{"id":5686,"date":"2012-04-08T00:01:24","date_gmt":"2012-04-08T06:01:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/?p=5686"},"modified":"2012-04-06T16:05:38","modified_gmt":"2012-04-06T22:05:38","slug":"book-review-secret-father-brown","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/book-review-secret-father-brown\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Review: The Secret of Father Brown"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe src=\"http:\/\/rcm.amazon.com\/e\/cm?t=adamsblog03-20&#038;o=1&#038;p=8&#038;l=as1&#038;asins=0755100271&#038;ref=tf_til&#038;fc1=000000&#038;IS2=1&#038;lt1=_blank&#038;m=amazon&#038;lc1=0000FF&#038;bc1=000000&#038;bg1=FFFFFF&#038;f=ifr\" style=\"width:120px;height:240px;\" scrolling=\"no\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" frameborder=\"0\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Have you wondered how the great detectives solved their cases? In <em>The Secret of Father Brown,\u00a0<\/em>while visiting Flambeau&#8217;s house Father Brown meets a curious American who has to know as some of his countrymen think Father Brown is using mystical powers. Father Brown offers his explanation:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;You see, I had murdered them all myself,&#8221; explained Father Brown<br \/>\npatiently. &#8220;So, of course, I knew how it was done.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Grandison Chace had risen to his great height like a man lifted to the\u00a0ceiling by a sort of slow explosion. Staring down at the other he<br \/>\nrepeated his incredulous question.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I had planned out each of the crimes very carefully,&#8221; went on Father\u00a0Brown, &#8220;I had thought out exactly how a thing like that could be done,\u00a0and in what style or state of mind a man could really do it. And when I\u00a0was quite sure that I felt exactly like the murderer myself, of course I\u00a0knew who he was.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Even after further explanation, the American still doesn&#8217;t quite get it, so Father Brown introduces the stories as case studies in his method.<\/p>\n<p>The eight mysteries that followed are asolid group. While, I don&#8217;t think the cases rise to the level of\u00a0the brilliance of the <em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/father-browns-buying-review-incredulity-father-brown\/\">Incredulity of Father Brown<\/a>, <\/em>there&#8217;s not a bad story in the lot. \u00a0Probably the weakest stories in the volume\u00a0\u00a0are <em>The Song of the Flying Fish <\/em>and <em>The Red Moon of Meru<\/em>\u00a0and that&#8217;s only because they seem similar similar to other attempted theft stories in other volumes.<\/p>\n<p>Three of the cases were chosen for adaptation in the 1970s Father Brown TV series and are probably the best cases in the book:<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;The Mirror of the Magistrate&#8221; finds Father Brown insisting that a revolutionary poet is innocent of murdering a judge. Father Brown&#8217;s ability to see the events from the poet&#8217;s perspective helps him avoid the assumptions the police fall into.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;The Man with Two Beards&#8221; finds police searching for a famous jewel thief who has emerged to rob again. He&#8217;s apparently killed while committing another robbery, but is that what really happened? \u00a0Father Brown probably faces one of his most clever and surprising adversaries in this case.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;The Actor and the Alibi&#8221; tells the story of a theatre owner being murdered where everyone seems to have an alibi. This is a case where nothing is what it seems and Father Brown has to see through \u00a0a clever rouse.<\/p>\n<p>In addition to this there are a couple other noteworthy stories: &#8220;The Vanishing of the Vaudrey&#8221; is perhaps the darkest Father Brown tale I&#8217;ve read yet, while &#8220;The Chief Mourner of Marne&#8221; is one of the more profound. A man has secluded himself and is in mourning. Rumor has it that Catholic monks have forced him to do it due to a duel he fought with his brother. Father Brown seeks to uncover the truth and clear the Church of\u00a0scurrilousness\u00a0charges. Along the way, the story provides enormous food for thought on forgiveness.<\/p>\n<p>Overall, this is a great collection with eight mysteries that will appeal strongly to any Father Brown fan and also showcases some interesting developments and growth in Chesterton&#8217;s philosophy.<\/p>\n<p>Rating: 4.75 Stars out of 5.0<\/p>\n<p><em>This post contains affiliate links, which means that items purchased from these links may result in a commission being paid to the author of this post at no extra cost to the purchaser.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>If you enjoyed this post, you can have new posts about Detective stories and the golden age of radio and television delivered\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/product\/B004U8SET2\/ref=as_li_tf_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=adamsblog03-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;creativeASIN=B004U8SET2\">automatically to your Kindle<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Have you wondered how the great detectives solved their cases? In The Secret of Father Brown,\u00a0while visiting Flambeau&#8217;s house Father Brown meets a curious American who has to know as some of his countrymen think Father Brown is using mystical powers. Father Brown offers his explanation: &#8220;You see, I had murdered them all myself,&#8221; explained&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[63,38,123],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5686","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-review","category-father-brown","category-golden-age-article"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pECdK-1tI","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5686","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5686"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5686\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5687,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5686\/revisions\/5687"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5686"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5686"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greatdetectives.net\/detectives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5686"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}