A Morbid Taste for Bones

With this book, Ellis Peters introduced Brother Cadfael, her medieval sleuth - some might say the medieval sleuth. A former Crusader who became a Benedictine monk in middle age and settled down to tend the abbey herb gardens, he is not quite like the other monks, who have never known anything else and who sometimes wonder about him:

Brother Cadfael himself found nothing strange in his wide-ranging career, and had forgotten nothing and regretted nothing. He saw no contradiction in the delight he had taken in battle and adventure, and the keen pleasure he now found in quietude. [...] And probably the youngsters who eyed him with such curiosity also whispered that in a life such as he had led there must have been some encounters with women, and not all purely chivalrous, and what sort of grounding was that for the conventual life?

They were right about the women. Quite apart from Richildis, who had not unnaturally tired of waiting for his return after ten years, and married a solid yeoman with good prospects in the shire and no intention of flying off to the wars, he remembered other ladies, in more lands than one, with whom he had enjoyed encounters pleasurable to both parties, and no harm to either. Bianca, drawing water at the stone well in Venice - the Greek boat girl Arianna - Mariam, the Saracen widow who sold spices and fruit in Antioch, and who found him man enough to replace for a while the man she had lost ...

Now he finds himself appointed to travel with the Prior and various other Brothers from the monastery in Shrewsbury into Wales. Their mission? To collect the remains of St Winifred from her burial place, Gwytherin, and bring the precious relics to the abbey in Shrewsbury, where they will receive the veneration due to them.

But Wales in the 12th Century (this story is dated to 1137) is still relatively wild and the people of the village are very against the disinterment and abduction (as they see it) of their saint. Cadfael, who is from Wales, sympathises with them, but he is a monk and under vows of obedience; he is also the interpreter and finds himself caught in the middle between Brother Robert, the Prior, whose idea the whole thing was in the first place, and Rhisiart, a local lordling and the spokesman for the village.

Then Rhisiart is murdered, and it falls to Cadfael to save the young man who is the obvious suspect and discover what really happened and why, while at the same time trying to avoid and prevent any further recrimination between the local people and the visiting monks.

Cleverly written, easy reading, relaxing and entertaining: it is not difficult to see why this series of best-selling books became the runaway success it did. If you only know Brother Cadfael from the TV series, read the books (try at least one!); Derek Jacobi is good, but the books are better.