12 Facts About Father Brown

Father Brown solves mysteries and crimes using his intuition and keen understanding of human nature.

Father Brown is a short, plain Roman Catholic priest, with shapeless clothes, a large umbrella, and an uncanny insight into human behaviour.

Somewhat in the vein of Agatha Christie's detective character Miss Marple, Father Brown uses his unimposing demeanor to his advantage when studying criminals, to whom he seems to pose no danger.

In early stories, Father Brown is said to be priest for the small parish of Cobhole in Essex, but he relocates to London and travels to many other places, in England and abroad, during the course of the stories.

Father Brown is characteristically humble and is usually rather quiet, except to say something profound.

Related searches

Father Brown makes his first appearance in the story "The Blue Cross" published in 1910 and continues to appear throughout fifty short stories in five volumes, with two more stories discovered and published posthumously, often assisted in his crime-solving by the reformed criminal M Hercule Flambeau.

Father Brown appears in a third story — making a total of fifty-three — that did not appear in the five volumes published in Chesterton's lifetime, "The Donnington Affair", which has a curious history.

Many of the Father Brown stories were produced for financial reasons and at great speed.

Father Brown was a vehicle for conveying Chesterton's view of the world and, of all of his characters, is perhaps closest to Chesterton's own point of view, or at least the effect of his point of view.

Father Brown solves his crimes through a strict reasoning process more concerned with spiritual and philosophic truths than with scientific details, making him an almost equal counterbalance with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, whose stories Chesterton read.

However, the Father Brown series commenced before Chesterton's own conversion to Roman Catholicism.

Father Brown has occasionally appeared as a character in works not by Chesterton.