Edith Pargeter: Ellis Peters (Border Lines Series) - Tapa dura

Ellis Peters is famous throughout the world as the author of the Chronicles of Brother Cadfael, featuring her monastic medieval sleuth. Televised, adapted for radio, turned into talking books, the Cadfael novels have played a major role in turning crime writing into a literary genre.
But there is much more to Peters than her twenty Cadfael novels. As Ellis Peters she has also produced a series of fourteen Inspector Felse novels, while under her real name of Edith Pargeter she has written a further thirty-six novels. These include two outstanding historical sequences, The Brothers of Gwynedd quartet and The Heaven Tree trilogy, and The Eighth Champion of Christendom, a trilogy of novels about the Second World War written during and just after that conflict. Add three collections of stories, three works of non-fiction and sixteen translations of Czech literature and Pargeter's canon of high quality writing is finally completed.
In this book, the first, on Edith Pargeter, Margaret Lewis proves an admirable and incisive guide to the two faces of this prolific and award-winning popular author, exploring both her life and her work.

An introductory biography of the life and work of Edith Pargeter, author of sixty books, but internationally known as Ellis Peters, author of the popular Cadfael Chronicles, featured on PBS's Mystery series. Margaret Lewis investigates the circumstances which make Pargeter's area of Shropshire so vital to her work, and discusses the wide range of her writing. Although devoting a large part of the book to the Cadfael phenomenon, and to the art of writing crime fiction, Lewis demonstrates that Pargeter is also a translator, historian, and novelist of distinction. The biography includes discussion of Pargeter's historical novels, The Heaven Tree Trilogy and the Brothers of Gwynedd Quartet, her wartime trilogy, The Eighth Champion of Christendom, the Inspector Felse novels, her award-winnning Czech translations, as well as the Cadfael Chronicles, and here Lewis includes a plot summary of each Cadfael novel. Some photographs have been made available from Edith Pargeter's private collection.