Father Brown thesis notes

01-16-2002


[Chesterton]". . .has the distinction of having introduced metaphysics into the crime novel. His detective, Father Brown, is a priest who bases himself on the 'understanding of sin' and Catholic theology in general to prove that things are not what they seem."

(23 Mandel _Delightful Murder_)

"It is impossible to imagine Hercule Poirot, not to mention Lord Peter Whimsey or Father Brown, battling against the Mafia."

(34 Mandel Delightful Murder)

". . .although Chesterton's Father Brown does not like rich people or approve of capital accumulation, he has dogmatic conception of Good and Evil that is entirely consistent with upholding the stability of bourgeois socielty."

(125 Mandel Delightful Murder)

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introductory blurb-". . .probably the first serous and perceptive application of the critical method to the genre; certainly the earlist by anyt major literary figure."
[Chesterton-"A Defence of Detective Stories]
(3 Haycraft _Art of the Mystery Story_)

"A less common and rather more subtle type is that of the intuitionist detective. England knows only two of these worth mention, Mr. Chesterton's Father Brown and Mr. Baley's Mr. Fortune. Father Brown needs no lengthy method of proving guilt for he can guess the sectret of the crime from his wide knowledge of sin. . . .The are at any rate the most brillian talkers among modern detectives, not only in what they say but also in their pregnant silences."

[Wrong, E.M. Crime and Detection]
(23 Haycraft _Art of the Mystery Story_)

"Even arrest is dispensed with at times; a confession is enough for Father Brown, who is concerned more with laying bare the heart of a man than with the crude matter of punishment."


[Wrong, E.M. Crime and Detection]
(24-25 Haycraft _Art of the Mystery Story_)

"What we want in our detective fiction is not a semblance of real life , where murder is infrequent and petty larceny common, but deep mystery and conflicting clues. Murder has removed one party to the secret, and so is essentially mor mysterious than theft. Moreover, it involves an intenser motive than any peacetime activity: the drama is keyed high from the start for the murderer is playing for the highest stake he has, and can reasonably be expected to tangle the eveidence even to the commiting of a second murder.
[Wrong, E.M. Crime and Detection]
(25 Haycraft _Art of the Mystery Story_)

"The narrative of an eye-witness attains dramatic quality more easily than does a personal record. The clues can, as we have seen, be described not as they really are, but as they appear to a man of average, or generally less than average, intelligence. This parade of oppenness pleases while it decieves. Yet if there is a Boswell he must be present at all times, and this may prove inconvenient. The intuitionist detective like Father Brown or Mr. Fortune would only be hampered by him. It is true that they often need companions, partly as a foil, partly to share in the conversation. but they get assistance as it is required, Fortune from the police, Father Brown from Flambeau, who was a prosperous thief till he reformed and became an unsuccessful detective."


[Wrong, E.M. Crime and Detection]
(29 Haycraft _Art of the Mystery Story_)

"Father Brown may see only what his companions see, but it is by no means described as he sees it."


[Wrong, E.M. Crime and Detection]
(30 Haycraft _Art of the Mystery Story_)

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"G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown--a quiet, plain little preist who is now definitely established as one of the great probers of mysteries in modern etective fiction--is also what might be called an intellectual sleuth, although the subtleties of his analyses depend, in large measure on a kind of spiritual intuition--the result of his deep knowledge of human frailties. Although Fathe Brown does not spurn material clues as aids to his conclusions, he depends far more on his analyses of the human heart and his wide experience with sin. At times he is obscure and symbolic, even mystical; and too often the problems which Mr. Chesterton poses for him are based on crimes that are metaphysical and unconvincing in their implications; but Father brown's conversational gifts--his commentaries, parables and observations--are adequate compensation for the reader's dubiety. That fact that Fathe rBrown is concerned with the moral, or religous aspects, rather than the lega status, of the criminals he runs to earth, gives Mr. Chestertons' stories and interesting direction.
[Wright, Willard Huntington. The Great Detective Stories]
(50 Haycraft _Art of the Mystery Story_)
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"But though the detective is from time to time threatened with death, he has rarely, in the best circles, to run the gauntlet of organised attempts at assasination. Father Brown does not find bombs in his coal scuttle."


