Every so often we tell the listeners ahead of time about a great book we want to discuss and have a little FoC “book club.”  This time it’s the Father Brown stories by famous British Catholic writer G.K. Chesterton.  A longtime favorite of Christy’s, Father Brown was a new read to Haley. The central character, Father Brown, is an ordinary and humble Catholic priest with the ability to get to the heart of the matter and solve murder mysteries when everyone else is baffled. These classic detective short stories are full of charm and wit.

In our discussion we tackled some fun topics such as why we are drawn to mysteries and Chesterton’s take on detective fiction and how the character of Father Brown is a response to popular detective characters of the time like Sherlock Holmes. We also compared Chesterton’s tales to the recent Father Brown television series (and some of our other favorite murder mysteries).

We had a lot of fun chatting about this lovely read and we tried not to spoil the tales for you if you haven’t had a chance to pick them up yet. So grab yourself a basket of laundry or a cup of tea and enjoy!

Today’s book:

(This post contains Amazon affiliate links.)

Father Brown: The Essential Tales

Other books we talked about:

G.K. Chesterton: The Apostle of Common Sense by Dale Ahlquist

The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton

In this episode:

A Defense of Detective Stories by G.K. Chesterton

Father Brown (also streaming on Netflix)

Father Brown

Sherlock