My new life on the road has afforded much opportunity for the consumption of audiobooks – and I have been sharing my reading (or listening) adventures here, more or less on a monthly basis. But with some recent changes in my schedule, audiobook time has been severely constricted and I have only two titles to bring to the table this month.

May’s reading had been a series of heavy lifts, and I took some reader suggestions to heart and chose some lighter titles for the start of summer. The first was The Innocence Of Father Brown, by G. K. Chesterton (1911). Chesterton wrote quite a number of “Father Brown Mysteries” over the years, and this collection was his first volume of them.

The title character is a short, pudgy, not-too-distinguished Catholic priest who somehow finds himself at the center of an implausible number of murders. The stories are unrelated – much like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories – except for a small group of recurring characters. Also like the Holmes stories, these are of the traditional English mystery genre in which writers like Agatha Christie and others have contributed.

Father Brown’s senses of observation are not so keen as those of Sherlock Holmes, but on the other hand, Brown is blessed with a keen understanding of human nature. Not the nature that most of us wish humans possessed, but rather the actual version which contains the good, the bad, and all of the shades of gray in between.

I recall a television series in the late 1970’s or early 1980’s in which Tom Bosley starred as an American version of the crime-solving Father Brown. I did not watch much of that show, but found these stories quite entertaining. For those unfamiliar with the author, G. K. Chesterton was an ardent Catholic in a country that had not always been so hospitable towards the faith thrown over by King Henry VIII in the English Reformation. Although these stories contain none of Chesterton’s tendencies to argue in favor of the faith, they contain enough of his biting wit to make them enjoyable to readers of all faiths (or of none at all). I would like to read more of Father Brown.

I followed the Chesterton stories with a page-turner of a different kind. Clive Cussler was, until his recent death, one of the most prolific of modern adventure novelists. There have been so many of them since publication of his first novel in 1973 (counting both individual books and series of them) that it was difficult to decide where to dive in. The decision was made (more-or-less at random) to begin with The Chase (1997).

The Chase was the first in a series of historical novels that featured the character Isaac Bell, an early 20th century detective with a large multi-state agency modeled on Pinkerton. The story was about an unusual (and unusually successful) bank robber who became known as “The Butcher Bandit” because of his insistence of killing every single potential witness whom he might have encountered during a robbery.

Bell, a son of an old Boston banking family, is a wealthy, intelligent and handsome young man who has decided that he prefers the life of a detective to that of a banker. It is through intelligence and hard work that he eventually learns the identity of the Bandit and begins the process of catching him.

The story starts and ends in 1950, with an aged Bell overseeing the raising of a locomotive from a deep lake. The rest of the story goes back to 1906 and tells the long story of how that locomotive got there. Cussler is quite good with almost all of the historical details, such as how he weaves the San Francisco earthquake into the tale and how the tale ends with Bell in a locomotive chasing The Bandit in another. It was a lengthy but very enjoyable read.

For better or worse, this will be the last installment in this series of literary reports for awhile. My current schedule has not been amenable to long stretches of time for listening to audiobooks. My next project is to catch up on reading my favorite blogs and other online sources in which I have become delinquent.