Jul 23, 2006

Book Review: Ellis Peters

Though Ellis Peters, the pen name for mystery writer Edith Pargeter (1913-1995), wrote many mystery series throughout her lifetime, she is best known for her medieval Cadfael series. Cadfael is a fictional, 12th century, Welsh ex-crusader-turned-Benedictine-monk whose skills as an herbalist always get him into trouble of the sleuthing kind.

Born in Shropshire, Peters began her writing career in the 1950s. She soon made a reputation for herself in the field and also received the Czechoslovak Society for International Relations Gold Medal in 1968 for her work in translating works from Czech and otherwise patronizing Czech literature.

Peters began the Cadfael series in 1977 with A Morbid Taste for Bones. She went on to write 19 more novels and a collection of short stories in the series. In the 1990s, Derek Jacobi appeared as Cadfael in a TV series based on the books. The series is occasionally formulaic (a recurring theme of star-crossed young lovers appears, for example) and always stuck to the ongoing formula of a murder mystery. But Peters made a couple of decisions in characterization and setting early on that allowed her to rise above the traditional romantic view of the Middle Ages as either bright, cardboard castles loaded with knights and ladies or the opposite "revisionist" view of medieval times as nasty, brutish and short, with everyone running around in rags covered with mud.

First, she made Cadfael a Welshman, an unusual ethnic choice in sleuths. Second, she placed him in Shrewsbury, on the border between Wales and England. Welsh outlaw Owain Glyndwr would invade England and fight a decisive battle with the English at Shrewsbury two and a half centuries after the books were set. Third, she placed Cadfael smack in the middle of the civil war (1135-1154) that raged in England between the Empress Matilda, daughter of Henry I, and the usurper Stephen I, ending only when Matilda grudgingly acknowledged Stephen's place on the throne if he equally grudgingly accepted her son (the future Henry II) as his heir. The central concern of almost everyone in the novels is somehow staying on the good side of whichever rival monarch is in power at the moment and avoiding being labeled an outlaw for being inconveniently loyal to the "wrong" rival or appearing to switch sides too often.

Peters set her hero up for an endless supply of adventures right on his contested home turf without resorting to the Ivanhoe-style cliché of knights thudding and blundering across the English countryside while peasants scattered in terror. It was also not a well-plowed field in historical fiction, the way the 14th century and the Hundred Years War (this week's film review) have become. These factors probably explain why, eleven years after her death and even after 21 books, readers still wish there had been more.