A difficulty of long-running stories set in a small world is that there are only so many crimes, murders, missing heiresses and multinational plots that a small community can host, whether it is Kembleford, Midsomer, or Cabot Cove. For some reason, the writers think a globetrotting thief of priceless but useless items would return, time and again, to a Gloucestershire village to renew his friendship with the parish priest. In turn, Father Brown sets aside his usual judgment of lawbreakers in order to fete the thief as a celebrity.
The tongue-in-cheek aspects of the joke taken too far are there in the character names: Hercule Flambeau, Marianne Delacroix, even a petty thief called Filchett (Filch it? Clever, or childish?). Two genteel international bandits come together in Kembleford, bringing two irreplaceable religious artefacts in order to do battle over who is more skilled, drawing in a museum willing to display a cheap fake item and trailing the Capo of an Italian crime family in their wake. Father Brown sits calmly at the centre of it all, making occasional efforts to dissuade the thieves from their vocations but allowing allowing all the crooks to escape justice on the basis that they will face a greater judgment later.
Sorry, the logic of allowing crime to continue unchecked, causing untold misery on Earth because it will be dealt with in Heaven is a shabby one and too crass for a show like this. We willingly suspend our disbelief; we do not lose contact with reality.
I enjoy Father Brown, but its charm lies partly in its human scale - local stories of local people. These attempts to shoehorn worldwide themes into parochial life just don't work for me.
