Welcome back, everyone to 1001 classic short stories and tales. This is your host and storyteller, John Haggardorn. We've got a very special

Father Brown for you today. One of his last collections of Father Brown mysteries is called

The Secret of Father Brown, which was a great title, because a lot of people really do wonder,

what's the secret of the way he can solve crimes? Here you have a shabbily dressed priest

who carries a small umbrella, rides a bicycle

instead of drives a car, and manages to find himself solving crimes on a regular basis. Just how in the

world does he do it? Well, he's going to share that with his very close friend, Flambeau, the thief

turned good guy in the preamble of this book.

So first we'll share with you the secret of Father Brown, and then the vanishing of Vaudry.

And now our story.

Flambeau, once the most famous criminal in France and later a very private detective in England,

has long retired from both professions.

Some say a career of crime had left him with too many scruples for a career of detection.

Anyhow, after a life of romantic escapes and tricks of evasion,

he had ended at one some might consider an appropriate address,

in a castle in Spain. The castle, however, was solid, though relatively small, and the black

vineyard and green stripes of kitchen garden covered a respectable square on the brown hillside.

For Flambeau, after all his violent adventures, still possessed what is possessed by so many

Latins, what is absent, for instance, in so many Americans, the energy to retire.

It can be seen in many a large hotel proprietor whose one ambition is to be a small peasant.

It can be seen in many a French provincial shopkeeper, who pauses at the

moment when he might develop into a detestable millionaire and by a street of shops, to fall back

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