[Thomson, H. Douglas. Masters of Mystery]
(145 Haycraft _Art of the Mystery Story_)
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"And here I venture to think there is a limitation about Mr. Chesterton's Father Brown stories. He nearly always tries to put us off the scent by suggesting that the crime must have been done by magic; and we know that he is too good a sprtsman to fall back upon such a solution. Cosequently, although we seldom guess the anser to his riddles, we usually miss the thrill of having suspected the wrong person.

[Knox, Ronald A. A Detective Story Decalogue]
(194 Haycraft _Art of the Mystery Story_)
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"It is significant that the attitude of the readers in England, their respect for this art form, their willingness not only to read these books but to be _seen_ reading them, influenced many fine English writers to contribute to the literature. G. K. Chesterton gained prestige when he created Father Brown. He had proved himself a master at other literary forms, and he proved himself again a master at this one."
[Wright, Lee. Command Performance]
(288 Haycraft _Art of the Mystery Story_)
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"It is significant that even the 'thrillers' most popular with the ruling classes usually represent their hero as being on the side of law and order--the bourgeois conception of law and order, of course (that unspeakable public school bully and neurotic exhibitionis, Bulldog Drummon, is a case in point), or as a reformed criminal(e.g. Father Brown's right hand man); or, like Arse'ne Lupin, he starts as a criminal character but, after a number of anti-social adventures, gradually goes over to the other side."

[Blake, Nicholas. The Detective Story--Why?]
(401 Haycraft _Art of the Mystery Story_)

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"While in each volume the individual stories are completely different form each other in plot, the presence of a dominating and continuing central character (like Father Brown, Max Carrados, or The Old Man in the Corner) binds the heterogenous stories into a more cohesive and symmetrical pattern."


[Queen, Ellery. Leaves From the Eidtor's Notebook]
(410 Haycraft _Art of the Mystery Story_)

"The homely, humble bumbershoot seems exclusively the property of Gilbert K. Chesterton's Father Brown, although no serious attempt has been made by Chesterton's publishers to exploit such a fixed idea . . ."

[Queen, Ellery. Leaves From the Editor's Notebook]
(411 Haycraft _Art of the Mystery Story_)

"Even the names of Brown, Jones, and Smith have hardly been overworked in books of detective shorts. There is only one Brown--Chesterton's immortal and doubly unique Father Brown."

[Queen, Ellery. Leaves From the Editor's Notebook]
(414 Haycraft _Art of the Mystery Story_)

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"that humble little genius of the cloth, Father Brown, invented by the master of paradox, Gilbert K. Chesterton"

[Queen, Ellery. Detective Shrot Story: The First hundred Years]
(479 Haycraft _Art of the Mystery Story_)

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[speaking about Hammet's prose style]
"Nor is it quite the voice of Metaphysics or Morality, as with Father Brown (even though in a general sense ant fictional detective becomes the story's omniscient narrator and hence a type of God)"
[Naremore, James. "Dashiell hammet and the Poetics of Hard-Boiled Detection"]
(51 Benstock. Art in Crime Writing)

"The limits of the genre are indeed narrow, but the variations are infinite: total liberty within a fixed form--such is crime fiction. Success is its only valid criterion."

[Weisz, Pierre. "Simenon and 'Le Commissaire'"]
(51 Benstock. _Art in Crime Writing_)
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"The stories must be read, however, to appreciate Chesterton's brilian use of words, his characterisation, and his thesis that the commonplace can be startling because it is so often overlooked. For examples of the latter, see _The Inveisible Man_ and _The Queer Feet_--both deservedly classics of the genre. If the stories are sermons, they are still the most enjoyable sermons ever delivered."
(33 Barnes, Melvyn. _Best Detective Fiction_)
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"G. K. chesterton defended the genre on the grounds that it was 'the only form of popular literature in which is expressed some sense of the poetry of modern life.' And he found the source of that poetry in the representation of the city, in the 'realization of a great city itself as something wild and obvious.' Yet in the British tradition, at least, the detective novelist has more often than not preferred a rural or semirural setting for the locality of crime. In such a setting as much as in its class heroes the genre's fundamental traditionalism is expressed."
(190 Porter, Denis. The Pursuit of Crime)

"In Chesterton's words: 'By dealing with the unsleeping sentinels who guard the outposts of society, it [the romance of police activity] tends to remind us that we live in an armed camp, making war with a chaotic world, and that the criminals, the children of chaos, are nothing but the traitors within our gates.' The significance of the embattled great house in such a context is obvious."

