The Father Brown stories first appeared in miscellaneous magazines. Most of them were later collected into five books: The Innocence of Father Brown (1911), The Wisdom of Father Brown (1914), The Incredulity of Father Brown (1926), The Secret of Father Brown (1927) and The Scandal of Father Brown (1935). The text for the stories in this volume is based on the British editions of those books. Only outright and obvious errors or corruptions of punctuation and spelling have been amended. All other apparent oddities of style have been preserved, partly because, generally, it impossible to know whether Chesterton was being intentionally unconventional (as opposed to careless), but also because the text’s unconventional constructions – intended or otherwise – often surprise us in interesting ways. So it is, for instance, that we cannot even get through the first paragraph of the very first story without stumbling over the description of Valentin as ‘the most famous investigator of the world’: we would ordinarily expect ‘in the world’, which perhaps primes us to wonder at what distinction might be lingering here, between the police detective and that alternative investigator whom we have yet to meet, the real hero of these stories, who works in this world but without being of it, and whose methods gesture beyond it.
This volume also includes two mysteries not collected in those five books: ‘The Donnington Affair’ and ‘The Mask of Midas’. Both of these stories have a curious history. Sir Max Pemberton wrote the first half of ‘The Donnington Affair’, which he published in Premier Magazine in October 1914. The challenge was put to Chesterton to solve the murder. This he did, and the second half of that story, Father Brown’s solution, was published in the November issue. It is possible that ‘The Mask of Midas’ was not published at all during Chesterton’s lifetime (it cannot be known for certain that it never made it into print, since new stories by Chesterton continue to be discovered in diverse publications). The indomitable Chesterton scholar Geir Hasnes first brought the story to a late-twentieth-century readership with the transcription he made from a manuscript uncovered when Chesterton’s secretary and literary executor, Dorothy Collins, passed away in 1988. (The Mask of Midas, ed. Geir Hasnes (Trondheim: Classica Publishing, 1991)).
‘The Vampire of the Village’ was first published in 1936, but has since generally been incorporated into subsequent editions of The Scandal of Father Brown. Here, however, it is grouped together with ‘The Mask of Midas’, because the manuscript for both stories indicates that these were intended to be part of a ‘new series’.
The introduction to this collection draws briefly upon the present writer’s G. K. Chesterton (2012). Geir Hasnes, Simon Head and Maureen Hurley were kind enough to look over the introduction and apparatus for this book, and gave excellent advice.