Отец Браун: Детектив с душой священника

Character created by British writer G. K. Chesterton. Father Brown is a fictional Roman Catholic priest and amateur detective. He is featured in 53 short stories by English author G. K. Chesterton, published between 1910 and 1936. Father Brown solves mysteries and crimes using his intuition and keen understanding of human nature. Chesterton loosely based him on the Rt Rev. Msgr John O'Connor (1870–1952), a parish priest in Bradford, who was involved in Chesterton's conversion to Catholicism in 1922. Since 2013, the character has been portrayed by Mark Williams in the ongoing BBC Television Series Father Brown.

Father Brown is a short, plain Roman Catholic priest, with shapeless clothes, a large umbrella, and an uncanny insight into human behaviour. His unremarkable, seemingly naïve appearance hides an unexpectedly sharp intelligence and keen powers of observation. Brown uses his unimposing demeanor to his advantage when studying criminals, to whom he seems to pose no danger, making him a precursor, in some ways, to Agatha Christie's later detective character Miss Marple. His job as a priest allows him to blend into the background of a crime scene, as others can easily assume he is merely there on spiritual business. In early stories, Brown is said to be priest for the fictitious small parish of Cobhole in Essex (although it is never named as the actual location of any of them), but he relocates to London and travels to many other places, in England and abroad, during the course of the stories. Much of his background is never disclosed, including his age, family, and domestic arrangements. Even his first name is never made clear; in the story "The Eye of Apollo", he is described as "the Reverend J. Brown" (perhaps in tribute to John O'Connor), while in "The Sign of the Broken Sword", he is apparently named Paul. Brown's crimesolving method can be described as intuitive and psychological; his process is to reconstruct the perpetrator's methods and motives using imaginative empathy, combined with an encyclopaedic criminal knowledge he has picked up from parishioner confessions. While Brown's cases follow the "Fair Play" rules of classic detective fiction, the crime, once revealed, often turns out to be implausible in its practical details. A typical Father Brown story aims not so much to invent a believable criminological procedure as to propose a novel paradox with subtle moral and theological implications. The stories normally contain a rational explanation of who the murderer was and how Brown worked it out. He always emphasises rationality; some stories, such as "The Miracle of Moon Crescent", "The Oracle of the Dog", "The Blast of the Book" and "The Dagger with Wings", poke fun at initially sceptical characters who become convinced of a supernatural explanation for some strange occurrence, but Father Brown easily sees the perfectly ordinary, natural explanation. In fact, he seems to represent an ideal of a devout but considerably educated and "civilised" clergyman. That can be traced to the influence of Roman Catholic thought on Chesterton. Father Brown is characteristically humble and is usually rather quiet, except to say something profound. Although he tends to handle crimes with a steady, realistic approach, he believes in the supernatural as the greatest reason of all.

When he created Father Brown, the English writer G. K. Chesterton was already famous in Britain and America for his philosophical and paradox laden fiction and nonfiction, including the novel The Man Who Was Thursday, the theological work Orthodoxy, several literary studies, and many brief essays. Father Brown makes his first appearance in the story "The Blue Cross" published in 1910 and continues to appear throughout fifty short stories in five volumes, with two more stories discovered and published posthumously, often assisted in his crime solving by the reformed criminal M. Hercule Flambeau. Father Brown also appears in a third story—making a total of fifty three—that did not appear in the five volumes published in Chesterton's lifetime, "The Donnington Affair", which has a curious history. In the October 1914 issue of an obscure magazine, The Premier, Sir Max Pemberton published the first part of the story, then invited a number of detective story writers, including Chesterton, to use their talents to solve the mystery of the murder described. Chesterton and Father Brown's solution followed in the November issue. and published in book form in the 1987 collection Thirteen Detectives. Many of the Father Brown stories were produced for financial reasons and at great speed. Chesterton wrote in 1920 that "I think it only fair to confess that I have myself written some of the worst mystery stories in the world." At the time he wrote this, Chesterton had given up writing Father Brown stories, though he would later return to them; Chesterton wrote 25 Father Brown stories between 1910 and 1914, then another 18 from 1923 to 1927, then 10 more from 1930 to 1936. Father Brown was a vehicle for conveying Chesterton's worldview and, of all of his characters, is perhaps closest to Chesterton's own point of view, or at least the effect of his point of view. Father Brown solves his crimes through a strict reasoning process more concerned with spiritual and philosophic truths than with scientific details, making him an almost equal counterbalance with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, whose stories Chesterton read.

Walter Connolly starred as the title character in the 1934 film Father Brown, Detective, based on "The Blue Cross". Connolly would later be cast as another famous fictional detective, Nero Wolfe, in the 1937 film The League of Frightened Men and played Charlie Chan on NBC radio from 1932 to 1938. The 1954 film Father Brown (released in the US as The Detective) featured Alec Guinness as Father Brown. Like the 1934 film starring Connolly, it was based on "The Blue Cross". An experience while playing the character reportedly prompted Guinness's own conversion to Roman Catholicism. Heinz Rühmann played Father Brown in two German adaptations of Chesterton's stories, Das schwarze Schaf (The Black Sheep, 1960) and Er kann's nicht lassen (He Can't Stop Doing It, 1962) with both music scores written by German composer Martin Böttcher. In these films Brown is an Irish priest. The actor later appeared in Operazione San Pietro (also starring Edward G. Robinson, 1967) as Cardinal Brown, but the film is not based on any Chesterton story.

