The Father Brown stories (1911-35) may seem to be too lighthearted to be awarded classic status, but this perception is mistaken.Without doubt, the English detective story, from Conan Doyle to P. D. James, encompassing among others Christie, Sayers, Allingham,Symons and Dexter, is a genre of its own, and these stories are among the finest examples of it. Detective stories are generally better for being short stories; they do not have to be padded out with extra corpses, and in the hands of a skilled practitioner such as Chesterton they will draw out the finer details of character and atmosphere.

Father Brown was based on Mgr John O"Connor of Bradford who received Chesterton into the Catholic Church. As Knox remarks of O"Connor, "he may have had difficulties in folding his umbrella, but instinctively you feel that this priest was a shrewd judge of men, with a reading of history and literature beyond the common". This worldly shrewdness which the author attributed to Father Brown may seem a surprising quality in one trained in a seminary, but Chesterton was well aware that a man who spent hours listening to other people"s sins would have some acquaintance with the byways of human depravity. Indeed, he acknowledged it in the final exchange between the master criminal Flambeau and Father Brown at the end of The Blue Cross. In addition to this surprising but wholly believable worldliness is the intuitive skill which stems from it. Father Brown could place himself into the darker recesses of the criminal mind, and being a moralist rather than a psychologist he could imagine the limits of normal behaviour; he could guess at what point envy, fear or resentment would spill over so that a man might be driven to crime. It is here that the Father Brown stories excel, in ingenuity and plausibility rather than sensation and horror.

THE INNOCENCE OF FATHER BROWN

The Blue Cross

The Secret Garden

The Queer Feet

The Invisible Man

The Honour of lsrael Gow

The Hammer of God

The Sign of the Broken Sword

THE WISDOM OF FATHER BROWN

The Paradise of Thieves

The Mistake of the Machine

The Perishing of the Pendragons

The Strange Crime of John Boulnois

THE INCREDULITY OF FATHER BROWN

The Oracle of the Dog

The Dagger with Wings

THE SECRET OF FATHER BROWN

The Mirror of the Magistrate

The Blast of the Book

The Green Man

The Point of a Pin

The Insoluble Problem