(194 Porter, Denis. The Pursuit of Crime)
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"A real person has then to be brought to the gallows, and this must not be done too lightheartedly. Mr. G. K. Chesteton deals with this problem by merely refusing to face it. His Father Brown (who looks at sin and crime from the religous point of view) retires form the problem before the arrest is reached. He is satisfied with a confession. The sordid details take plae "off."


(38 Sayers, Dorothy L. _The Omnibus of Crime_)

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"Chesterton's love of paradox is too well known to require comment. he must have delighted in the fact that by the creation of his erstwhile meek, round-faced priest-detective, FATHER BROWN, he gave body to one of the most famous and best loved of detective _characters_--while writing tales that often are not detective _stories_ at all!
The FATHER BROWN series is composed exclusively of short stories, of which there are fifty, collected in five volumes: _The Innocence of Father Brown_ (1911), _The Wisdon of Father Brown_ (1914), _The Incredulity of Father Brown_ (1926), and _The Secret of Father Brown_ (1927), and the belated and definitely inferior _The Scandal of Father Brown_ (1935)."

(74,75 Haycraft, Howard. _Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective Story_)

"The best BROWN stories, from a detectival standpoint, are found in the first two volumes. In the final three the artificiality and fantasticism that inge all the tale sto a certain extent are even more pronounced. To say that FATHER BORWN is the greatest of 'intuitive' detectives is to suggest by the same word the most serious failure of his adventures by deductive standards: for decuction, not instinct, is the root of all convincing criminal investigation. Chesterton partly circumvented the difficulty by explaining (a trifle too frequently and insistently) that BROWN's magician-like ability to produce full-fledged solutions out of his globular head was only the logical operation of his profound knowledge of human wickedness, acquired in his priestly calling. Many critics haved objected also to the back grounds of the stories. Far from meeting the verisimilitude test of plausible fictive detection, they are often too abtruse to carry conviction even as fantasy (which also needs some connecting link with reality to acheive its purpose). Nevertheless, there are numerous points in the little priest's favor, as detective as well as man of wisdom."

(75 Haycraft, Howard. _Murder for Pleasure: The Life and imes of the Detective Story_)

"And Chesterton's vivid imagination, on the occasions when he kept it within the range of plausibility, greatly enriched and revivified the stereotyped form into which the detective story was beginning to fall when he started writing."

(75-76 Haycraft, Howard. _Murder for Pleasure: The Life and imes of the Detective Story_)

Nearly all the problems in the BROWN stories are problems of character. But Chesterton's approach was philosophical, whe A. E. W. Mason's (for example) was psychological. As Willard Huntington wright points our, FATHER BROWN is cheifly concerned with the moral and religous aspects of crime. In fact, it may well be Chestertopn's chief contribution to the genre that he perfected the _metaphysical_ detective story. Though not particularly suited to the me'tier, and for that reason seldom found in its pure state among other writers of detection, influential traces of it are present in the workd of many of the better Moderns. A few of the individual stories are undeniably brilliant, whether judged as detective tales or as that problematical thing called Art. Chesterton is at his best when he states a problem in apparently supernatural terms and then resolves it by philosophical paradox--see such tales as 'The Hammer of God,' 'The Invisible Man,' and that anthologists' favorite, 'The Queer Feet.' Unfortunately, the explanations are sometimes as fantastic as the premises, and too frequently the author seizes the occasion to intrude personal dogma and mysticism.
But such faults are largely forgivable inthe light of greater achievement. When Chesterton began to write the FATHER BROWN narratives, the detective story had only two main classifications: increasingly heavy-handed romanticism on the one side, and the new scientifcism on the other."

