Ellis Peters

• Born: September 28, 1913
• Birthplace: Horsehay, Shropshire, England
• Died: October 14, 1995
• Place of death: Shropshire, England

Types of Plot: Amateur sleuth; historical; police procedural; thriller; cozy

Principal Series: Felse family, 1951–1978; Brother Cadfael, 1977–1995

Biography

Ellis Peters was born Edith Mary Pargeter on September 28, 1913, in Horsehay, Shropshire, England, the daughter of Edmund Valentine Pargeter and Edith Hordley Pargeter. (Ellis Peters is a pen name that she adopted in 1959 after having published numerous books.) She attended Dawley Church of England Elementary School in Shropshire and Coalbrookdale High School for Girls and earned an Oxford School Certificate. She worked as a pharmacist’s assistant and dispenser in Dawley from 1933 to 1940. During this time, she also began writing novels on a wide range of historical and contemporary subjects; the first was Hortensius, Friend of Nero (1936). From 1940 to 1945, she served as a petty officer in the Women’s Royal Naval Service, receiving the British Empire Medal in 1944. During World War II she developed an interest in Czechoslovakia because she was haunted by the Western powers’ betrayal of that country at Munich. After the war, she translated many volumes of prose and poetry from the Czech and Slovak and continued writing her own fiction.

Her first detective novel, which she published as Edith Pargeter in 1951, was Fallen into the Pit. It initiated a series of thirteen novels featuring the Felse family, a series that continued until 1978. Peters wrote five other detective novels and numerous detective short stories during this period as well. Her interests in music, theater, and art are reflected in several of these works. In 1977, she began publishing the Brother Cadfael novels.

As both Edith Pargeter and Ellis Peters, this writer received much recognition for her work, including the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Allan Poe Award in 1963 for Death and the Joyful Woman (1961), which was cited as the best mystery novel of the year; the Czechoslovak Society for International Relations Gold Medal in 1968; and the Crime Writers’ Association’s Silver Dagger in 1980 for Monk’s-Hood (1980). She was awarded the Crime Writers’ Association’s Cartier Diamond Dagger for lifetime achievement in 1993. Peters died on October 14, 1995.

Contribution

Ellis Peters’s Felse family series and her chronicles of Brother Cadfael are in the British tradition of detective-fiction writers such as P. D. James and Ruth Rendell. These writers’ works, while displaying the careful and suspenseful plotting characteristic of the detective genre, frequently transcend the effect of pure entertainment and share with the traditional "literary" novel the aims of engaging in complex examinations of human character and psychology and achieving thematic depth and moral vision.

Peters herself expressed her dislike for the distinction between detective fiction and serious novels and succeeded in interweaving traditional novelistic materials—love interests, the study of human growth and maturation, the depiction of communities and their politics—with the activity of crime solving. The Brother Cadfael chronicles are her most popular as well as her most impressive achievements, locating universal human situations in the meticulously particularized context of twelfth century England. These novels are masterpieces of historical reconstruction; they present a memorable and likable hero, Brother Cadfael, and a vivid picture of medieval life, in and out of the monastery, in its religious, familial, social, political, and cultural dimensions.

Analysis

Peters came to detective fiction after many years of novel writing. Disliking the frequently made distinction between detective novels, or "thrillers," as she called them, and serious novels, she stressed that "the thriller is a novel. . . . The pure puzzle, with a cast of characters kept deliberately two-dimensional and all equally expendable at the end, has no attraction for me." Her detective novels bear witness both to her life experiences and to her statements about her art.

Peters was essentially a social novelist. Murder serves as her occasion to dramatize a wide variety of human interactions and motivations in settings that are vividly realized. One might think of an Ellis Peters mystery in terms of a set of concentric circles. At the center is the detective character, usually preoccupied at the beginning of the novel with something other than crime. Frequently, he or she is an amateur who assumes the role of detective only circumstantially. The amateur status of several of her detectives allows Peters to move the narrative comfortably beyond crime into other areas such as love relationships, family interactions, and the struggles of adolescents maturing toward self-discovery. Except for Death Mask (1959), Peters’s detective novels are narrated from a third-person point of view through an anonymous persona. Peters is able to narrow or broaden her perspective with ease, and therefore to present the inner workings of her central characters’ minds and to focus on external matters—landscapes, social or historical background, local customs—with equal skill.

