Chesterton's Brown and Greeley's Blackie: two very different detectives

Commonweal, August 14, 1992 by A.W.R. Sipe, B.C. Lamb

And, though father Blackie's captive is not sent to the electric chair, neither is he led to repentance: "Vinney was in a psychiatric institution where he would spend his few remaining days... Prognosis: hopeless." Father Brown is content to trust a sinner's conscience and God's mercy; father Blackie insists on swifter retribution.

It could be argued that with the confines of the narrative it is not Father Blackie who makes Vinney insane and confines him to an institution, any more than it is Blackie who burns Sister Hilaire alive, or who tortures Catherine Collins. Blackie is merely an observer to these horrors, is he not? But what of the creator - the storyteller? Nowhere does the person of the author reveal himself or herself more clearly than in the telling of the story and its prevailing mythopoeic values. In fact, Greeley embraces his vocation as a storyteller as both sacred and sacramental. But what is revealed as being truly sacred and as having meaning?

George Lukacs defines the problems of the author and his characters this way: "the objectivity of the novel is the mature man's knowledge that meaning can never quite penetrate reality but that, without meaning, reality would disintegrate into the nothingness of inessentiality... and the characteristic structure of its matter is discreteness, the separation between interiority and adventure" (The Theory of the Novel. MIT Pres).

An author is the form-giver to the characters' inner struggles and their adventures. By this definition, Chesterton and Greeley could hardly be further apart. At the heart of Father Brown's universe we find the discourse of the confession: a dialectical process aimed at discovering a sinner's true position before God. Brown reveals his humanity over and over in his interactions with other sinners who, like himself, are in need of compassion. It is out of his shared humanity that he interacts vigorously and salvifically with the criminal. Father Brown voices a classic expression of that sensibility in "the Hammer of God": "I am a man... and therefore have all devils in my heart. Listen to me."

Father Blackie is more the dramatic hero who, following Lukacs's definition, lacks interiority. His adventures exist outside of him. He judges and brings other to justice, but is not himself vulnerable. In Blackie's universe the demons are all in others: priest - who are satanic, drunken, sandal-wearing. misguided, unfaithful, or otherwise irredeemable - or reprehensible dirty old men, usually Irish.

Greeley's characters are the products of his own imagination. In his autobiography, Confessions of a Parish Priest (Pocket Books, 1986), he says that all of his "novels are about God's love." Careful analysis offers a more complex reading.

Father Brown is clearly modeled on a real priest. Father John O'Connor, a Yorkshire pastor, who was an important figure in Chesterton's life and intellectual development. At the same time. Chesterton endows Father Brown with external qualities unlike his model. He began writing the Father Brown mysteries in 1910 and only later (1922) converted to Roman Catholicism "to get rid of my sins." The discourse of "confession" in Chesterton's life is very much like Brown's modus operandi.