The Secret of Father Brown - Couverture souple

Gilbert Keith Chesterton, (29 May 1874 – 14 June 1936) better known as G. K. Chesterton, was an English writer, lay theologian, poet, philosopher, dramatist, journalist, orator, literary and art critic, biographer, and Christian apologist. Born in Campden Hill in Kensington, London, he was baptized at the age of one month into the Church of England, though his family themselves were irregularly practising Unitarians. According to his autobiography, as a young man he became fascinated with the occult and, along with his brother Cecil, experimented with Ouija boards. He was educated at St Paul's School, then attended the Slade School of Art in order to become an illustrator. In 1896 he began working for the London publisher Redway, and T. Fisher Unwin, where he remained until 1902. During this period he also undertook his first journalistic work as a freelance art and literary critic. In 1902 the Daily News gave him a weekly opinion column, followed in 1905 by a weekly column in The Illustrated London News, for which he continued to write for the next thirty years. He was a large man, standing 6 feet 4 inches and weighing around 286 pounds. His girth gave rise to a famous anecdote. During the First World War a lady in London asked why he was not "out at the Front"; he replied, "If you go round to the side, you will see that I am." On another occasion he remarked to his friend George Bernard Shaw, "To look at you, anyone would think a famine had struck England". Shaw retorted, "To look at you, anyone would think you have caused it". P. G. Wodehouse once described a very loud crash as "a sound like Chesterton falling onto a sheet of tin" He died of congestive heart failure on the morning of 14 June 1936, at his home in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire. His last known words were a greeting spoken to his wife. During his life, he wrote around 80 books, several hundred poems, some 200 short stories, 4000 essays, and several plays.

Easily the darkest of Chesterton’s Father Brown collections, it is nonetheless a masterwork of perception of the human condition, explored through the usual impossible crimes and a parade of rogues and saints–a corpse in shining armor, a thieving mystic, insouciant British aristocrats, and a Canadian journalist. We are asked to solve death by duel and pistol shot, and thefts of jewels large and small. The stories in this collection are worth reading over and over–to see how the plot unfolds, and to enjoy Chesterton’s gorgeous and well-informed prose. Includes the title story, The Secret of Father Brown, along with, The Mirror of the Magistrate, The Man with Two Beards, The Song of the Flying Fish, The Actor and the Alibi, The Vanishing of Vaudrey, The Worst Crime in the World, The Red Moon of Meru, and The Chief Mourner of Marne. Gilbert Keith Chesterton was an English writer with a prolific and diverse output which included philosophy, ontology, poetry, play writing, journalism, public lecturing and debating, literary and art criticism, biography, Christian apologetics, and fiction, including fantasy and detective fiction. Chesterton has been called the “prince of paradox”. Time magazine, in a review of a biography of Chesterton, observed of his writing style: “Whenever possible Chesterton made his points with popular sayings, proverbs, allegories–first carefully turning them inside out.”