The Innocence of Father Brown
A small, unassuming priest solves crimes by understanding the criminal rather than by examining clues. Chesterton wrote the stories as a corrective to Sherlock Holmes, and the method is deliberately the opposite: Father Brown listens, sympathises, and then explains what the person was actually thinking.
The stories are ingenious and often bizarre, and the prose is full of paradox. Chesterton's Catholic worldview is present but rarely preachy. The best of them, The Blue Cross and The Sins of Prince Saradine, are small masterpieces of the form. Read them in order; the collection builds.
Public-domain status
First published in 1911. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; G. K. Chesterton died in 1936, so this work has been free to republish there since 2007.
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- Project Gutenberg, ebook no. 204 — plain text, EPUB and Kindle, checked by us
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Keep reading
- The Mystery of a Hansom Cab — Fergus Hume, 1886
- The Moonstone — Wilkie Collins, 1868
- The Hound of the Baskervilles — Arthur Conan Doyle, 1902
- Pride and Prejudice — Jane Austen, 1813
- Reading lists — 19 ways through the collection
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