Book description
Shabby and lumbering, with a face like a Norfolk dumpling, Father Brown
makes for an improbable super-sleuth. But his innocence is the secret of
his success: refusing the scientific method of detection, he adopts
instead an approach of simple sympathy, interpreting each crime as a
work of art, and each criminal as a man no worse than himself. This
complete edition brings together all of the Father Brown stories,
including two not previously available in Penguin: 'The Donnington
Affair', in which Chesterton rises to the challenge of solving a
murder-mystery half written by someone else (Max Pemberton), and 'The
Mask of Midas', which was found in Chesterton's papers after his death.
G. K. Chesteron was born in 1874. He attended the Slade School of
Art, where he appears to have suffered a nervous breakdown, before
turning his hand to journalism. A prolific writer throughout his life,
his best-known books include The Napoleon of Notting Hill
(1904), The Man Who Knew Too Much(1922), The Man Who Was
Thursday (1908) and the Father Brown stories. Chesterton
converted to Roman Catholicism in 1922 and died in 1938.
Michael D. Hurley is a Fellow and Director of Studies in English at
Robinson College, Cambridge. He has written widely on English
literature from the nineteenth century to the present day, with an
emphasis on poetry and poetics. His book on G. K. Chesterton
was published in 2011.
