SOURCE: “G. K. Chesterton's ‘Father Brown’ Stories,” in The Southern Review, Autumn, 1969, pp. 611–29.

In the following review, Robson maintains that Chesterton's detective stories deserve more serious critical attention than is customary for the genre.

Chesterton himself did not attach great importance to the Father Brown stories. Ordered in batches by magazine editors and publishers, they were written hurriedly for the primary purpose of helping to finance his distributist paper, G. K.'s Weekly. And though they have proved to be the most popular of Chesterton's writings, critical attention to them has been casual. This is partly because they are, of course, detective stories; and the detective story is commonly dismissed, without argument, as a very low form of art. That it is also a very difficult and demanding form, in which many clever writers have failed, is not regarded as relevant. Nor is there much respect for the...