One of my favorite detectives is Father Brown. G.K. Chesterton modeled him after one of his friends, a real priest.
Of course he changed him for the fiction stories, or in his own words he"permitted myself the grave liberty of taking my friend and knocking him about, beating his hat and umbrella shapeless, untidying his clothes, punching his intellectual countenance into a condition of pudding-faced fatuity and generally disguising Father O'Connor as Father Brown."
I've taken thirteen of my favorite passages from Father Brown Stories. Enjoy them.
1. The winter afternoon was reddening toward evening, and already a ruby light was rolled over the bloomless beds, filling them, as it were, with the ghosts of the dead roses."
2. ...a car of splendid speed, great elegance, and a
pale green colour swept up to the front doors
like a bird and stood throbbing.
3. A large, neat chauffeur in green got out from the front, and a small, neat manservant in grey got out from the back, and between them they deposited Sir Leopold on the doorstep and began to unpack him...
4. "A radical does not mean a man
who lives on radishes,"remarked Crook, with some impatience; "and a Conservative
does not mean a man who preserves jam.
Neither, I assure you, does a Socialist mean a man
who desires a social evening with the chimney-sweep.
A Socialist means a man who wants all the chimneys swept
and all the chimney-sweeps paid for it."
5. "But who won't allow you," put in the priest in a low voice, "to own your own soot."
6. The green gaity of the waving laurels, the rich purple indigo of the night, the moon like a monstrous crystal, make an almost irresponsible romantic picture...
7. He sparkles from head to heel as if clad in ten million moons; the real moon catches him at every movement and sets a new inch of him on fire.
8. Men may keep a sort of level of good, but no man has ever been able to keep on one level of evil. That road goes down and down.
9. And it seemed as if, on that particular morning, a swarm of total strangers had been buzzing in his ear with more or less unenlightening verbal messages; the telephone seemed to be possessed of a demon of triviality."
10. As is common under the lurid Quietude
of that kind of light,what colour there was in the landscape gained a sort of
secretive glow which is not found in objects under the full sunlight; and ragged red leaves or golden or orange fungi
seemed to burn with a dark fire of their own.
11. The door was thrown open with violence and a woman with a wild mop of red hair rushed to meet them, as if she were ready to board the car in full career... "Come into the inn," she said with extraordinary abruptness..."There's been a murder done."
12. In the broken sunlight
from behind,the tree-tops in front of them stood up
like pale green flames against a sky
steadily blackening with storm,
through every shade of purple and violet.
13. "Surely," said Father Brown very gently, "it is not generous to make even God's patience with us a point against Him."
Chesterton, G.K., " The Flying Stars", "The Insoluble Problem", Father Brown Mystery Stories, Dodd, Mead & Company, Binghamton, N. Y. 1962.
