This book examines adaptations of G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown stories in film, radio and television. Part One covers adaptations prior to 2013, including portrayals by Alec Guinness, Kenneth More, and others, as well as German and Italian versions. Part Two focuses on the BBC series Father Brown, launched in 2013 with Mark Williams starring in the title role. It provides information about the series' creation and production along with a helpful episode guide, and it analyzes critical and audience responses to the show.

Beloved clerical sleuth in roster of remarkable cases: "The Blue Cross," "The Sins of Prince Saradine," "The Sign of the Broken Sword," "The Man in the Passage," "The Perishing of the Pendragons," more.

G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown may seem a pleasantly doddering Roman Catholic priest, but appearances deceive. With keen observation and an unerring sense of man’s frailties–gained during his years listening to confessions–Father Brown succeeds in bringing even the most elusive criminals to justice. This definitive collection of fifteen stories, selected by the American Chesterton Society, includes such classics as “The Blue Cross,” “The Secret Garden,” and “The Paradise of Thieves.” As P. D. James writes in her Introduction, “We read the Father Brown stories for a variety pleasures, including their ingenuity, their wit and intelligence, and for the brilliance of the writing. But they provide more. Chesterton was concerned with the greatest of all problems, the vagaries of the human heart.”

In this fifth and final set of Father Brown mysteries G K Chesterton's short, shabby priest continues, in his humorous, effortless but powerfully effective way to solve a wide range of high crimes and misdemeanours.

The complete adventures of the well-loved clerical sleuth, collected in one brilliant volume. Shabby and lumbering, with a face like a Norfolk dumpling, Father Brown makes for an improbable super-sleuth. But his innocence is the secret of his success: refusing the scientific method of detection, he adopts instead an approach of simple sympathy, interpreting each crime as a work of art, and each criminal as a man no worse than himself. This complete edition brings together all of the Father Brown stories, including two not previously available in Penguin: 'The Donnington Affair', in which Chesterton rises to the challenge of solving a murder-mystery half written by someone else (Max Pemberton), and 'The Mask of Midas', which was found in Chesterton's papers after his death. It also includes an introduction and notes by Michael D. Hurley. G.K. Chesteron was born in 1874. He attended the Slade School of Art, where he appears to have suffered a nervous breakdown, before turning his hand to journalism. A prolific writer throughout his life, his best-known books include The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904), The Man Who Knew Too Much(1922), The Man Who Was Thursday (1908) and the Father Brown stories. Chesterton converted to Roman Catholicism in 1922 and died in 1938. Michael D. Hurley is a Lecturer in English at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of St Catharine's College. He has written widely on English literature from the nineteenth century to the present day, with an emphasis on poetry and poetics. His book on G. K. Chesterton was published in 2011.

A Father Brown Mystery taken from The Wisdom of Father Brown. This version is great way to introduce someone to G. K. Chesterton's great amateur detective.

The little village of Bohun Beacon was perched on a hill so steep that the tall spire of its church seemed only like the peak of a small mountain. At the foot of the church stood a smithy, generally red with fires and always littered with hammers and scraps of iron;opposite to this, over a rude cross of cobbled paths, was "The Blue Boar," the only innof the place. It was upon this crossway, in the lifting of a leaden and silver daybreak,that two brothers met in the street and spoke; though one was beginning the day and theother finishing it. The Rev. and Hon. Wilfred Bohun was very devout, and was makinghis way to some austere exercises of prayer or contemplation at dawn. Colonel the Hon.Norman Bohun, his elder brother, was by no means devout, and was sitting in eveningdress on the bench outside "The Blue Boar," drinking what the philosophic observerwas free to regard either as his last glass on Tuesday or his first on Wednesday. Thecolonel was not particular.