I wanted to include a detective story in my line-up and in the end went for Father Brown because he’s always a delight. I almost picked the one where he solves a case while half-asleep and seasick on a boat (since we all have to operate on less than 100% from time to time), or the one where he solves a decades-old mystery while sitting in a beer garden (as that’s where I personally get my best ideas), but in the end I’ve gone for ‘The Queer Feet’, where the case turns on overhearing different kinds of footsteps. You could give this story to drama students to prove that walking silently across a room is the ultimate show of character.
First published in The Story-Teller, The Saturday Evening Post, Oct 1 1910, and collected in The Innocence of Father Brown, 1911; now available in The Complete Father Brown Stories (Penguin Classics 2012, ed. Michael D. Hurley, and elsewhere
A Personal Anthology 