The Father Brown Classics

"The God of the Gongs" by G.K. Chesterton is a Father Brown story: It was one of those chilly and empty afternoons in early winter, when the daylight is silver rather than gold and pewter rather than silver. If it was dreary in a hundred bleak offices and yawning drawing-rooms, it was drearier still along the edges of the flat Essex coast, where the monotony was the more inhuman for being broken at very long intervals by a lamppost that looked less civilized than a tree, or a tree that looked more ugly than a lamppost.

The Salad of Colonel Cray is a short story by Gilbert Keith Chesterton: Black figure of Dr. Oman standing on the sunlit lawn and looking steadily into the room. Before he could quite recover himself Cray had cloven in.

The Strange Crime of John Boulnois is a short story by Gilbert Keith Chesterton: Mr. Calhoun Kidd was a very young gentleman with a very old face, a face dried up with its own eagerness, framed in blue-black hair and a black butterfly tie. He was the emissary in England of the colossal American daily called The Western Sun—also humorously described as the "Rising Sunset.

The picturesque city and state of Heiligwaldenstein was one of those toy kingdoms of which certain parts of the German Empire still consist. It had come under the Prussian hegemony quite late in history-- hardly fifty years before the fine summer day when Flambeau and Father Brown found themselves sitting in its gardens and drinking its beer.