The Innocence of Father Brown

Unlike his counterpart Sherlock Holmes, Father Brown relies more on intuition than reasoning ("Has it never struck you that a man who does next to nothing but hear men's real sins is not likely to be wholly unaware of human evil?") which makes for an interesting twist on the detective genre. A lot of deep philosophical and theological gems are shared by the homely priest along the way.

As far as my mystery experience goes I’ve only recently gotten into some Hercule Poirot, and most recent, Sherlock Holmes. I feel like this collection really lacks any guidelines and rule building for the Father Brown world. He is a practicing priest that also has a hand at detective work, but mostly he solves crime through his intuition rather than deductive work? I found that a lousy reasoning. And I’m sure in the character history there’s more to it, but it certainly wasn’t in this collection of stories. Not to mention most of these stories jump directly into it without anything else and more than one ends with something along the lines of, “that’s it, there’s nothing more.” It is mostly for that reason that I found these lackluster and really struggled to enjoy.

During our first lockdown last year, Father Brown (the TV series) was my major binge-watch. I thought I'd give the original stories a try. They weren't exactly what I expected them to be, but sometimes they were pretty good. You can tell why certain changes were made for the show, and I appreciate that. Out of all the stories in this one, I think I rated just one 4 stars. The rest hovered around 2-3.5 mainly. One big change they made for the show is definitely Flambeau's role, as in the stories he's actually a friend of Father Brown's, and all the secondary characters in the show don't exist in the stories either. While I don't regret reading this, there were enough times that the stories didn't age well that made them a bit tough to want to read more of.