An excellent mystery: the eleventh chronicle of Brother Cadfael.

An Excellent Mystery: The Eleventh Chronicle of Brother Cadfael

by Ellis Peters (Morrow, 190 pp., $15.95)

THE FIRST STEP in writing a successful mystery series is to create a detective whose company the reader will want more of. Ellis Peters broke an almost ironclad rule--that mysteries are set in the approximate present-- and came up with a winner: Brother Cadfael, a Crusader turned Benedictine monk. (By the way, people to whom I've mentioned these books have asked if they are takeoffs on The Name of the Rose. Apparently not: The Italian novel was copyrighted three years after the first of the Brother Cadfael series.) These novels are set against the long, rambling war between Stephen and Matilda (a/k/a the Empress Maud) in the mid twelfth century. There are ample opportunities here for anachronism and what C. S. Lewis called "chronological snobbery,' but Miss Peters has mostly avoided them. Her novels lament war, but celebrate soldiers. ("Cadfael's warrior blood, long since abjured, had a way of coming to the boil when he heard steel in the offing. His chief uneasiness was that he could not be truly penitent about it. His king was not of this world, but in this world he could not help having a preference.') They portray strong and resourceful women who do not chafe against their roles as daughters, wives, mothers. (Cadfael, upon arriving at the house of old friends of his and learning that the husband is out, says to the wife: "Had [he] been here, I would have begged the loan of you of your lord in a proper civil fashion, but as things are . . . I need you for an hour or two. Will you ride with me in a good cause?' and she replies, "I'll lend myself for any enterprise you tell me is urgent.') They accept the Christian world view wholeheartedly, and do not gloss over their characters' lapses. There is little a reviewer can say about the plot or characters of any mystery novel without giving away too much of the first-reading suspense; with the Chronicles of Brother Cadfael, one would risk revealing the outcome of earlier novels in the series as well. Suffice it to say that in addition to the suspense and the puzzle element that one expects from any mystery, this novel movingly portrays a man whom one might describe as the obverse of Tolstoi's Prince Andrei. But fine as An Excellent Mystery is, I would advise anyone who is inclined to try Ellis Peters to put it aside, go back to the first in the series--A Morbid Taste for Bones--and read the Chronicles of Brother Cadfael in order.