I've just finished Ellis Peters' first mystery with George Felse, _Fallen 
Into the Pit_(1951).  I discovered this series when Mysterious Press started 
reprinting them recently -- for some reason they've been putting them out any 
which way, and have just now gotten around to printing the first in the 
series.  
For those who haven't read any -- the main detective is Sergeant George 
Felse, a policeman in the quiet country town of Comerford in Wales.  I like 
the series because you also see a great deal of George's wife Bunty and their 
son Dominic.  The books are superbly written -- that almost goes without 
saying -- but I also find them great fun because they complement the Ngaio 
Marsh mysteries so nicely -- you see Inspector Alleyn going about to all 
these little out-of-the-way locales and taking over some difficult case from 
the local police, but you hardly ever see the local police doing their thing. 
 Only here in the Felse books, you get that chance.  And since you often see 
Felse with his family, you see son Dominic grow up as the series goes on -- 
in later books (e.g _Death to the Landlords_), Dominic is the only hero and 
the parents are mostly offstage.
This first Felse book, however, is the most satisfying of the half-dozen or 
so I've been able to lay hands on.  For one thing, it's much longer -- 325 
pages -- and comes in at twice or three times the spine-thickness of the 
first Felse book I read, _Death and the Joyful Woman_.  Peters spends a long 
time with the setting, capturing the atmosphere of Wales right after WWII, 
establishing the village and many of the inhabitants.  It's a rich tapestry, 
and the later books now look rather thin by comparison.  I wonder why the 
later books are so much shorter -- one wonders if some scurrilous publisher 
or agent convinced her that long involved "mysteries of substance" were 
passe.  
I don't want to say too much about the mystery itself for fear of spoiling 
it.  There's a young German POW who has ended up in Comerford somehow -- he 
has a gift for spinning a tall tale when he thinks it's something his 
listeners want to hear, so he's probably given some song-and-dance about how 
he was really anti-Nazi but had to play along to survive.  But he also has a 
talent for picking on people until they smack him one, so it's no surprise to 
the reader when he turns up dead.  So George Felse is launched upon his first 
murder investigation, and we see all the results of suspicion haunting the 
village.  Having taken quite a while to get to this point, Peters takes an 
equally leisurely way out of it, until the final flourish at the end, where 
she tosses off one more surprise like an artist putting a signature on a 
painting.  
So if you've wondered what all the fuss is about, yet were put off by Brother 
Cadfael because you don't like the historical setting, and you want to give 
Peters a try, you can't go far wrong by starting here.  I'm looking forward 
to the other Felse books -- even if most of them are shorter than this first 
book, they are still a lot of fun.
--- QM v1.31 
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