Father Brown: Selected Stories by G. K. Chesterton
I finally got around to reading the only Father Brown book I have on my shelf. It's a selection of stories from each of the collections.
Father Brown is easy to underestimate. In the first story of the collection, a police detective sees him as rather stupid and bumbling, which is the impression he gives most people at first meeting.
"There was ... a very short Roman Catholic priest going up from a small Essex village... The little priest was so much the essence of those Eastern flats; he had a face as round and dull as a Norfolk dumpling; he had eyes as empty as the North Sea; he had several brown-paper parcels, which he was quite incapable of collecting... He had a large, shabby umbrella, which constantly fell on the floor. He did not seem to know which was the right end of his return ticket. He explained with a moon-calf simplicity to everybody in the carriage that he had...