Three Father B rown book collections in one Folio Edition Slipcase (Only, no slipcase.I had come across a copy in the Oxfam bookshop, Ann St) The three collections in this largerv collection are; Incredulity Of Father Brow, The Secret Of Father Brown and The Scandal Of Father Brown. The short stories contained are just lovely, well written and thought provoking. Its the way he tells them, so to speak, Father Brown that is. An incident occurs, whether Father Brown is nearby or not, generally a mystery is recounted and then Father Brown relates the impressions he gets from said incident. His clarity, even when he has not seen as others have, is unsettlingly precise. The answers he comes up with not neccessarily what he or the listeners want to hear. His empathy is boundless, not so much his patience with his fellow man. Others seem to hear what he is saying but they fail to listen to what he is telling them.He will not always tell others what they want to hear b ut he will always tell them what they need to hear.
Father Brown's duties take him far and wide. He meets people from all walks of life, even those who are openly hostile to his faith. nearly all underestimate this shabbily gentile moon faced holy man. His venerable sense of dress setting him aside from the mainstream. He must have looked old fashioned even as a young man.What a thinker,though. T.S. Eliot once said of GK Chesterton "He was importantly and constantly on the side of the angels." That wonderful brain seeing the world as it is and not as we wish it to be, which is achingly human, a pain that comes with a deligent religous observance.
Murder, the act of human destruction, has been gradually whittledc down in its positioning as a terrible act of evil. Almost every visit to any bookshop, new or old, has its dedicated sections aimed at the cosey notion of murder. We find it in the quaintest of villages, under the moon and beneath the sun, even under the mistletoe. Father Brown observes the many faces of murder in many different places and at all times exercises the world weary wisdom of a slightly rumpled angel in black.
