G.K. Chesterton was a writer of many talents who published dozens of books in his lifetime on subjects ranging from theology to literary criticism. His place in the history of crime fiction was won by his creation of the unassuming Catholic priest Father Brown, forever alert to the frailties of human nature, who featured in a series of short stories which showcased Chesterton's gift for paradox and his ingenuity in creating both puzzles and their solutions. Many of the best stories appeared in the volume entitled The Innocence of Father Brown. Father Brown and his friend, the thief turned private investigator Flambeau, pursue a murderer who appears to have the power of invisibility, coming and going and leaving footsteps in the snow without anyone observing him. The priest solves another murder after realizing that the supposed suicide note the victim left is the 'wrong' shape. Brown, with a little help from Flambeau, works out how a man committed murder when a hundred people saw him practicing his religious rites at the exact time his lover fell to her death. Chesterton sets up the puzzling scenarios in his stories with great skill and then allows Father Brown to reveal the solutions with impeccable, if ingenious, logic and insight.

In any other detective stories the flamboyant Flambeau, a great creation in his own right, would take centre stage but, in Chesterton's narratives, he plays second fiddle to the modest priest with the gift for imagining himself in the position of the criminal. 'Are you a devil?' the murderer in one story asks when Father Brown seems to read his mind with ease. 'I am a man,' the priest replies, 'and therefore have all devils in my heart.' It is his knowledge of the devils in his own heart and those of others that enables him to perform the apparently impossible feats of deduction which enliven Chesterton's wonderfully enjoyable short stories.

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