Chesterton and Father Brown

An emerging science of the period was the science of human motives and behavior, psychology. And with GK Chesterton's Father Brown,  we meet someone who is intimately acquainted with the twists and turns of the human heart as heard in the Catholic confessional. For GK (pictured below), the detective story is a morality tale of good and evil, of sin and repentance and redemption. Fr. Brown owes nothing to the foot-ruler, magnifying glass, microscope or lab, but depends on intuitive insight into 'fallen' human nature.

It's difficult to imagine a greater contrast to Holmes than Fr Brown, a little priest with a round, dull face, "dull as a Norfolk dumpling," plain gray eyes and who keeps fumbling about for his umbrella. But he has unexpected vigilance and intelligence, seeing criminals not as enemies of society to be captured and put away, but as wayward souls to be rescued and restored. An evil-doer's sin must be brought to light for his own good. To Fr Brown, problems of crime are problems of character. Many stories end with a private confession, such as "The Invisible Man". 

To emphasize this, GK uses two characters who are exaggerated a bit from earlier French forms. First, Aristide Valentin is head of the Paris police, and the best investigator in the world, totally French and logical. His ambition in life is to arrest Flambeau, the other figure, a rogue-hero and gentleman-crook who is flamboyant (Flambeau, get it?), witty, daring, tall and strong. Between these two huge stock figures waddles the unassuming Fr Brown (even his name is plain). As Paul wrote in I Corinthians 1:27, "God has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and God was chosen the weak things of the world to confound the mighty."

Fr Brown's sympathies lie with the sinner, Flambeau. In "The Blue Cross," Fr B pulls the ol' switcheroo con game on Flambeau himself, who thought he was playing it on Fr. Brown by imitating a priest. Brown knows Flambeau is a fake because in their walk-along conversation, Flambeau praises 'the mysteries of heaven,' but dismisses reason, which sounds to Fr B like bad theology. That's because humans, made in the image and likeness of God, are endowed with reason and intellect. Fr B recovers the cross and allows Flambeau to go free, whereupon Flambeau repents and reforms, later becoming a pro detective who assists Brown in cases.

Brown has no such feelings toward Valentin. In one story, Valentin himself commits a murder he believes is cleverly covered up, but Fr B uncovers it and the proud and powerful Valentin commits suicide.

This exemplifies part of GK's overall message: the folly of mechanical, materialistic rationality, distinguished from true reason which recognizes that humans are made in the image of God with a mind and a will but are 'fallen.' So they are not basically 'good' nor wholly 'evil' but bent in nature from the inherited habit of sinning, and yet capable of finding restoration. GK intended his stories to convey such theological messages, and so he carries the genre to a higher level, considering issues of social justice and individual morality. The later stories can be high-handed in their teaching, but most of the 50 stories try to emphasize the criminal as a human being with both good and bad impulses, as someone not evil but fallen. And that, Fr Brown would say, is good theology.

So, unlike the 'scientific detective' testing stains and measuring prints, Fr B looks for complex psychological motives that led a person into wrongdoing. GK modeled Brown after Monsignor John O'Connor, whom he met in 1904 and who influenced him to become a Catholic Christian.

GK is the first 'man of letters' to write in the genre. He defended it in critical essays such as "On Detective Stories" found here: https://www.chesterton.org/a-defence-of-detective-stories/

And he offered advice on how to write such stories, here: https://www.chesterton.org/how-to-write-detective/ as well as here: https://www.chesterton.org/errors-about-detective-stories/

Even while offering such erudite advice, GK the 'intuitive detective' writer and the other 'scientific detective' writers did not allow for much 'fair play.' The detective simply announced at the end 'whodunnit'. Some detectives even remain unnamed, such as Baroness Orczy's "Old Man in the Corner" who played with a piece of string and announced a solution at the end. 

Perhaps as a reaction to this after Word War I, and the loss of faith in pure reason which accompanied the senseless war, the rules of 'fair play' formed somewhat rigidly, and the gentleman of leisure who undertakes an occasional investigation for the pleasure of solving a puzzle (and often defending a wrongly-accused woman) came to the fore, for what most call "The Golden Age" of the 1920s-30s--the age of Hercule Poirot, Lord Peter Wimsey, and Ellery Queen.