Roman Catholic priest and amateur sleuth created in the early 20th century by English novelist G. K. Chesterton.

Father Brown is featured in a series of short stories where he solves mysteries and crimes using his intuition and keen understanding of human nature. The character was loosely based by Chesterton on Father John O'Connor (1870–1952), a parish priest in Bradford, who was involved in Chesterton's conversion to Catholicism in 1922.

Character

Chesterton portrays Father Brown as a short, stumpy Roman Catholic priest, with shapeless clothes and a large umbrella, and an uncanny insight into human evil. In "The Head of Caesar" he is "formerly priest of Cobhole in Essex, and now working in London". He makes his first appearance in the story "The Blue Cross", and continues to appear throughout five volumes of short stories, often assisted in his crime-solving by the reformed criminal M. Hercule Flambeau.

Father Brown also appears in a story, "The Donnington Affair", that has a curious history. In the October 1914 issue of an obscure magazine, The Premier, Sir Max Pemberton published the first part of the story, then invited a number of detective story writers, including Chesterton, to use their talents to solve the mystery of the murder described. Chesterton and Father Brown's solution followed in the November issue. The story was first reprinted in the Chesterton Review (Winter), 1981, pp. 1–35 , and later in the book Thirteen Detectives.[1]

Unlike the better known fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, Father Brown's methods tend to be intuitive rather than deductive. He explains his method in "The Secret of Father Brown": "You see, I had murdered them all myself... I had planned out each of the crimes very carefully. I had thought out exactly how a thing like that could be done, and in what style or state of mind a man could really do it. And when I was quite sure that I felt exactly like the murderer myself, of course I knew who he was."

Brown's abilities are also considerably shaped by his experience as a priest and confessor. In "The Blue Cross", when asked by Flambeau, who has been masquerading as a priest, how he knew of all sorts of criminal "horrors," Father Brown responds: "Has it never struck you that a man who does next to nothing but hear men's real sins is not likely to be wholly unaware of human evil?" He also states the reason why he knew Flambeau was not really a priest: "You attacked reason. It's bad theology."

The stories normally contain a rational explanation of who the murderer was, and how Brown worked it out. He always emphasises rationality; some stories, such as "The Miracle of Moon Crescent", "The Oracle of the Dog", "The Blast of the Book" and "The Dagger With Wings", poke fun at initially sceptical characters who become convinced of a supernatural explanation for some strange occurrence, while Father Brown easily sees the perfectly ordinary, natural explanation. In fact, he seems to represent an ideal of a devout, yet considerably educated and "civilised" clergyman. This can be traced to the influence of Roman Catholic thought on Chesterton. Father Brown is characteristically humble, and is usually rather quiet; when he does talk, he almost always says something profound. Although he tends to handle crimes with a steady, realistic approach, he believes in the supernatural as the greatest reason of all.[2]

Interpretations

Father Brown was the perfect vehicle for conveying Chesterton's view of the world and, of all of his characters, is perhaps closest to Chesterton's own point of view, or at least the effect of his point of view. Father Brown solves his crimes through a strict reasoning process more concerned with spiritual and philosophic truths than with scientific details, making him an almost equal counterbalance with Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, whose stories Chesterton read.[lower-alpha 1] However, the Father Brown series commenced before Chesterton's own conversion to Roman Catholicism.

In his Letters from Prison, the Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci made this partisan declaration of his preference:

Father Brown is a Catholic who pokes fun at the mechanical thought processes of the Protestants and the book is basically an apologia of the Roman Church as against the Anglican Church. Sherlock Holmes is the 'Protestant' detective who finds the end of the criminal skein by starting from the outside, relying on science, on experimental method, on induction. Father Brown is the Catholic priest who through the refined psychological experiences offered by confession and by the persistent activity of the fathers' moral casuistry, though not neglecting science and experimentation, but relying especially on deduction and introspection, totally defeats Sherlock Holmes, makes him look like a pretentious little boy, shows up his narrowness and pettiness. Moreover, Chesterton is a great artist while Conan Doyle was a mediocre writer, even though he was knighted for literary merit; thus in Chesterton there is a stylistic gap between the content, the detective story plot, and the form, and therefore a subtle irony with regard to the subject being dealt with, which renders these stories so delicious.[4]

In other media

Father Brown, as he appeared in volume 13 of Detective Conan

Other references

In Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, a quote from "The Queer Feet" is an important element of the structure and theme of the book. Father Brown speaks this line after catching a criminal, hearing his confession and letting him go: "I caught him, with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world, and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread." Book Three of Brideshead Revisited is called "A Twitch Upon the Thread" and the quotation acts as a metaphor for the operation of grace in the characters' lives. They are free to wander the world according to their free will until they are ready and receptive to God's grace, at which point he acts in their lives and effects a conversion. In the miniseries made by Granada Television adapting Brideshead, the character Lady Marchmain (Claire Bloom) reads this passage aloud.

