The Innocence of Father Brown

He looks like a Norfolk dumpling with eyes as empty as the North Sea, forever losing his umbrella and dropping his parcels, and Europe's most notorious thief takes one glance at him and decides he has finally found an easy mark. He is wrong, catastrophically wrong, and watching him find that out is most of the pleasure on offer here. G.K. Chesterton built his detective backwards from the genre's own rules: no deerstalker, no magnifying glass, no chain of clues read off a muddy boot. Father Brown solves crimes the way a confessor solves them, by having spent years listening to ordinary men admit, in the dark, exactly what they are capable of, so he can feel wickedness the instant its shape goes wrong in a room, the way you would notice a picture hung crooked. There are twelve stories here, and the same small joke never wears out: everybody underestimates the shabby little priest in the round hat, right up until, very gently, he tells them exactly how they did it.