Yipppeeee! Fr Brown is back!

I have been enjoying the "Endeavour" series of TV programmes, based on the young Constable Endeavour Morse, and now my joy is complete!!! I just heard that next Saturday at 7.30pm, ABC TV is starting to screen a new BBC series of Father Brown stories. A thoughtful review of the series is here.

I think I have read all the Father Brown stories by G.K. Chesterton and they are all good. He is a very good technician as a writer of detective fiction and the reader normally has all the information necessary to solve the crime themselves. (unlike Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, where Holmes at the end of the story often reveals things he knows but has neglected to tell the reader.)

Chesterton also uses the crime and its solution as a way of observing life, and I think the first episode next Saturday is based on the "Hammer of God" story, where the crime, its solution and the moral are very elegantly entwined.

Two of the best known Christian writers of detective fiction are G.K. Chesterton and Dorothy L. Sayers (and her detective Lord Peter Wimsey). Both are excellent, but are also different. As a generalisation, I think Sayers emphasises retribution, while Chesterton stresses salvation.

I watched the next episode of Endeavour yesterday and it was a joy. The stories so far are not as complicated as the original Inspector Morse stories by Colin Dexter, but they have a thoughtful structure holding them together, which was certainly the case in last week's episode "Fugue".

One unique thing about Endeavour is that it violates the convention that the detective is old and experienced, often an outsider or a policeman overlooked for promotion. Here Morse is the novice constable, working for the experienced, cynical detective, but still young Morse is the main character. I doubt they could have achieved this without the audience already knowing the future "back" story of Morse. I think they also tread a path between serious detective fiction and parody, and they do it very well. A masterpiece of television, in my opinion.