The Detective as Historian: History and Art in Historical Crime Fiction

Ellis Peters: Brother Cadfael

Ellis Peters: Brother Cadfael Edward J. Rielly Ellis Peters is the pseudonym that Edith Pargeter used for most of her detective fiction, including the Chronicles of Brother Cadfael, on which her fame will primarily rest. Not to acknowledge Pargeter's other writings, however, would be to undervalue her accomplishments. Pargeter published at least ninety-one books in addition to short stories. Margaret Lewis, author of Edith Pargeter: Ellis Peters, so far the only book-length study of the author, lists thirty-six works of fiction by Pargeter, thirteen George Felse detective novels, twenty Chronicles of Brother Cadfael, three nonfiction books, three collections of short stories, and sixteen translations of books from Czech into English.1 Pargeter, who was born in 1913 and died in 1995, began her writing career in her native Shropshire, England, in the 1930s and continued her extraordinarily productive career until shortly before her death, her final published book being the twentieth Cadfael novel, Brother Cadfael's Penance, in 1994.2 Certainly her early novels, six of which appeared in print by 1939, do not represent her finest writing. Already, though, she had begun using pseudonyms, employing either Jolyon Carr or Peter Benedict for three of these early novels.3 World War II took Pargeter temporarily away from Shropshire. She volunteered for the Women's Royal Naval Service (Wrens) and was posted to Plymouth, and later to Liverpool, to serve as a teleprinter operator helping to administer Allied convoys across the Atlantic. Pargeter's war experiences produced such fiction as She Goes to War (1942), featuring a Wren named Catherine Saxon; and a trilogy-The Eighth Champion of Christendom (1945), Reluctant Odyssey (1946), and Warfare Accomplished (1947)about a soldier, Jim Benison, from Midshire (a fictional Shropshire). Pargeter's war service also led to friendships with Czech servicemen and a lifelong interest in the literature, history, and political fate of Czechoslovakia . The novelist later visited Czechoslovakia several times; wrote about the country, e.g., the novel The Fair Young Phoenix (1948), in which the phoenix is the Czech Republic, and a memoir of her travels in the country , The Coast of Bohemia (1950); set one of her George Felse mysteries, The Piper on the Mountain (1966), in Czechoslovakia; and completed the sixteen translations mentioned above, including both classics and contemporary works. Over the years, Pargeter received various awards honoring her Czech interests, including a Gold Medal and Ribbon from the Czechoslovak 60 Ellis Peters 61 Society for International Relations and honorary membership in the Prague Branch of P.E.N., the international writers' association. Edith Pargeter's most successful writing, however, came within the genres of historical fiction and detective fiction. Pargeter began writing detective fiction as a young woman and achieved her greatest pre-Cadfael fame through a series of contemporary detective novels featuring George Felse, a Criminal Investigation Department detective based in Midshire, from Fallen Into the Pit (1951), the only one in the series published with her real name (the remaining twelve appearing from Ellis Peters) to Rainbow's End (1978). Death and the Joyful Woman (1961) earned its author an Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America. Unfortunately, Felse does not come through as a fully realized character . Pargeter falls well short of the ideal that she enunciates in a short but important essay called "The Thriller Is a Novel," where she stresses "that the thriller is a paradox. It must be a mystery. And it must be a novel" (214). She adds, regarding characterization: A book about half-people is not for me. If I have written such books, they were simply failures on my part. What I want is to make my people live, breathe, speak, act with such conviction that the reader may know them as he knows his own kin. (217) The more one creates "three-dimensional, calculable" characters, she points out, the more successful as a novel the book becomes, but at the same time, the reader's ability to understand the character as a fully realized person also undermines the thriller's intent to surprise the reader (216). The ideal, Pargeter argues, is "to show the reader every inflection of every character's personality , and yet come up at the end of everything with a solution that both startles and rings true" (217). That, she says, is virtually impossible, but it is the goal toward which she strives. Pargeter comes up well short of that ideal in the Felse mysteries as a whole, although...