The central character is generally carefully placed within the circle of a close family or community that is described in depth. The earlier mysteries often focus on Central Intelligence Division detective sergeant George Felse of Comerford, his wife, Bunty, and their son Dominic. Although George and Dominic are the most actively involved in detection, Bunty too becomes accidentally involved in solving a murder in The Grass-Widow’s Tale (1968). Peters’s later series places its central character, Brother Cadfael, within the twelfth century Benedictine community of monks at the Abbey of St. Peter and St. Paul in Shrewsbury, England. Although the Felse family series ranges in locale from central England to such places as the Cornish coast, Scotland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, and India, the Brother Cadfael novels usually stay within the vicinity of Shrewsbury, allowing Peters to develop her picture of medieval life in great depth.

Beyond these family and community circles, there are larger milieus. For the Felse family, these include a variety of worlds—for example, those of concert musicians, of diplomats, and of professional thieves. Brother Cadfael and his fellow monks live in the Shropshire of the late 1130s and earlier 1140s and frequently find themselves caught in the political strife between Empress Maud and her cousin King Stephen, who contend for the British crown. At other times, the political feuds are more local if not less complex and bitter.

The Grass-Widow’s Tale

Typically, Peters’s detective novels begin at a fairly leisurely pace. In The Grass-Widow’s Tale, for example, Bunty Felse at the outset is feeling frustrated that her husband and son are going to be absent on her forty-first birthday, doubtful about her identity and accomplishments, and gloomy as she ponders "age, infirmity, and death." The plot of this novel takes many surprising twists and turns before focusing on the solution of a murder and robbery case, a case that becomes the occasion for Bunty to find renewed meaning in her life and to discover some precious truths about the nature of human love.

A Morbid Taste for Bones

In A Morbid Taste for Bones (1977), the first chronicle of Brother Cadfael, Peters begins with the background for the Shrewsbury monks’ mission to Wales to obtain the bones of Saint Winifred and proceeds to dramatize the initial results of that mission and to establish the novel’s major characters and subplots. It is only on page 91 of this 256-page novel that a murder case surfaces.

Once the scenes have been set and the characters established, Peters’s detective novels become absorbingly suspenseful and often contain exciting action scenes. The Grass-Widow’s Tale includes a terrifying episode in which Bunty and her companion, Luke, must fight their way out of a cottage in which they are being held by a gang of ruthless professional criminals who are planning to murder them. Saint Peter’s Fair (1981), one of the most suspenseful of the Brother Cadfael chronicles, features a remarkable chase-and-rescue sequence.

A highly skillful creator of suspense, Peters proves to be at least as gifted as a student of human character. She has explained her interest in crime novels thus:

The paradoxical puzzle, the impossible struggle to create a cast of genuine, rounded, knowable characters caught in conditions of stress, to let readers know everything about them, feel with them, like or dislike them, and still to try to preserve to the end the secret of which of these is a murderer—this is the attraction for me.

Brother Cadfael

The most successfully realized of Peters’s characters is Brother Cadfael, who combines worldly wisdom and experience with moral and spiritual insight. He is a middle-aged man who entered monastic life after fighting for many years in the Crusades. His experiences and travels to such places as Venice, Cyprus, and the Holy Land afforded him a knowledge of human nature unusual in a monk and developed in him courage and a liking for adventure. He came to know not only the ways of men but also those of women; he has been a lover as well as a warrior, and he readily acknowledges that he committed a fair share of "mischief" as a younger man.

This "mischief" is to be distinguished, however, from evil. Brother Cadfael is essentially a good man. It was the desire to develop his spiritual side that led him to retire to the Benedictine abbey at Shrewsbury, where he has been living as a monk for fifteen years when the chronicles begin.

Cadfael’s experiences of a life of action set him apart from most of the other monks; his experiences as a monk, in turn, set him apart from people living a worldly life. Even his birthplace sets him apart: He is a Welshman in an English monastery. Like many other famous detective heroes, Cadfael is unique in his milieu, a more complete person than his contemporaries. As a man of action, moreover, he shares the abilities, though never the ruthlessness, of hard-boiled detectives, while as a participant in the contemplative life, he bears some resemblance to armchair detectives.

Monk’s-Hood

At the abbey, Brother Cadfael is in charge of a flourishing garden. He specializes in herbs used for seasoning and medicine. Some of these herbs can be dangerous, and, to Cadfael’s horror, malefactors sometimes steal them from the garden to use them as poisons. Cadfael becomes involved in several of his cases through such circumstances. In Monk’s-Hood, for example, he commits himself to solve the murder of Master Bonel, who died after being served a dinner sent from the monastery. The dish proved to be laced with liniment prepared by Cadfael himself and containing monkshood (wolfsbane), a deadly poison.