A Mutual Broadcasting System radio series, The Adventures of Father Brown (1945), featured Karl Swenson as Father Brown, Bill Griffis as Flambeau and Gretchen Douglas as Nora, the rectory housekeeper. In 1974, to celebrate the centenary of Chesterton's birth, five Father Brown stories starring Leslie French as Father Brown and Willie Rushton as Chesterton were broadcast on BBC Radio 4. BBC Radio 4 produced a series of Father Brown Stories from 1984 to 1986, starring Andrew Sachs as Father Brown. A series of 16 Chesterton stories was produced by the Colonial Radio Theatre in Boston, Massachusetts. Actor J. T. Turner played Father Brown; all scripts were written by British radio dramatist M. J. Elliott. Imagination Theater added this series to their rotation with the broadcast of "The Hammer of God" on 5 May 2013.

"The Quick One" was adapted for the 1964 BBC anthology series Detective, with Mervyn Johns as Father Brown. Josef Meinrad played Father Brown in an Austrian TV series (1966–72), which followed Chesterton's plots quite closely. In 1974, Kenneth More starred in a 13 episode Father Brown TV series, each episode adapted from one of Chesterton's short stories. The series, produced by Sir Lew Grade for Associated Television, was shown in the United States as part of PBS's Mystery!. They were released on DVD in the UK in 2003 by Acorn Media UK, and in the United States four years later by Acorn Media. A US film made for television, Sanctuary of Fear (1979), starred Barnard Hughes as an Americanised, modernised Father Brown in Manhattan, New York City, and Kay Lenz, as Carol Bains. The film was intended as the pilot for a series but critical and audience reaction was unfavourable, largely due to the changes made to the character, and the mundane thriller plot. An Italian television miniseries in six episodes, "I racconti di padre Brown" (The Tales of Father Brown) starring Renato Rascel in the title role and Arnoldo Foà as Flambeau was produced and broadcast by the national TV RAI between December 1970 and February 1971 to a wide audience (one episode peaked at 12 million viewers). A Catholic cable channel, EWTN, produced the Father Brown story "The Honour of Israel Gow" as a 2009 episode of the television series The Theater of the Word. A German television series superficially based on the character of Father Brown, Pfarrer Braun, was launched in 2003. Pfarrer Guido Braun, from Bavaria, played by Ottfried Fischer, solves murder cases in the (fictitious) island of Nordersand in the first two episodes. Later, other German landscapes like the Harz, the Rhine and Meißen in Saxony became sets for the show. Martin Böttcher again wrote the score and he was instructed by the producers to write a title theme hinting at the theme of the movies with Heinz Rühmann. Twenty two episodes were made, which ran very successfully in Germany on ARD. The 22nd episode, which was aired on 20 March 2014, concluded the series with the death of the protagonist. In 2012, the BBC commissioned the 10 episode series Father Brown starring British actor Mark Williams in the title role. It aired on BBC One beginning January 2013, Monday to Friday, over a two week period in the afternoon. The era and location are moved to the Cotswolds of the early 1950s and used adaptations and original stories. Filming for the series began around the Cotswolds in summer 2012. Further series ordered aired in 2014 (10 episodes), 2015 (15 episodes), 2016 (10 episodes), 2017 (15 episodes), 2018 (10 episodes), 2019 (10 episodes), 2020 (10 episodes), 2022 (10 episodes), 2023 (10 episodes) and 2024 (10 episodes).

Ignatius Press published an audiobook version of The Innocence of Father Brown in 2008. The book is read by actor Kevin O'Brien and features introductions to each story written and read by Dale Ahlquist, president of the American Chesterton Society. The book was a winner of the 2009 Foreword Audio Book Awards.

Ralph McInerny used Father Brown as the spiritual inspiration for his Father Dowling pilot script which launched The Father Dowling Mysteries, a television series that ran from 1987 to 1991 on US television. An anthology of the two detectives' stories, titled Thou Shalt Not Kill: Father Brown, Father Dowling and Other Ecclesiastical Sleuths, was released in 1992. Father Brown was highlighted in volume 13 of the Case Closed manga's edition of "Gosho Aoyama's Mystery Library", a section of the graphic novels where the author introduces a different detective (or occasionally, a villain) from mystery literature, television, or other media. In the mobile game Fate/Grand Order, in an effort to thwart James Moriarty after his own defeat of Sherlock Holmes, the characters summon up a number of "Phantom Spirits" of fictional detectives that were inspired by or followed after Holmes. The first to appear is a shadowy spirit described simply as "Round Faced Priest", with the outline and vague features closely resembling the appearance of Father Brown in the Case Closed appearance.