Ellis Peters's Felse Series: The Road to Brother Cadfael, and More.(Critical Essay)

Clues: A Journal of Detection, September, 2000 by Reynolds, William

In October 1995, while reflecting on Edith Pargeter's death, I resolved to finish a project I had been working on for several years: reading, or rereading, the thirteen novels of her first series of detective novels. These novels--which feature George Felse, his wife Bunty, and their son Dominic-were, except for the first, published under Pargeter's Ellis Peters' pseudonym between 1951 and 1978.

In my mind were a number of questions. Why had Pargeter stopped a successful series dead in its tracks? Had the series run out of gas? Had it (or why had it) been forced out by the Brother Cadfael series which began in 1977, only one year before the appearance of the last Felse novel? Could the two series have co-existed side by side? My answers are less definite than I...

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