Cadfael’s garden is a living symbol of the hero himself as well as of the human world around him. Growth takes place there, as it does in human life, growth of things either healthful and nourishing or harmful. Just as Brother Cadfael cultivates, nurtures, and controls his plants, so too does he foster the proper kinds of growth in his community. In a number of the chronicles, Cadfael has a young assistant, a novice monk whom he lovingly guides toward psychological and spiritual maturity. Sometimes this guidance takes the form of transplanting. In A Morbid Taste for Bones, Cadfael recognizes that Brother John lacks a vocation for the monastery and eventually helps him to begin a new life with the woman with whom he falls in love in Wales.

The Devil’s Novice

In The Devil’s Novice (1983), Cadfael obtains justice for Brother Meriet, a "green boy" who has been banished to the monastery for a crime he did not commit. Cadfael’s detective activities extend the gardening metaphor further—he weeds out undesirable elements in his community and distinguishes the poisonous from the harmless. Cadfael’s herbs are most beneficial as medicinal aids, and he himself is, ultimately, not merely an amateur detective but also a healer of physical, moral, and spiritual maladies.

In his role as healer, Brother Cadfael exemplifies Peters’s principal concerns as a novelist. She has commented, "It is probably true that I am not very good at villains. The good interest me so much more." Her villains are typically motivated by ambition or greed, dehumanizing vices that lead them to murder and treachery. The element of treachery makes Cadfael’s cases something more than simply puzzles to be solved; it invests them with an enhanced moral dimension. Peters declares that she has "one sacred rule" about her detective fiction, apart from treating her characters "with the same respect as in any other form of novel":

It is, it ought to be, it must be, a morality. If it strays from the side of the angels, provokes total despair, wilfully destroys—without pressing need in the plot—the innocent and the good, takes pleasure in evil, that is unforgivable sin. I use the word deliberately and gravely.

The villains in the Brother Cadfael series characteristically attempt to destroy "the innocent and the good." Brother Cadfael repeatedly becomes involved in his cases when a young person is unjustly accused of murder. In A Morbid Taste for Bones, for example, Engelard, an exiled Englishman in love with the Welsh squire Rhisiart’s daughter, is wrongly thought to have killed Rhisiart, who had opposed Engelard’s suit. The murderer proves instead to be a fanatically ambitious young monk. Brother Cadfael works to prove the innocence of Master Bonel’s stepson Edwin when Bonel dies of poisoning in Monk’s-Hood. A complicating motivational force in this novel is the fact that Edwin is the son of Richildis, Cadfael’s sweetheart of long ago, whom he has not seen in forty-two years.

The Leper of Saint Giles and The Sanctuary Sparrow

In The Leper of Saint Giles (1981), the lovely Iveta is about to be married by her ambitious and greedy guardians to a man she does not love. When that man’s mangled body is found in a forest, the man she loves is accused of the murder, and Brother Cadfael steps in to prove that he is innocent. Cadfael saves Liliwin, a traveling performer who seeks sanctuary at the abbey, and proves his innocence of robbery and murder in The Sanctuary Sparrow (1983).

One Corpse Too Many and Saint Peter’s Fair

Although threats to innocent young men in the Brother Cadfael chronicles usually take the form of false accusations of crime, threats to innocent young women tend to involve actual or potential entrapments requiring their rescue, as in One Corpse Too Many (1979) and Saint Peter’s Fair. Peters’s young female characters are not passive victims, however, but intelligent, persistent, and courageous, and they frequently work with Brother Cadfael in solving his cases. In doing so, these young women are motivated not only by the desire for justice but also by love. Young love, at first thwarted and then fulfilled, is omnipresent in these novels, and Brother Cadfael is its chief facilitator. As surely and steadily as he brings murderers to the bar of justice, he brings lovers to the altar of marriage. The chronicles of Brother Cadfael follow the literary tradition of social comedy: affirming love; thwarting whatever blocks it; reestablishing the social order that has been upset by ambition, greed, and murder; and promoting the continuity of that order in future generations.

