Review: The Innocence of Father Brown by G. K. Chesterton

Trade paperback, 306 pages
Published 1998 (contents: 1910-11)

Acquired and read January 2013

The Annotated Innocence of Father Brown: The Innocence of Father Brown by G. K. Chesterton
With Introduction and Notes by Martin Gardner

When I was reading for my Ph.D. exams way back when, one of my committee members suggested I read some Father Brown stories: if I was reading Sherlock Holmes to see how a detective applied seeing like a scientist to solving crimes, then maybe it would be helpful to contrast a non-scientific way of solving crimes. Martin Gardner's introduction emphasizes that this is Father Brown's modus operandi, quoting a speech by Father Brown from the later The Secret of Father Brown (1927): "what do those men mean, nine times out of ten, when [...] they say detection is a science? When they say criminology is a science? They mean getting outside a man and studying him as if he were a gigantic insect; in what they would call a dry impartial light; in what I should call a dead and dehumanised light. They mean getting a long way off him, as if he were a distant prehistoric monster; staring at the shape of his 'criminal skull' as if it were a sort of eerie growth like the horn of a rhinoceros's nose" (9). To me, this feels like a rebuttal of the practices of actual scientific criminologists, like Cesare Lombroso and Francis Galton, and even though it evokes Holmes's comparison of himself to the paleontologist Cuvier,* I don't think it really matches up with how Holmes actually works. Holmes investigates the external, of course, but reveals the internal by doing so, and though I would agree he works in a "dry impartial light," I would never call his approach "dead and dehumanised."

If Chesterton subtracted Doyle's scientific and logical approach from detective fiction, I'm not convinced he replaced it with anything of particular interest. Chesterton writes well, but I found these were mostly unsatisfying as mysteries, relying too much on obscure leaps of deduction. Father Brown may claim he gets into people's heads more than other detectives, but I didn't find that borne out by the actual stories in question. I might enjoy reading them for fun, but I found little of interest in Father Brown.

* "As Cuvier could correctly describe a whole animal by the contemplation of a single bone, so the observer who has thoroughly understood one link in a series of incidents should be able to accurately state all the other ones, both before and after." (from "The Five Orange Pips")