d.

Considered purely as detective stories, these cannot be granted a very
good mark. There is scarcely a story that has not a serious flaw in it.
A man--Flambeau, of whom more later--gains admittance to a small and
select dinner party and almost succeeds in stealing the silver, by the
device of turning up and pretending to be a guest when among the
waiters, and a waiter when among the guests. But it is not explained
what he did during the first two courses of that dinner, when he
obviously had to be either a waiter or a guest, and could not keep up
both parts, as when the guests were arriving. Another man, a "Priest of
Apollo," is worshipping the sun on the top of a "sky-scraping" block of
offices in Westminster, while a woman falls down a lift-shaft and is
killed. Father Brown immediately concludes that the priest is guilty of
the murder because, had he been unprepared, he would have started and
looked round at the scream and the crash of the victim falling. But a
man absorbed in prayer on, let us say, a tenth floor, is, in point of
fact, quite unlikely to hear a crash in the basement, or a scream even
nearer to him. But the most astonishing thing about _The Eye of Apollo_
is the staging. In order to provide the essentials, Mr. Chesterton has
to place "the heiress of a crest and half a county, as well as great
wealth," who is blind, in a typist's office! The collocation is somewhat
too singular. One might go right through the Father Brown stories in
this manner. But, if the reader wishes to draw the maximum of enjoyment
out of them, he will do nothing of the sort. He will believe, as
fervently as Alfred de Vigny, that L'Idee C'est Tout, and lay down all
petty regard for detail at the feet of Father Brown. This little Roman
cleric has listened to so many confessions (he calls himself "a man who
does next to nothing but hear men's real sins," but this seems to be
excessive, even for a Roman Catholic) that he is really well acquainted
with the human soul. He is also extremely observant. And his greatest
friend is Flambeau, whom he once brings to judgment, twice hinders in
crime, and thenceforward accompanies on detective expeditions.

_The Innocence of Father Brown_ had a _sequel_, _The Wisdom of Father
Brown_, distinctly less effective, as sequels always are, than the
predecessor. But the underlying ideas are the same. In the first place
there is a deep detestation of "Science" (whatever that is) and the
maintenance of