Bring back Father Brown

G.K. Chesterton’s perspicacious priest is 100 next year. Sinclair McKay says that he is more colourful and insightful than any of today’s TV detectives

A chap murdered by an invisible man? A decapitiated Scottish laird with the fillings stolen from his skull? A poet, hypnotised into committing suicide? Who could deal with such curious and baffling crimes?

There’s only one possible answer: an amateur sleuth who specialised in the bizarre and diabolical long before Mulder and Scully; a detective long due for a comeback: G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown.

Although the 52 short stories in which he featured never go out of print, this stumpy black-clad figure with his umbrella, face ‘like a Norfolk dumpling’ and passionate outbursts of anger in the face of dumb superstition, is weirdly neglected today. Why, for instance, is Father Brown not a part of that eternal ITV Holmes/Poirot/Marple television detective roster? It’s Father Brown’s 100th anniversary this coming year, and it’s about time he became a proper TV star.