The Wholeness of Father Brown

Father Brown explains: "You see, I murdered them all myself... I planned out each of the crimes very carefully. I thought out exactly how a thing like that could be done, and in what style or state of mind a man could really do it. And when I was quite sure that I felt exactly like the murderer myself, of course I knew who he was." -- "Has it never struck you that a man who does next to nothing but hears men’s real sins is likely to be wholly aware of human evil?"

Father Brown is one of the great detectives in world literature. Here you are served not only some of the best detective stories ever written but great literature in every measurement. The tales are thought-provoking, humorous, satirical, poetical and philosophical. They usually have an uncanny, weird, almost supernatural atmosphere -- and nevertheless how rational and logical the solutions turns out to be, the explanations in themselves tends to feel even more mysterious. Many authors have tried to imitate the paradoxical nature of these 53 stories; none has succeeded.

The English author Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) was a very prominent cultural figure at the beginning of the last century, a true intellectual freethinker who never submitted himself to conventional ideas only because they were in vogue. In Eugenics and Other Evils (1922), when the eugenic movement was at its peak, he warned for racial purity and totalitarianism decades before the world became aware of what had happened in Nazi Germany. As a Catholic and theologian, moral questions and problems were of the highest importance for him, and his love for crime fiction should be seen in that light.