BROWN BOY IN THE RING. . . . . . .

The diminutive Father Brown is a spiritual sleuth with razor sharp memory and incisive wit tucked away unobtrusively in the folds of his shadowy habit. With a single look he penetrates into the furtive criminal pachyderms lurking in the wilderness; a second suffices to produce a detailed map spotted with lawbreaker’s motives and actions. In a jiffy he figures out who is who and what is what. With uncanny insight be advises and averts impasses and morasses. The modest parish priest excels even Sherlock Holmes and his illustrious predecessor Auguste Dupin in intellectual games. While the early masters would lead reclusive lives, poring on tomes in flickering candle lights or playing violin at odd hours, the priest has his feet firmly on the earth and keeps a handle on reality. But then he has not been impressed by the hairsplitting ratiocination flaunts and intriguing inferential demonstrations of the Baker Street resident, though the former criminal Flambeau plays the credulous foil, just like agape Dr. Watson takes part in and later narrated the breathtaking exploits of Holmes.
There is much more than meets the eye in Brown’s aversion to the dry deductive process hailed by Dupin and Holmes. By distancing himself from the mechanical logic of the preceding age which witnessed the nadir of Christianity, the priest is offering a juicy scheme of criminal investigation where everything is at play: it is a cosmos where a benevolent god, pricks of conscience, fruits of confession and perceptions into theology work in harmony to spot and destroy/reform/prevent/explain criminals and their deeds, for the general good of the society. In other words, Father Brown is what the Catholic Church wants to project itself as these days. Exorcising itself from the pestering specters of inquisitions (Joan of Arc, Galleleo, John Frampton and all those nameless ‘witches’), from the days when the Pope awarded padroado to the Kings of Spain and Portugal and from the haunting memories of Darwinism (and many), the Holy Church has wriggled into the garb of humanism and liberalism. At least of sorts.
Father Brown is a seller of dreams which know no contradictions. With the dexterity of a magician, he puts cats and mice in the same cage and makes them discuss Original Sin, Aquinas and Papal Infallibility over spoonfuls of mousse. And we believe him. You see the rigorous vows of poverty, chastity and obedience churn out a rationalist; he sniffs and scorns “bad theology” because it “attacked reason”: for him miracles and oracles are as improbable as thousand feet anacondas: he is wise and bold enough to declare “there is one mark of all genuine religions: materialism [and] devil-worship is a perfectly genuine religion” ; for him many mysterious phenomena are explainable in terms of human psychology; he is a fountainhead of the ‘milk of human kindness’, denouncing “superstition” and taking digs at the narrow-mindedness of modern science and society in the same breath. For him the stay on earth might well be a sojourn on the way to heaven but not a mere stopover.
In fact every fictional detective has tried to frown on and make fun of his predecessor. For Holmes, Dupin was an inferior logician; for Hercule Poirot, the detective poking around with a magnifying glass is a ridiculous figure, though he actually did visit crime sites and gleaned shreds of evidence glossed over by the official police. But the investigative matrix that Brown creates has a marked difference. For him cracking crimes is essentially an exercise in identifying with the criminal brain and seeing things from that end. Material evidence and reasoning are secondary. For him being a detective is like being a good shepherd. That is why while the denouements of Holmes are notable for their moral insipidity, homilies spice, if not saturate, Brownian expositions.
Little Brown is a Big Ambassador.