Audiobook · read by volunteers
Wisdom of Father Brown
G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936)
Read by Martin Clifton · 12 chapters · 7 h 17
About the book
Father Brown is back, with his umbrella, his shapeless clothes and a quiet gift for seeing what others overlook. In this second collection of stories, he confronts a series of strange and seemingly inexplicable crimes: mysterious deaths, vanishing objects and elaborate frauds, each with a solution that is simple once he has explained it. G. K. Chesterton's priest is no cold reasoner. He works by intuition, by a deep knowledge of human wrongdoing and by an unshakable common sense that is, as the stories insist, perfectly compatible with faith. The stories sparkle with paradox and with marvellous descriptions of a vanished England. Twelve chapters and over seven hours, read by a single LibriVox volunteer. A treat for lovers of classic detective fiction.
Introduction
The Wisdom of Father Brown, published in 1914, is the second of five collections of short stories by G. K. Chesterton about his fictional detective. Chesterton, who lived from 1874 to 1936, was an English journalist, novelist and thinker, famous for his wit and for the paradoxes that fill his writing. His priest-detective first appeared in 1910, and the series made him one of the best-known names in the genre.
Father Brown is a short, unremarkable Catholic priest in shapeless clothes, forever carrying a large umbrella, and he has an uncanny understanding of human evil. Unlike his near contemporary Sherlock Holmes, he works from small details that others overlook, but he reaches the truth chiefly by intuition rather than by deduction. He is plainly devout, yet he never abandons reason: whatever his faith in God and in miracles, he almost always finds the perfectly ordinary, natural explanation of the puzzle in front of him. He is also an educated and civilised man, quite at home in modern, secular ways of thinking.
It has often been said that the character was inspired by a real priest whom Chesterton knew, and the figure certainly has the warmth of a portrait. The stories themselves move across England and Europe, from country houses to city streets, and they combine ingenious plotting with a lively moral imagination.
This recording contains twelve chapters and lasts about seven and a quarter hours. It is read by a single LibriVox volunteer. Readers who enjoyed the first collection will find the same pleasures here, and newcomers can begin with this volume without difficulty.
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