Compilation books

1. The Innocence of Father Brown, 1911 

  1. "The Blue Cross", The Story-Teller, September 1910 ; first published as "Valentin Follows a Curious Trail", The Saturday Evening Post, 23 July 1910 
  2. "The Secret Garden", The Story-Teller, October 1910 .
  3. "The Queer Feet", The Story-Teller, November 1910 .
  4. "The Flying Stars", The Saturday Evening Post, 20 May 1911 .
  5. "The Invisible Man", The Saturday Evening Post, 28 January 1911 .
  6. "The Honour of Israel Gow"  (as "The Strange Justice", The Saturday Evening Post, 25 March 1911 .
  7. "The Wrong Shape", The Saturday Evening Post, 10 December 1910 .
  8. "The Sins of Prince Saradine", The Saturday Evening Post, 22 April 1911 .
  9. "The Hammer of God"  (as "The Bolt from the Blue", The Saturday Evening Post, 5 November 1910 .
  10. "The Eye of Apollo", The Saturday Evening Post, 25 February 1911 .
  11. "The Sign of the Broken Sword", The Saturday Evening Post, 7 January 1911 .
  12. "The Three Tools of Death", The Saturday Evening Post, 24 June 1911 .

2. The Wisdom of Father Brown (1914)

  1. "The Absence of Mr Glass"
  2. "The Paradise of Thieves"
  3. "The Duel of Dr Hirsch"
  4. "The Man in the Passage"
  5. "The Mistake of the Machine"
  6. "The Head of Caesar"
  7. "The Purple Wig"
  8. "The Perishing of the Pendragons"
  9. "The God of the Gongs"
  10. "The Salad of Colonel Cray"
  11. "The Strange Crime of John Boulnois"
  12. "The Fairy Tale of Father Brown"

3. The Incredulity of Father Brown (1926)

  1. "The Resurrection of Father Brown"
  2. "The Arrow of Heaven"
  3. "The Oracle of the Dog"
  4. "The Miracle of Moon Crescent"
  5. "The Curse of the Golden Cross"
  6. "The Dagger with Wings"
  7. "The Doom of the Darnaways"
  8. "The Ghost of Gideon Wise"

4. The Secret of Father Brown (1927)

(framing story) "The Secret of Father Brown"
  1. "The Mirror of the Magistrate"
  2. "The Man with Two Beards"
  3. "The Song of the Flying Fish"
  4. "The Actor and the Alibi"
  5. "The Vanishing of Vaudrey"
  6. "The Worst Crime in the World"
  7. "The Red Moon of Meru"
  8. "The Chief Mourner of Marne"
(framing story) "The Secret of Flambeau"

5. The Scandal of Father Brown (1935)

  1. "The Scandal of Father Brown"
  2. "The Quick One"
  3. "The Blast of the Book"
  4. "The Green Man"
  5. "The Pursuit of Mr Blue"
  6. "The Crime of the Communist"
  7. "The Point of a Pin"
  8. "The Insoluble Problem"
  • "The Donnington Affair" (1914, outside of compilations; written with Max Pemberton)
  • "The Vampire of the Village" (Strand Magazine, August 1936); included in later editions of The Scandal of Father Brown
  • "The Mask of Midas" (1936, outside of compilations)

Notes

  1. Chesterton also made 19 illustrations of the Sherlock Holmes stories, then not published and recently printed for the first time.[3]

Citations

  1. Chesterton, G.K (1987). Smith, Marie, ed. Thirteen Detectives. London: Xanadu. ISBN 0-947761-23-3.
  2. LeRoy, Panek (1987), An Introduction to the Detective Story, Bowling Green: Bowling Green State Univ. Popular Press, pp. 105–6.
  3. G.K. Chesterton's Sherlock Holmes, Baker Street Productions, 2003.
  4. Gramsci, Antonio (2011), Letters from Prison 1, Columbia University Press, p. 354, ISBN 978-0-231-07553-4.
  5. Cox, Jim (2002), Radio Crime Fighters, Jefferson, NC: McFarland, p. 9, ISBN 0-7864-1390-5.
  6. Terrace, Vincent (1999). Radio Programs, 1924–1984: A Catalog of Over 1800 Shows. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. ISBN 0-7864-0351-9.
  7. "How Father Brown Led Sir Alec Guinness to the Church". Catholic culture. Retrieved 2014-08-21.
  8. Sutcliffe, Tom (7 August 2000). "Sir Alec Guinness obituary". The Guardian (London). Retrieved 28 February 2007.
  9. Hail devil man (29 December 1967). "Operazione San Pietro (1967)". IMDb.
  10. A Walter 1 (23 April 1979). "Sanctuary of Fear (TV Movie 1979)". IMDb.
  11. "Ralph McInerny". The Daily Telegraph (London). 18 February 2010.
  12. "J.T. Turner". Retrieved 2014-08-21.
  13. Chesterton, G. K, The Complete Father Brown Stories: Books 1–7, Classics, Starbooks.
  14. "Ignatius Press". Retrieved 2014-08-21.
  15. "The word". Retrieved 2014-08-21.
  16. "Chesterton.org". Retrieved 2014-08-21.
  17. "Books of the year awards". Retrieved 2014-08-21.
  18. "EWTN". Retrieved 2014-08-21.
  19. "Theater of the Word, Inc. (TV Series 2009– )". IMDb.
  20. "Kevin O'Brien". IMDb.
  21. "Frank C. Turner". IMDb.
  22. Eames, Tom (22 June 2012). "'Harry Potter' Mark Williams cast in BBC drama 'Father Brown'". Digital Spy. Retrieved 3 August 2012.

Bibliography

External links

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