![]() ![]() There’s an arrow, a sword-stick and a noose, all ingeniously deployed, and a couple of corpses that aren’t who or what they seem. Most of the stories are locked-room mysteries: someone was murdered in a room that no one else could have got into or out of. Father Brown’s nemesis Flambeau doesn’t appear, and more action takes place in the USA than I remember. The Incredulity of Father Brown was the third of five collections, and contains eight stories. ![]() Then, having not read anything by him for roughly half a century, I found this slim, yellowing paperback in a street library. I thought his aphorisms, ‘Blessed is he who expecteth little, for he shall often be surprised,’ and ‘Anything worth doing is worth doing badly’ were words to live by. If they hoped it would break my addiction to Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh, they were to be disappointed, but I did love Father Brown, and once I’d read all his stories, I sought out everything I could find by Chesterton: the autobiography, essays (including ‘On chasing after one’s hat’), his books on Francis of Assisi and Thomas Aquinas, Orthodoxy, some poetry (‘I don’t care where the water goes/ If it doesn’t get into the wine’) and more. On my eleventh or twelfth birthday, my parents gave me The Father Brown Omnibus, a doorstop of a book containing all 53 of G K Chesterton’s Father Brown stories. ![]()
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