The Wisdom of Father Brown: A Collection of Short Stories - Softcover

In G. K. Chesterton’s 1914 sequel to The Innocence of Father Brown, we find the tenacious little priest hounding thieves, traitors, and killers throughout England, and even to France and Italy. Here are twelve more cases featuring Father Brown, a priest turned detective who combines philosophical and spiritual reasoning with scientific observation to solve crimes. In these long-cherished tales, Chesterton laid the foundation for future detective figures in literature, such as Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple, Ellery Queen, and Nero Wolfe.
Unlike other writers of his time, who concocted outlandish crimes and intricate puzzles for the protagonist to solve, Chesterton pioneered the cozy mystery, narrowing the scope of the investigation to limited time, limited space, and a limited number of suspects, with all of the clues revealed to the reader, as well as to the detective.
Chesterton is highly regarded as a biting social commentator, and his humorous and insightful comparisons leave readers reeling. The tales in this collection are short, easy reads with strong plots, all connected by the clever cleric’s intuitive understanding of the dark side of human nature.

G. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton (1874–1936) was an English writer, philosopher, satirist, and social critic. During his lifetime, the prolific Chesterton wrote eighty books, several hundred poems, some two hundred short stories, four thousand essays, and several plays. He was also known as a strong debater and Christian apologist. He often took on what he considered to be the flawed philosophy of modernism found in the writings of his good friends Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw. It was Shaw who once referred to Chesterton in Time magazine as “a man of colossal genius.” Chesterton’s writings consistently displayed wit and a sense of humor. His ingenious use of paradox in his commentaries on the leading political, economic, philosophical, and theological beliefs makes his writings as relevant today as they were in his day.