Chesterton, un maestro de la novela detectivesca

[Alfred Rathbone]

G. K. Chesterton
Nació en Londres (1874- 1936) Considerado un maestro de la literatura policíaca. Su personaje más famoso es el Padre Brown, un sacerdote católico de apariencia ingenua cuya agudeza psicológica lo vuelve un formidable detective.

Chesterton fue un hombre grande, físicamente: medía 1 metro con 93 centímetros, y pesaba alrededor de 134 kilos. Ello dio paso a una anécdota famosa. Durante la Primera Guerra Mundial una mujer en Londres le preguntó por qué no estaba "afuera en el Frente", a lo que éste replicó: 'Si usted da una vuelta hasta mi costado, podrá ver que sí lo estoy.

La habilidad de Chesterton consistía en sugerir que la explicación "irracional" es la única y la más racional, para después develar la sencilla respuesta al misterio. Chesterton compuso alrededor de una cincuentena de relatos con este personaje publicados originalmente entre 1910 y 1935 en revistas británicas y estadounidenses. Luego se recopilaron en cinco libros (El candor del Padre Brown, La sagacidad del Padre Brown, La incredulidad del Padre Brown, El secreto del Padre Brown y El escándalo del padre Brown). Tres cuentos fueron publicados más tarde: "La vampiresa del pueblo", "El caso Donnington", descubierto en 1981, y "La máscara de Midas", terminado poco antes de la muerte del autor y hallado en 1991.

La traducción más reciente y completa de todos ellos al español es Los relatos del padre Brown (Acantilado), por Miguel Temprano García, en 2008.

El personaje del Padre Brown fue llevado numerosas veces a la pantalla; entre las más sonadas, figuran las adaptaciones de Edward Sedgwick (1934), Robert Hamer (1954, con Alec Guinness en el papel principal) y la serie televisiva inglesa de 1974 protagonizada por Kenneth More.

Bibliografía de mayor importancia:

• The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904)
▪ Heretics (1905)
▪ Charles Dickens: A Critical Study (1906)
▪ The Man Who Was Thursday (1908)
▪ Orthodoxy (1908) Doubleday, 1991.
▪ The Ballad Of The White Horse (1911) poetry
▪ Manalive (1912)
▪ Father Brown short stories (detective fiction)
▪ Eugenics and Other Evils (1922)
▪ The Everlasting Man (1925)
▪ Saint Thomas Aquinas: "The Dumb Ox", Doubleday, 1974.
▪ Saint Francis of Assisi, Doubleday, 1987.
_________________________________________________
Bibliografía detallada

900-1909

Cover of The Napoleon of Notting Hill
Greybeards at Play (1900) poetry
The Wild Knight and Other Poems (1900) poetry
The Defendant (1901)
Thomas Carlyle (1902) with J. E. H. Williams
Twelve Types (1902)
Robert Browning (1903)
Tennyson (1903) with R. Garnett
Thackeray (1903) with L. Melville
Leo Tolstoy (1903) with G. H. Perris and Edward Garnett
Varied Types (1903)
The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904) novel
G.F. Watts (1904)
The Club of Queer Trades (1905) stories
Heretics (1905)
Charles Dickens (1906)
The Man Who Was Thursday (1908) novel
Orthodoxy (1908)
All Things Considered (1908)
George Bernard Shaw (1909)
Tremendous Trifles (1909)
The Ball and the Cross (1909) novel

1910-1919

Five Types (1910) essays, selected from Twelve Types
William Blake (1910)
Alarms and Discursions (1910)
What's Wrong With the World (1910)
Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens (1911)
The Ballad Of The White Horse (1911) poetry
Wit and Wisdom of G. K. Chesterton (1911)
The Innocence Of Father Brown (1911) stories
Manalive (1912) novel
A Miscellany Of Men (1912)
Simplicity and Tolstoy (1912)
Magic (1913) play [1]
The Victorian Age in Literature (1913)
The Flying Inn (1914) novel
The Wisdom Of Father Brown (1914) stories
Trial of John Jasper, Lay Precentor of Cloisterham Cathedral in the County of Kent, for the Murder of Edwin Drood (1914)
London (1914)
The Barbarism of Berlin (1914)
Poems (1915)
Wine, Water And Song (1915) poetry
The Appetite of Tyranny (1915)
The Crimes of England (1915)
Divorce vs. Democracy (1916)
The Book of Job (1916)
A Shilling for My Thoughts (1916)
Temperance and The Great Alliance (1916) pamphlet
Utopia Of Usurers (1917)
Lord Kitchener (1917)
A Short History of England (1917)
How to Help Annexation (1918)
Irish Impressions (1919)

