Exactly one hundred years ago Agatha Christie – challenged by her sister and inspired by Gaston Leroux, among others – began toying with the idea of writing a detective novel. Conan Doyle, on the other hand, had already offered his adoring public the best of his oeuvre and Sherlock Holmes was an established household name. 1914 was also the year that saw the publication of The Wisdom of Father Brown. It was the second and perhaps the most interesting collection of short stories by G.K. Chesterton in which the unlikeliest amateur detective imaginable investigates some of the most bizarre murders in English detective fiction.
It was inevitable that Father Brown should have been compared to Sherlock Holmes and the contrast between the two detectives couldn’t be more striking. Sherlock Holmes is very much the Bohemian Übermensch of Victorian, Edwardian and then Georgian London; he is tall and hawk-like, a master analyst-cum-logician, a boxer, a swordsman, a scientist and, as though that were not enough, an expert disguiser. Holmes’ manner is superior and often disdainful. Father Brown is a dowdy Catholic priest, short and rotund, with an ingenuous moonlike face, comically clumsy, very humble and always apologetic. In The Absence of Mr Glass he is described as ‘the very embodiment of all that is homely and helpless’. Father Brown’s most conspicuous feature – to perpetrate a Chestertonian paradox – is his inconspicuousness. His detective method, as such, appears to be more a matter of (divine?) inspiration than deduction.
Father Brown’s main tactic, as he is the first to point out, is empathy – a leap into another’s point of view. He puts himself imaginatively in the minds of the killers, identifying himself with their way of seeing and thinking, with their wants, their desires and, ultimately, with their motive for murder. In doing so, he discovers his own capacity for murder, though distinct from them, he shares their humanity and, in potential at least, their sin. At odd moments, in the course of the stories, Brown can seem as an uncanny figure – a goblin, a horned and Satanic figure caught in a glance in a distant mirror. But even though he ‘doubles’ himself with the killer, he does so entirely in a spirit of humility and charity.
Chesterton’s aim in writing the Father Brown stories seems to have been to subvert the widely accepted idea that priests are unworldly innocents who lead a sheltered existence and are ignorant of the ways of the world. Father Brown – whose religion would automatically have marked him down as something of an outsider in early twentieth-century England – is startlingly well-informed about all manner of sins. (In that respect he bears similarity to Christie’s unworldly, village-bound Miss Marple.) Father Brown’s life as a priest, on the other hand, brings into the tales the kind of enigmas that an orthodox detective would not be expected to solve: not just ‘whodunit’, but the ultimate mystery of life and death itself.
After reading a Father Brown story, it is not so much the solution to the crime one remembers but the fascinating ideas and the entertaining, thought-provoking paradoxes, which inevitably conjure up the spirit of Oscar Wilde. (‘You attacked reason. It is bad theology.’ ‘Nobody could quite decide whether he was a great aristocrat who had taken up Art, or a great artist whom the aristocrats had taken up.’ ‘Dr Hood treated his private book-shelf as if it were a public library.’)
One also remembers the atmosphere – a claustrophobic walled gardens in which a decapitated corpse is found, an occultist’s sinister tower, a cursed book, an aesthete’s hidden island lost among the fens.
The Father Brown stories are undoubtedly some of the greatest and most unusual yet written. And, interestingly enough, the cleric-as-crime-buster has recently re-appeared in the shape of dashing Sidney Chambers, the protagonist of James Runcie’s detective novels set in the 1950s, which have also been made into a major TV series called Grantchester. The fact that the latter are enjoying tremendous popularity with the public shows that the appetite for clerical crime continues unabated in the twenty-first century.
R.T. Raichev is the author of The Antonia Darcy and Major Payne Mystery series. His latest book is The Killing of Olga Klimt. Olga Klimt knew that there might be a high price to pay for playing with the hearts of powerful men but when jealousy, obsession and deception come into play the stakes are higher than she ever could have anticipated. In this ninth investigation of Antonia Darcy and Major Payne, they are drawn into the most baffling case of murder and intrigue where nothing—not even the identity of the victim– is certain. R.T. Raichev’s post-modern twist on Victorian London and his penchant for composing the most intricate of murder mysteries means that nothing is ever quite what it seems ...