Like more-recent writers, such as Anne Perry, Elizabeth Peters, and Peter Lovesey, who have followed her lead, Ellis Peters has made the historical mystery novel her own special domain; but unlike these three, with their nineteenth-century settings, she chose a much more distant historical setting, the Middle Ages, particularly the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Although the first of her two detective series was contemporary, featuring Detective-Sergeant George Felse, his wife, and their son, after thirteen novels of domestic crime, Peters was ready for a more challenging series, one that allowed her to use her scholarship, the familiar locale of her region, and her training and interest in history. The result was innovative, intriguing historical crime stories set in twelfth-century Shrewsbury, their amateur detective a monk, Brother Cadfael. Begun in 1977, this popular series, which includes twenty novels--several of them filmed for the BBC Mystery Theater series and starring Derek Jacobi--educates readers about medieval life, its hierarchies and structures, its daily concerns and hardships, its conflicts and intrigues, its joys and fears.
