The Penguin Complete Father Brown

Father Brown is the most popular of Chesterton's fictional characters--a naive-seeming parish priest who has a fundamental knowledge of the evil in the human spirit, gathered through his confessional work. This gives him an advantage over the traditional detective, because he can see that anyone at all is capable of doing any kind of evil. It is this sense of morality, of good and evil, that raises Chesterton's detective fiction above the level of the traditional mystery story.