The Hammer Of God by G.K. Chesterton, 1911
The magic trick:
Setting up a mystery with two extreme character types
Every time I read another Father Brown mystery I marvel further at the outstanding job the people who adapted it for TV did at breathing life into the character. While, I’ve always enjoyed the BBC/PBS show, I’m just not that impressed with the stories.
“The Hammer Of God” does nice work in establishing two big character types. We’ve got two brothers – one serves the church; the other is a n’er-do-well playboy. With two extremes like that, the story is able to exploit the reader’s assumptions.
And that’s quite a trick on Chesterton’s part.
The selection:
His brother the curate had also the yellow hair and the elegance, but he was buttoned up to the chin in black, and his face was clean-shaven, cultivated, and a little nervous. He seemed to live for nothing but his religion; but there were some who said (notably the blacksmith, who was a Presbyterian) that it was a love of Gothic architecture rather than of God, and that his haunting of the church like a ghost was only another and purer turn of the almost morbid thirst for beauty which sent his brother raging after women and wine. This charge was doubtful, while the man’s practical piety was indubitable. Indeed, the charge was mostly an ignorant misunderstanding of the love of solitude and secret prayer, and was founded on his being often found kneeling, not before the altar, but in peculiar places, in the crypts or gallery, or even in the belfry. He was at the moment about to enter the church through the yard of the smithy, but stopped and frowned a little as he saw his brother’s cavernous eyes staring in the same direction. On the hypothesis that the colonel was interested in the church he did not waste any speculations. There only remained the blacksmith’s shop, and though the blacksmith was a Puritan and none of his people, Wilfred Bohun had heard some scandals about a beautiful and rather celebrated wife. He flung a suspicious look across the shed, and the colonel stood up laughing to speak to him.
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