(76 Haycraft, Howard. _Murder for Pleasure: The Life and imes of the Detective Story_)

"Chesterton's brillian style and fertile imagination brough new blood to the genre; gave it a needed and distinctly mor 'lieterary' turn that was to have far-reaching effect. His great reputation and the instant response to FATHER BROWN as a character combined to create and aura of prestige and respectability which detective fiction at the time was beginning to require if it was to survive and progress."

(77 Haycraft, Howard. _Murder for Pleasure: The Life and imes of the Detective Story_)
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FROM THE NET

"The Father Brown stories first appeared on this side of the Atlantic, beginning in July of 1910 in The Saturday Evening Post. The stories reveal a drab and seemingly unexceptional Roman Catholic priest
-- an Englishman -- "formerly of Cobhole in Essex, and now working in London."
He is amusing and companionable, and, when you get to know him, uncommonly witty
and bright. He is also a hard- working and dedicated priest and, in addition to
that, he has an uncommon gift for solving crimes. "

(Peterson, John. Who Is Father Brown?)
Google search 01-16-2002
1997 The American Chesterton Society

"In 1909 Gilbert Chesterton's brother Cecil, who had been watching these developments with more than casual interest, noted that as Gilbert was a philosopher as well as a detective-story writer, he was therefore logically destined to write "philosophical detective stories." Cecil was quite sure these
would feature some kind of "transcendental Sherlock Holmes." His prophecy was
fulfilled when his brother created the character of Father Brown. It is no secret how Gilbert finally decided to make an ordinary clergyman into his transcendental Holmes. Not then a Roman Catholic himself, he had a very
good Roman Catholic friend, Father John O'Connor, a parish priest whom he had
met in 1903. Chesterton had assumed, as perhaps many have, that celibate priests
are somehow shielded from life and from life's full serving of evil. But priests
are not shielded from evil. As we will eventually hear Father Brown say, "a man
who does next to nothing but hear men¹s real sins is not likely to be wholly
unaware of human evil." Chesterton had been surprised by what he later said were Father O'Connor's
glimpses of hell. "That the Catholic Church knew more about good than I did was
easy to believe," he would write in his Autobiography. "That she knew more about
evil than I did seemed incredible." One particular occasion had brought the point home with some force. Shortly
after the priest was obliged to set him straight on some harrowing point of
human depravity, Chesterton happened to overhear two undergraduates complaining
about Father O'Connor and the cloistered innocence of priests. Chesterton's
reaction, recorded thirty years later, is worth repeating. To me, still almost shivering with the appallingly practical facts of which the priest had warned me, this comment came with such a
colossal and crushing irony, that I nearly burst into a loud harsh laugh in
the drawing-room. For I knew perfectly well that, as regards all the solid
Satanism which the priest knew and warred against with all his life, these two Cambridge gentlemen (luckily for them) knew about as much of real evil as two
babies in the same perambulator.
Viewed in retrospect, the
idea of a fictional priest-and-sleuth makes perfect sense. Part of the allure of
the classic detective story derives from the contrast between the murderer and
the detective -- between the brutality of the one and the gentility of the
other. The classical Great Detective is refined and fastidious (we need only
think of Holmes, Wimsey, Poirot, and Miss Marple). The classic detective
traffics in vulgar atrocities but is not touched by them nor does he sink to
their level, as so invariably do the detectives of the so-called "hard-boiled
school" of crime fiction.
The detective who is also a clergyman might, in theory, press this contrast
even further by offering saintly goodness, rather than fastidiousness, in
opposition to the depravity and outrage of the criminals and crimes."

(Peterson, John. Who Is Father Brown?)
Google search 01-16-2002
The Detedtion Club
1997 The American Chesterton Society
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"A taste for detective stories always seems to require self-justification on
the part of its devotees, against the implication that it exposes either a
frivolous mind given over merely to escapist entertainment or a certain
blood-thirstiness. Perhaps no branch of literature has called forth so much
argument as to whether it is legitimate even to read such things at all.
Chesterton thought the detective genre was popular because “serious” literature
had departed from ageless perceptions of reality which every person shares at
some deep level. It was, he believed, “...the earliest and only form of popular
literature in which is expressed some sense of the poetry of modern life.”"