1920-1929

The Superstition of Divorce (1920)
The Uses of Diversity (1920)
The New Jerusalem (1920)
The Ballad of St. Barbara and Other Poems (1922) poetry
The Man Who Knew Too Much (1922) stories
Eugenics and other Evils (1922)
What I Saw in America (1922)
St. Francis of Assisi (1923)
Poems (1923)
Fancies Versus Fads (1923) essays
The End of the Roman Road (1924)
Tales Of The Long Bow (1925) stories
The Superstitions of the Sceptic (1925)
The Everlasting Man (1925)
William Cobbett (1925)
The Queen of Seven Swords (1926) poetry
The Outline of Sanity (1926)
The Incredulity Of Father Brown (1926) stories
The Catholic Church and Conversion (1926)
Collected Works (1926) nine volumes
Collected Poems (1926)
Robert Louis Stevenson (1927)
The Secret Of Father Brown (1927) stories
The Return of Don Quixote (1927) novel
The Judgment of Dr. Johnson (1927) play
The Collected Poems of G.K. Chesterton (1927)
Gloria in Profundis (1927) poetry
Culture and the Coming Peril (1927)
Social Reform vs. Birth Control (1927)
Generally Speaking (1928)
Do We Agree? (1928) debate with George Bernard Shaw
The Sword of Wood (1928) stories
The Thing: Why I am a Catholic (1929)
G.K.C. as M.C (1929) collected introductions, edited by J. P. de Fonseka.
Father Brown Omnibus (1929) collected stories
The Poet and the Lunatics (1929) stories
Ubi Ecclesia (1929) poetry
Christmas Poems (1929)
New and Collected Poems (1929)

1930-1936

Four Faultless Felons (1930) stories, separately in US as The Ecstatic Thief; The Honest Quack; The Loyal Traitor; The Moderate Murderer
The Turkey and the Turk (1930) play for mummers
The Grave of Arthur (1930)
Come to Think of It (1930)
The Resurrection of Rome (1930)
All is Grist (1931)
The Floating Admiral (1931) collaborative detective story
Chaucer (1932)
New Poems (1932)
Christendom in Dublin (1932)
Sidelights of New London and Newer York (1932)
All I Survey (1933)
St. Thomas Aquinas: The Dumb Ox (1933)
Avowals and Denials (1934)
GK's: A Miscellany of the First 500 Issues OF G.K.'S Weekly (1934)
The Well and the Shallows (1935)
The Way of the Cross (1935)
The Scandal Of Father Brown (1935) stories
Stories, Essays And Poems (1935)
Autobiography (1936)
As I Was Saying (1936)

Posthumous

The Paradoxes of Mr. Pond (1937)
The Man Who Was Chesterton (1937) anthology
The Coloured Lands (1938)
The End of the Armistice (1940) edited by Frank Sheed
The Pocket Book of Father Brown (1943) and many other reprint collections, including The Second Father Brown (1959), Ten Adventures of Father Brown (1961), The Penguin Complete Father Brown (1981), The Father Brown Omnibus (1983), The Best of Father Brown (1987), The Annotated Innocence Of Father Brown (1989), Father Brown Crime Stories(1990), Father Brown of the Church of Rome (1996)
The Common Man (1950)
The Surprise (1952) play
A Handful of Authors (1953)
Collected Poems (1954)
The Glass Walking-Stick (1955) edited by Dorothy Collins
Lunacy and Letters (1958) edited by Dorothy Collins
Where All Roads Lead (1961)
The Spice of Life (1965) edited by Dorothy Collins
G. K. Chesterton. A selection from his non-fictional prose (Faber & Faber 1970) edited by W. H. Auden
Chesterton on Shakespeare (1972) edited by Dorothy Collins
The Apostle and the Wild Ducks (1975) edited by Dorothy Collins
The Hound of Heaven and Other Poems (1978)
The Spirit of Christmas (1984) edited by Marie Smith
Basic Chesterton (1984)
The Bodley Head G.K. Chesterton (1985) edited by P.J. Kavanagh
Daylight and Nightmare (1986) uncollected short fiction, edited by Marie Smith
GK's Weekly: A Sampler (1986)
The Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton (1986) begun by Ignatius Press
Illustrated London News, 1905-1907 (1986)
Illustrated London News, 1908-1910 (1987)
Illustrated London News, 1911-1913 (1988)
Illustrated London News, 1914-1916 (1988)
Illustrated London News, 1917-1919 (1989)
Illustrated London News, 1920-1922 (1989)
Thirteen Detectives (1989) edited Marie Smith
Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton: Plays (1989)
Seven Suspects (1990) edited by Marie Smith
Brave New Family (1990) edited by Alvaro de Silva
Illustrated London News, 1923-1925 (1990)
Illustrated London News, 1926-1928 (1991)
Illustrated London News, 1929-1931 (1991)
The Mask of Midas (1991)
Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton: Collected Poetry: Part 1 (1994)
Platitudes Undone (1997) annotations to a book by Holbrook Jackson
Prophet of Orthodoxy: The Wisdom of G. K. Chesterton (1997) edited by Russel Sparkes
Eugenics and Other Evils (2000)
On Lying in Bed and Other Essays (2000)
Criticisms and Appreciations of the works of Charles Dickens (2001)
The G.K. Chesterton Papers: Additional Manuscripts (2001)
Chesterton Day by Day: The Wit and Wisdom of G. K. Chesterton (2002)
Essential Writings (2003)
G. K. Chesterton's Early Poetry: Greybeards at Play, The White Knight and Other Poems, The Ballad of the White Horse (2004)