I should be particularly interested to see any rival Top Tens.ħ/10: Perfectly good introduction to the characters, not really a mystery.ġ0/10: Eminently quotable masterpiece, wonderful decapitation plotline. (Gayle assures me there is an American TV series, which is also tiresome.) I've not seen any of the recent TV series starring Mark Williams, but the old one from the 70s was awful - watch some Morse repeats instead. The two unpublished stories ('The Donnington Affair' and 'The Mask of Midas') should have remained so. Really, though, it is worth buying the substantial Penguin Complete, which contains all of them: in my ranking system, only scores of 4 and below correspond to ‘unreadable’. The stories were published over a period of about 20 years, and get steadily worse as time goes on, although his last book, The Scandal of Father Brown, is a late flowering. Flambeau, his sometime nemesis and sometime companion, is a vast athletic French cat burglar. Father Brown is a Catholic priest and amateur detective, much given to Chestertonian pontificating.

I admire their freedom with genre and setting, jumping easily from Gothic horror (‘The Worst Crime in the World’) to Italian banditry (‘The Paradise of Thieves’) to quintessential British sci-fi which wouldn’t be out of place in Doctor Who (the army of robotic household servants from ‘The Invisible Man’). Chesterton’s Father Brown stories, which to my taste are the best short mystery stories I’ve read. Please note that this is not a complete collection, you can buy the complete collection of this book if you are living outside the USA.This is a ranking of all G.K. The International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) is the global trade and standards organization dedicated to the development and promotion of electronic publishing and content consumption.

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The complete father brown mysteries