Easily the darkest of Chesterton’s Father Brown collections, it is nonetheless a masterwork of perception of the human condition, explored through the usual impossible crimes and a parade of rogues and saints–a corpse in shining armor, a thieving mystic, insouciant British aristocrats, and a Canadian journalist. We are asked to solve death by duel and pistol shot, and thefts of jewels large and small. The stories in this collection are worth reading over and over–to see how the plot unfolds, and to enjoy Chesterton’s gorgeous and well-informed prose. Includes the title story, The Secret of Father Brown, along with, The Mirror of the Magistrate, The Man with Two Beards, The Song of the Flying Fish, The Actor and the Alibi, The Vanishing of Vaudrey, The Worst Crime in the World, The Red Moon of Meru, and The Chief Mourner of Marne.
James Bagshaw and Wilfred Underhill were old friends, and were fond of rambling through the streets at night, talking interminably as they turned corner after corner in the silent and seemingly lifeless labyrinth of the large suburb in which they lived. The former, a big, dark, good-humoured man with a strip of black moustache, was a professional police detective; the latter a sharp-faced, sensitive-looking gentleman with light hair, was an amateur interested in detection. It will come as a shock to the readers of the best scientific romance to learn that it was the policeman who was talking and the amateur who was listening, even with a certain respect. 'Ours is the only trade,' said Bagshaw, 'in which the professional is always supposed to be wrong. After all, people don’t write stories in which hairdressers can’t cut hair and have to be helped by a customer; or in which a cabman can’t drive a cab until his fare explains to him the philosophy of cab-driving. For all that, I’d never deny that we often tend to get into a rut: or, in other words, have the disadvantages of going by a rule. Where the romancers are wrong is, that they don’t allow us even the advantages of going by a rule.'
