First published in 1911, The Innocence of Father Brown contains stories involving one of the greatest characters in the history of detective fiction, Father Brown. He is a Roman Catholic priest, has an uncanny insight to human evil. Rather than the large serial villains in stories such as Sherlock Holmes, the mysteries Father Brown solved were more local murders by small town crooks, narrowing the suspect list down to those in the area of the crime. The cozy mystery style that The Innocence of Father Brown conveys sparked a revolution at the time, bringing it to the forefront of the detective fiction genre.