“Father Brown”: The ATV Series Now on DVD

Now, though, Chesterton fans have an alternative. Thirteen classic Father Brown stories — adapted with gratifying fidelity in the 1974 television series starring Kenneth More — are now available on DVD in a pair of two-disc box sets.

Known to American viewers from PBS’s “Mystery!” series, “Father Brown” was produced in the UK by Lew Grade’s ATV Network. There were 13 episodes in all. Set 1 comprises the first seven, with such classic stories as “The Hammer of God,” “The Oracle of the Dog,” and “The Eye of Apollo.” Set 2 contains the remaining six episodes, including favorites “The Arrow of Heaven” and “The Secret Garden.”

This series, despite modest production values and uneven video quality, offers a far more satisfying sampling of what makes the Fr. Brown stories so enduringly popular. Dialogue is frequently taken verbatim from Chesterton’s text, though there are departures in both dialogue and plot. More’s performance, while a bit twitchier and less matter-of-fact than Guinness’s, captures the eccentric charm and practical common sense of the umbrella-toting cleric.

The stories, though often implausible — as Chesterton himself well knew — are satisfyingly clever; their purpose is not to be credible, but to entertain. “I like detective stories; I read them, I write them; but I do not believe them,” Chesterton once said. In spite of that, what Chesterton did believe is always slipping through the chinks of these stories, which are sometimes dodgy detective work, but almost always good theology, and usually a good yarn as well.