Gilbert Keith Chesterton: which book should you start with?

Father Brown is a small, clumsy Catholic priest, always weighed down by a big umbrella, and no one suspects him. Yet he is the one who unmasks criminals where the police fail: a disguised master thief, a murderer no one saw come in, a crime committed at the foot of a church. His secret: from listening to so many confessions, he knows evil better than anyone. These twelve short cases have made him one of the most endearing detectives in literature. You can read each case in one sitting in the language you are learning.

In London, Gabriel Syme, a poet who has secretly become a policeman, manages to get himself elected to the supreme council of Europe's anarchists. Its seven members are each named after a day of the week, and Syme becomes Thursday. There he uncovers a plot, and a huge, terrifying leader whom everyone calls Sunday. Chases, masks falling, reversals: nothing is ever what it seems. It is a spy novel full of humour, which Chesterton himself subtitled “A Nightmare”. Fast-paced from start to finish, the novel is easy to read in the language you are learning.

Father Brown, a small priest with an absent-minded air, solves the crimes the police cannot understand. One day, an American visitor finally asks him for his secret. The priest's answer is surprising: to find the culprit, he puts himself in his shoes, to the point of imagining that he committed the crime himself. This collection brings together eight short cases, such as “The Mirror of the Magistrate” and “The Man with Two Beards”. In Chesterton's stories, cleverness counts for less than knowledge of the human heart. You can read each case in one sitting in the language you are learning.

Father Brown, a small Catholic priest with an absent-minded air, solves cases that baffle the police and the experts, often with his friend Flambeau, a former thief turned detective. A scientist accused of treason in Paris, travellers held up by brigands in the mountains of Italy, an old Cornish family: each puzzle is solved thanks to a detail no one else noticed. Twelve detective stories full of humour and paradox, in which this quiet priest, who knows the human heart well, guesses the truth before anyone else. You can read each story in one sitting in the language you are learning.