Although Edith Pargeter will ever be better known as her alter ego, Ellis Peters, the success of the Brother Cadfael series brought recognition to all of her writings. In 1991 Mysterious Press began reissuing the Felse novels, and these were followed in 1993 by The Heaven Tree (1960), The Green Branch (1962), and TheScarlet Seed (1963) bound as a set and rechristened the Heaven Tree trilogy. Though these historical novels did not enjoy the acclaim of the Brother Cadfael series, they were created with the same eye for detail and filled with the lively atmosphere of medieval Britain.

Brother Cadfael’s Penance

The last Brother Cadfael novel, Brother Cadfael’s Penance (1994) was published a year before the author’s death. The venerable series attained even greater fame when the BBC produced several television installments starring Derek Jacobi as Brother Cadfael. The books have also been recorded, and an entire line of Brother Cadfael paraphernalia, including maps, handbooks, needlework, glassware, and numerous trinkets, is available in the United Kingdom and the United States.

To Peters this was all icing on the cake; her goals were purely literary when she was writing her historical characters, "to demonstrate," as Rosemary Herbert wrote in Publishers Weekly in 1991, "that people from distant ages can be portrayed with vitality and intimacy." In this, Peters more than succeeded—millions mourned her death at the age of eighty-two and the loss of her extraordinary creations.

Principal Series Characters:

• George Felse is detective sergeant and later detective chief inspector of the Criminal Investigation Department in Comerford, a provincial town in central England. Felse, is a highly professional and honest police officer. A middle-aged family man, Felse is deeply in love with his wife and devoted to their son. He is dependable, mature, understanding, and reasonable.
• Bernarda "Bunty" Elliot Felse , the wife of George Felse, was a concert contralto before she married George. Bunty is a loyal and devoted wife and mother. Intelligent, sensitive, and thoughtful, she proves to be shrewd and fearless when she accidentally becomes involved in detection.
• Dominic Felse , the son of George and Bunty Felse, matures in the course of the series from a thirteen-year-old boy who discovers the corpse in his father’s first murder case to a young Oxford University graduate. Engaging, adventurous, and aware, Dominic figures directly as an amateur detective in several of the novels, and peripherally in the others.
• Brother Cadfael , a twelfth century Benedictine monk, is a Welshman in his early sixties. Cadfael fought in the Crusades and had several amatory adventures as a young man before retiring to Shrewsbury Abbey. His youthful experiences gave him an understanding of human nature, and his present work as gardener and medicinal herbalist figures in his detection of criminals.
• Prior Robert , a monk of Shrewsbury Abbey, is around fifty years of age. He is handsome, aristocratic, authoritative, and ambitious. His scheming for power in the abbey sets him at odds with Brother Cadfael and makes him that character’s principal foil.
• Hugh Beringar , sheriff of Shrewsbury, is a bold and keenly intelligent man in his early twenties. He is the friend and principal secular ally of Brother Cadfael and aids him in solving several of his cases.

Bibliography

Ellis, Margaret. Edith Pargeter—Ellis Peters. Reprint. Bridgend, Mid Glamorgan, Wales: Seren, 2003. Literary biography of Peters covering all her works, including the Cadfael series, the Felse family series, and her historical novels.

Greeley, Andrew M. "Ellis Peters: Another Umberto Eco?" The Armchair Detective 18 (Summer, 1985): 238-245. Compares Peters’s Brother Cadfael to Umbero Eco’s William of Baskerville.

Kaler, Anne K., ed. Cordially Yours, Brother Cadfael. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Press, 1998. Compilation of scholarly criticism of the Cadfael novels, including discussions of religion, philosophy, and the study of herbs.

Klein, Kathleen Gregory, ed. Great Women Mystery Writers: Classic to Contemporary. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. Places Peters within a coherent lineage of great women mystery writers, discussing her relationship to her forebears and followers.

Reynolds, Moira Davison. Women Authors of Detective Series: Twenty-one American and British Authors, 1900-2000. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2001. Examines the life and work of major female mystery writers, including Peters.

Riley, Edward J. "Ellis Peters: Brother Cadfael." In The Detective as Historian: History and Art in Historical Crime Fiction, edited by Ray B. Browne and Lawrence A. Kreiser, Jr. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 2000. Examination of the function and representation of history in Peters’s Cadfael novels. Bibliographic references.

Whiteman, Robin. The Cadfael Companion: The World of Brother Cadfael. Rev. ed. London: Little, Brown, 1995. An encyclopedia of the world represented by the Cadfael stories. Includes entries on the herbs grown and used by the monk-cum-sleuth, as well as on the major characters, locations, and properties of the novels.