(Hitchcock, James. Father Brown and Company)
Google search 01-16-2002
Catholic Dossier - May/June 1998

"His imagination was, as always, gripped by the drama of a romanticized
chivalry, and he saw the detective moving across London like “a prince in a tale
of elfland,” every lamp post, every crooked street, announcing hidden meanings
of which the casual observer is ignorant but the detective is determined to ferret out. "

(Hitchcock, James. Father Brown and Company)
Google search 01-16-2002
Catholic Dossier - May/June 1998

"Chesterton often insisted that modern popular rationalism is in fact
unrealistic, illustrating the point on one occasion by pointing out the
coincidence that “a man named Williams actually does murder a man called
Williamson, thus making it appear as though a father has killed his offspring.”
It was probably a reference to the Ratcliffe Highway murders in London in 1811,
when a sailor named John Williams was accused of murdering two entire families,
one of them named Williamson (a story grippingly told by P.D. James, herself a
detective-story writer of great distinction, and T.A. Critchley in their book
The Maul and the Pear Tree)."

(Hitchcock, James. Father Brown and Company)
Google search 01-16-2002
Catholic Dossier - May/June 1998

"The definitive study of religious belief and the detective story has yet to
be written, but it is probably not a coincidence that some of the leading practitioners of the genre — Chesterton, Dorothy Sayers, Christie, Knox, and
others — have been believers. Perhaps the deepest insight into the connection
comes from another believer, W.H. Auden, in his classic essay “The Guilty
Vicarage,” where he analyzes the genre as a state of tension between an innocent
society in no need of law and events which cause it to lose its innocence and
thus to be in need of getting set right again by an agent of the law. Father
Brown, Auden pointed out, is unique as a detective in being able to offer
compassion and forgiveness as well as apprehension and punishment."

(Hitchcock, James. Father Brown and Company)
Google search 01-16-2002
Catholic Dossier - May/June 1998

"In his classic essay Chesterton saw the detective as a “knight errant”
charged with protecting the “romantic rebellion” which is civilization against
the primeval chaos which always threatens it, the detective story’s task to
remind the reader of the “knives and fists of a thieves’ kitchen.”"

(Hitchcock, James. Father Brown and Company)
Google search 01-16-2002
Catholic Dossier - May/June 1998

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"It’s no mystery why priests and religious are
natural choices to be the protagonists of mystery fiction.

What is a mystery, after all, but the story of a confrontation between
good and evil, an attempt to restore justice to creation, and to shed
light into the darkness? This is what ministry is about, as well, so
calling the ordained or vowed forces of good to the scene of a crime makes
perfect literary sense.

When we consider the question of clerics and mysteries, the first
figure most of us think of is G.K.
Chesterton’s Father Brown. The first Father Brown story was published
in 1910 in the Saturday Evening Post, years before Chesterton had even converted to
Roman Catholicism.
Forty-eight Father Brown
stories were published before Chesterton’s death, and for many, the
unassuming Catholic priest, who solved mysteries through close observation
and intuition, remains the model clerical detective, unmatched by any
subsequent efforts by other authors. "

(Welborn, Amy. THe Mytery of the Clerical Detective.)
Google search
01-16-2002

" Chesterton’s explanation of what the “Ideal Detective
Novel”, starring clerics or laity, should be about:

“The inconsistencies of human nature are indeed terrible and
heart-shaking things, to be named with the same note of crisis as the hour
of death and the Day of Judgment. They are not all fine shades, but some
of them very fearful shadows, made by the primal contrast of darkness and
light. Both the crimes and the confessions can be as catastrophic as
lightning. Indeed, The Ideal Detective Story might do some good if it
brought men back to understand that the world is not all curves, but that
there are some things that are as jagged as the lightning-flash or as
straight as the sword.”
"

(Welborn, Amy. THe Mytery of the Clerical Detective.)
Google search
01-16-2002
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