Response #23: Oh, Father Brown

Oh, Father Brown.

Thank you for redeeming the detective name after Raffles and Bunny put a sour taste in my mouth.

I wasn’t really sure how I felt about Father Brown after reading the first story, “The Secret Garden.” The storytelling is done in such a different way than what we have been reading thus far in this class. There is no narrator, which is one of the main difference I noticed in this series of stories. We are given the story in third person. I did not enjoy the point-of-view of this story after getting used to a narrator in the previous readings. I like being able to get inside a characters head and seeing things from their point-of-view, but we don’t get that in the Father Brown stories.

Father Brown is quite a peculiar little man (literally). I found his entrances into each story as a surprise, and often I found myself trying to guess when and where our little detective would appear in the story. I really enjoyed reading “The Secret Garden.” I was not expecting the ending to turn out as it did.

As for the way Father Brown detects, I really can’t put my finger on what it is about his techniques. It’s obviously not deductive like Sherlock Holmes, but since we aren’t given a background of Father Brown or a narrator who knows him well, it’s hard to pinpoint where his reasoning is coming from. Maybe it’s his years of hearing confessions and getting glimpses of the dark side of the human mind, or maybe he’s just intuitive. Whatever it is, Brown is able to think like a criminal and solve the mysteries.