The Complete Father Brown

This is a collection of ALL of the Father Brown stories by GK Chesterton. In retrospect, although I mostly enjoyed them and I finished the book, 718 pages was too much for me. The stories contain quite a bit of social criticism--of people's ideas about science and the supernatural, the place and purpose of religion in life, among other things.

The stories are full of melodrama and strangeness. Quite a few of them involve characters from former British colonies, especially India, or British people who had served in the colonies. A common framework for one of these stories has a somewhat lurid atmosphere and characters who are afraid that supernatural forces are at work. Father Brown, a Catholic priest who seems to have a lot of time off from his regular duties, serves in these stories as the dispeller of superstition. He applies reasoning to his astute observations and shows how an ordinary human being accomplished the crime and why. As he does this, he also cautions his observers that the answers he provides are not less disturbing than the supernatural explanations they originally feared.

The copyright on this volume is 1963, with copyrights from the original books starting in 1911. The attitudes towards people and ideas from the former British colonies reflect the attitudes from those times. Racial slurs are used with no consciousness that they are offensive.

I also have a bone to pick with the publisher, Penguin, who calls Father Brown "Fiction's best loved amateur sleuth" on the cover of this volume. I would argue that title belongs to Sherlock Holmes.