I come away from this collection of short stories with a distinct image of humble little Father Brown ambling alongside his giant of a friend Flambeau. Father Brown is a Catholic priest with an uncanny intuition in matters criminal. The characters are whimsical and the crimes quite absurd, yet Father Brown bumbles along and salvages each with not only solid logic but profound insight. Some of the stories are truly ingenuous but all of them seem to belong to a very distant but optimistic time.