Father Brown, one of the most quirkily genial and lovable characters to emerge from English detective fiction, first made his appearance in The Innocence of Father Brown in 1911. That first collection of stories established G.K.Chesterton's kindly cleric in the front rank of eccentric sleuths.

This collection contains all the favourite Father Brown stories. They represent the quiet wit and compassion which is so different from his moody and caustic predecessor, Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes. Father Brown solves his mysteries by a mixture of intuition and sympathetic worldliness in a totally believable manner.