AustLit

'Detective fiction is a genre that takes a huge range of different styles and approaches. With Father Brown, G. K. Chesterton gave detective fiction an unforgettable character and a persuasive rationale for his skills. Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes presented a cerebral, analytical, intuitive intellectual, humanized by association with his friend Dr Watson. With Father Brown Chesterton offered not a thinking machine with an arcane knowledge of poisons, tobacco ash and other bizarre items that can be decoded as clues, but a mild-mannered priest whose knowledge of crime had been acquired in the course of his daily work. As Father Brown says to the arch villain Flambeau in ‘The Blue Cross’, ‘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?’' (Introduction)