This volume is a collection of four books which I shall review separately.
Book One: The Innocence of Fr. Brown. The little priest is a whiz-bang analyzer and reaches conclusions far in advance of those with him. The curious, and disconcerting, aspect of these stories is the ubiquitousness of Fr. Brown. He turns up in the most unusual places in a most timely manner. It is entertaining but can become boring.

These are all clever tales. Usually the plot concerns an event in which some terrible crime has been committed, but Fr Brown finds a simpler and less violent thing had actually happened. ( )

this wasn't as good as i remembered it being. i had to resort to listening to it as an audio book to get through it and the weird inconsistencies in morals between the narrator and father brown and sometimes father brown and himself were just very :/ to me. i had a half hour left on the audio book but i'm not gunna bother to finish it. ( )

Entertaining, at times a bit formulaic. Like all crime and mysteries series', at the heart is an interesting, unforgettable protagonist. Father Brown is an anti-Sherlock, unprepossessing, a small man with a moon-like face and a big black knobby umbrella. At almost all times polite, at all times humane. Reading all the stories back to back, one senses some development from one collection to the next. The earliest stories are marred by a reflexive anti-protestantism, against both Church of England and Dissenting groups. Those in succeeding collections are more tolerant. Recurring throughout however is a trace of xenophobia; Chesterton's references to blacks, while not as virulent of those of his contemporary Thomas Wolfe, are unacceptable today, his references to Jews are nearly as bad. Balanced against this are the pleasures of Chesterton's habitual turn to paradox and view of life both comic and moral (without being priggish). The perfect companion for my weekly commutes to this city this semester. ( )

When Chesterton is on, he's on. There are two stories here that are, in my opinion, incredible literary works of their own - "The Sign of the Broken Sword", which is maybe the only mystery I've ever read that does the "detective cracks a cold case from folklore and legends" plot well, and "The Head of Caesar", which could easily be stripped of the detective story trappings and presented as an out-and-out short horror story.

However, reading dozens of these back-to-back-to-back lays a lot of things very bare. Father Brown's lack of a life outside "priest who appears in the nick of time to solve a mystery", and his lack of eccentricities, make him come across as a flat character to me. Sherlock Holmes isn't someone who has much of an inner life, but his various eccentricities make him fun to read. Likewise, a lot of modern detective novels (thinking of Tana French, Adrian McKinty, etc here) lack what Chesterton (in what I freely acknowledge is a good joke) calls "opium smoking and acrostics". I developed a theory reading this that you need to have one or the other to keep things going - either you need to be able to see inside the detective's head, or they need to be such an enjoyable character that that lack of introspection doesn't matter. Chesterton kind of gesticulates towards this at the beginning with an interconnected narrative about Brown and Flambeau, but once that gets settled the roteness of the stories becomes really apparent.

In the end, I think that the highest highs of this make up for the lowest lows, but I don't know if I'd want to push myself through something like this again. I *am* interested to watch the TV show (part of the reason I read this), however, as I think that there's potential to do something interesting with the material in a different format. ( )