The Secret of Father Brown

Chesterton’s fourth Father Brown collection appeared in 1927, by which point Chesterton himself had finally converted to Catholicism after years of writing as if he already had. The Secret of Father Brown is structurally different from the earlier collections. It opens with a framing story in which an American detective novelist named Grandison Chace presses Brown to explain his actual method. Brown answers that he assumes the identity of the criminal inside his own mind, imagines committing the crime as that person, and lets the truth come from the inside.

The other stories in the collection are then offered as illustrations of that method. The Mirror of the Magistrate involves a poet’s murder with an unusual physical staging. The Man with Two Beards features a recently released safecracker. The Vanishing of Vaudrey, The Worst Crime in the World, and The Red Moon of Meru all turn on Brown’s psychological method. The framing is unusual for a detective collection of this era, and it gives the book a self-aware quality that some readers find clever and others find self-indulgent.