Audiobook · read by volunteers
Innocence of Father Brown
G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936)
Read by Brian Roberg · 12 chapters · 10 h 23
About the book
Father Brown does not look like a detective. He is small, round and clumsy, carries a battered umbrella and a brown paper parcel, and seems always to be a little behind the conversation. Yet wherever a crime baffles the experts, he turns up, listens, and quietly sees what the cleverest minds have missed. In these twelve stories, G. K. Chesterton sends his priest after a thief in disguise, a murder in a walled garden and a score of impossible-looking puzzles, and every time the solution turns on understanding people rather than collecting clues. The mysteries are ingenious, the style is full of paradox and sparkle, and the London of the early twentieth century glows with colour. One reader carries you through more than ten hours of cunning, wit and surprise. Clever, humane and wonderfully readable.
Introduction
Gilbert Keith Chesterton, who lived from 1874 to 1936, was an English writer of extraordinary range. He produced essays, novels, poems, biography and theology, and he was famous for his wit, his paradoxes and his large figure. In the history of detective fiction he is remembered chiefly for Father Brown, a Catholic priest who first appeared in print in 1910 and went on to solve crimes in five collections of stories.
The Innocence of Father Brown, published in 1911, is the first of those collections. It contains twelve stories, beginning with The Blue Cross, in which the priest outwits a master thief, and followed by tales such as The Secret Garden. Chesterton's detective is the opposite of the brilliant, aloof investigators who preceded him. He is an unassuming man who has spent years hearing confessions and has therefore learned how the human heart goes wrong. His method is less a matter of footprints and cigarette ash than of imagination, of putting himself inside the mind of the wrongdoer.
The stories are enjoyable as puzzles, but they are also full of Chesterton's own interests: his love of paradox, his suspicion of fashionable certainties and his delight in vivid description. The experts who are fooled by the priest's modest appearance often hold clever, fashionable ideas that Chesterton enjoys puncturing.
This recording has twelve chapters, one for each story, and runs for about ten and a half hours. One LibriVox volunteer reads the whole collection. It is perfect for fans of classic mysteries, and for anyone who likes their puzzles with a dash of philosophy. Anyone who likes clever mysteries will enjoy the way each story builds towards a surprise.
Public domain
G. K. Chesterton died in 1936: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text