Inspector George Felse

About the Inspector George Felse series

Long before Brother Cadfael, Ellis Peters (the pen name of Edith Pargeter) wrote thirteen contemporary mysteries centred on George Felse, a quietly perceptive detective inspector in the fictional Midlands town of Comerford, and — as the series goes on — his wife Bunty and their son Dominic, who takes over as the effective lead investigator in several later entries as he grows from schoolboy to young adult. Beginning with Fallen into the Pit (1951), written in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, the series moves at a markedly different pace and register from Cadfael: these are English village and small-town mysteries of character and community, closer to the classic Golden Age tradition, with Peters' interest in landscape, folklore and ordinary people under moral pressure already fully present.

The series unfolds gradually over nearly three decades of real time, with Dominic Felse maturing from a teenager solving cases alongside his father in the earlier books to a married adult with his own entanglements by the later ones — Death and the Joyful Woman (1961) won the Edgar Award for Best Novel and is generally considered the series' high point. Later entries send the family further afield, into Wales, Vienna, Greece and beyond, widening the series' geography without losing its close attention to family and community. It's a rewarding find for readers who love Cadfael's humane observation of character but want something set in the twentieth century, with a genuine family saga running underneath the mysteries.