1911 collection of 1910-1911 short stories, first of the Father
Brown anthologies. Father Brown is an unassuming priest with a solid
understanding of human nature.
Of course he is also a mouthpiece for Chesterton, who's never
afraid of letting the reader know what he approves or disapproves
of—the latter, here particularly, anyone who looks "foreign", and
anything associated with foreignness; I think it's not so much racism
as a desperate clinging to the idea that the English way of doing
things is always the best, at least for the English, and nobody else
can have anything to teach them.
But this is Chesterton, so his language is also beautiful,
"The Blue Cross" introduces us to Flambeau the great thief, and
Valentin the greater detective (at least in his own mind); and to
Flambeau's victim, a bumbling priest from Essex up to London. As
Valentin follows the pair, he keeps seeing oddities: salt and sugar
swapped in their pots, a plate of soup thrown at the wall, a grocer's
signs changed around. But while he's following that trail he has an
experience which caught me when I first read these stories as a
teenager:
the long roads of the North London suburbs seemed to shoot out into
length after length like an infernal telescope. It was one of those
journeys on which a man perpetually feels that now at last he must
have come to the end of the universe, and then finds he has only come
to the beginning of Tufnell Park.
Yes, talk of the theology if you like, but that's what made me fall in
love.
"The Secret Garden" also has Valentin, mostly to set up an apparently
air-tight logic puzzle that isn't. (And Chesterton's tendency to
include a troubled young couple to be set to rights.) There's a gadfly
playfulness here that seems to come more from Chesterton than from
Brown:
I fancy you're ill," exclaimed Dr. Simon sharply; "but I'll ask the
next question if you like. How did Brayne get out of the garden?"
"He didn't get out of the garden," said the priest, still looking
out of the window.
"Didn't get out of the garden?" exploded Simon.
"Not completely," said Father Brown.
Simon shook his fists in a frenzy of French logic. "A man gets out
of a garden, or he doesn't," he cried.
"Not always," said Father Brown.
Of course, he will justify it all.
"The Queer Feet" is probably my favourite of these, and not at all for
the crime.
‘Stand still,' he said, in a hacking whisper. ‘I don't want to
threaten you, but——'
‘I do want to threaten you,' said Father Brown, in a voice like a
rolling drum. ‘I want to threaten you with the worm that dieth not,
and the fire that is not quenched.'
‘You're a rum sort of cloak-room clerk,' said the other.
‘I am a priest, Monsieur Flambeau,' said Brown, ‘and I am ready to
hear your confession.'
and someone who "had never done anything—not even anything wrong". But
the thing that struck me most is the reaction from the dining-club
when a waiter comes in and simply stops.
The waiter stood staring a few seconds, while there deepened on every
face at table a strange shame which is wholly the product of our time.
It is the combination of modern humanitarianism with the horrible
modern abyss between the souls of the rich and poor. A genuine
historic aristocrat would have thrown things at the waiter, beginning
with empty bottles, and very probably ending with money. A genuine
democrat would have asked him, with a comrade-like clearness of
speech, what the devil he was doing. But these modern plutocrats could
not bear a poor man near to them, either as a slave or as a friend.
That something had gone wrong with the servants was merely a dull, hot
embarrassment. They did not want to be brutal, and they dreaded the
need to be benevolent. They wanted the thing, whatever it was, to be
over.
"The Flying Stars" has Flambeau's last crime, and a sudden commedia
dell'arte performance at a Christmas party.
The young lady, having scattered bread for the birds (for the
fourth or fifth time that day, because the dog ate it), passed
unobtrusively down the lane of laurels and into a glimmering
plantation of evergreens behind.
"The Invisible Man" is possibly the most influential story, because
it's so very adaptable: how can you have witnesses saying that
nobody's gone in, when someone has? Because that someone's job was to
be there. (Rather more, of course, in those days when servants and
tradesmen were commoner.)
"The Honour of Israel Gow" is reaching for the gothic, and to my mind
doesn't quite make it; but it's also a rare case of Father Brown being
entirely wrong-footed by being too ready to see man's interaction with
God in the small things of life.
"The Wrong Shape" is perhaps the nadir of Chesterton feeling that
England's culture and people should be enough for the English:
"Why, look at it," cried Father Brown, holding out the crooked knife
at arm's length, as if it were some glittering snake. "Don't you see
it is the wrong shape? Don't you see that it has no hearty and plain
purpose? It does not point like a spear. It does not sweep like a
scythe. It does not look like a weapon. It looks like an instrument
of torture."
But it's still a decent piece of detection.
"The Sins of Prince Saradine" is a more effective gothic for losing
the castle setting, but the smell of decay pervades even as our heroes
enter.
The vessel was just comfortable for two people; there was room only
for necessities, and Flambeau had stocked it with such things as his
special philosophy considered necessary. They reduced themselves,
apparently, to four essentials: tins of salmon, if he should want to
eat; loaded revolvers, if he should want to fight; a bottle of
brandy, presumably in case he should faint; and a priest, presumably
in case he should die.
"The Hammer of God" is to me the most Father Brown-ish of the stories
here (in this subgenre that Chesterton was defining as he wrote it):
Brown not only spots the criminal, he does it by getting inside his
head and working out who, of the people here, should have thought
that way, and thus come up with the idea of doing the thing.
"The Eye of Apollo" has two frauds but only one murder, with "one of
those new religions":
Their two great symbols are the sun and the open eye; for they say
that if a man were really healthy he could stare at the sun."
"If a man were really healthy," said Father Brown, "he would not
bother to stare at it."
"The Sign of the Broken Sword" stretches a bit to talk about the
aftermath of a battle (one that need never have been fought):
‘Where does a wise man hide a leaf? In the forest. But what does he
do if there is no forest?'
‘Well—well,' cried Flambeau irritably, ‘what does he do?'
‘He grows a forest to hide it in,' said the priest in an obscure
voice. ‘A fearful sin.'
and includes another religious fanatic:
In each of the hot and secret countries to which that man went he
kept a harem, he tortured witnesses, he amassed shameful gold; but
certainly he would have said with steady eyes that he did it to the
glory of the Lord. My own theology is sufficiently expressed by
asking which Lord?
Finally, "The Three Tools of Death" has the demise of someone whose
entire public persona has been built on constant cheerfulness; and if
that seems like the sort of thing Chesterton would despise, fair
enough, but it's clearly a fairly horrible business even for the
practitioner.
Chesterton famously knocked these off in haste for ready cash, and
didn't think much of them; but I enjoy them rather more than the
things that he lingered over.