As in his excellent 2017 study H.C. Bailey’s Reggie Fortune and the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, Blackwell takes the formal detective story seriously, both for its puzzle-spinning and for its explorations of deeper themes. “One of the great strengths of [Chesterton’s] stories,” he writes, “is their rejection of easy platitudes and conventions of thought and belief, of the simple but destructive ‘either/or’ thinking so prevalent and convenient in modern times.” All five Father Brown books are discussed story by story, along with other works in the genre both before the priest’s debut (The Club of Queer Trades and The Man Who Was Thursday) and after (the little-known novel Manalive, the collections The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Poet and the Lunatics, Four Faultless Felons, and The Paradoxes of Mr. Pond; and a couple of uncollected short stories). Among the early discussions is a reasonable answer to the question raised by the title of the first Brown collection: how could a priest with broad knowledge of human foibles, failures, and potential for evil be characterized by his innocence?
Noting that the later Father Brown stories written after Chesterton’s conversion to Catholicism are often considered inferior to the earlier, Blackwell writes, “If this is the case, it would be doubly ironic since Conan Doyle apparently tired of his Sherlock Holmes stories partly because they didn’t allow him to explore his deepening interests in spirituality, while Chesterton would have diluted and weakened his later Father Brown stories by incorporating more of his burgeoning interest and passion for his religion.”
A list of 18 Father Brown stories Blackwell thinks the best cites seven, over half the contents, from The Innocence of Father Brown (starting with “The Blue Cross” and including such famous titles as “The Secret Garden” and “The Hammer of God”) and only five total from the last two collections, The Secret and The Scandal of Father Brown. There is no list of the worst, but a few are suggested in the main text (“The God of the Gongs,” “The Red Moon of Meru,” “The Quick One”).
