Death and the Joyful Woman
by Ellis Peters
Summary
The Joyful Woman is a pub, or was: a beautiful old timbered inn whose name and painted sign outlived its trade, bought and vulgarised by Alfred Armiger, a self made brewing magnate with a bulldozer's approach to everything, including his family. When Armiger is found in the inn's outbuilding with his skull broken, the suspect pool is a testament to his character: the son he disinherited for marrying beneath the firm, the assistant he bullied, the neighbouring gentry he squeezed, and Kitty Norris, the young heiress to a rival fortune, godchild of his ambitions, whom he had earmarked, with characteristic delicacy, for his son and then for himself.
Peters's stroke is to run the investigation through a divided household. Detective Sergeant George Felse works the case professionally, interviews, alibis, the ugly finances under the county's pleasant surface. His son Dominic, sixteen, is meanwhile privately, desperately in love with Kitty Norris, a devotion of the hopeless teenage kind, and when the evidence begins to close around Kitty and George arrests her, the Felse dinner table becomes the book's second crime scene: the boy convinced of her innocence, the father sick at what his duty is doing to his own house, and Dominic finally conducting his own investigation, which carries him, in the last movement, somewhere genuinely dangerous.
The mystery is fair and well turned; the novel's distinction is the family, drawn with the warmth that became its author's signature.
Around two hundred and fifty pages.
Best for readers who want the classic English detective story with a beating domestic heart, from the writer who would later build Brother Cadfael.
Historical Context & Significance
Death and the Joyful Woman won the Edgar for Best Novel in 1963, the American prize finding Ellis Peters a decade and a half before the books that made her famous: she was Edith Pargeter, already a prolific and respected novelist and translator of Czech literature under her own name, and the Felse family mysteries, of which this is the second, were her first sustained crime project, the village England procedural warmed by an actual family at its centre.
The Cadfael Chronicles, begun in 1977, would make her one of the bestselling mystery writers alive and helped establish the historical mystery as a modern commercial genre; readers who arrive at the Felse books from Shrewsbury Abbey find the same signature already formed, crime fiction as an instrument of humanism.
The novel was filmed for American television in the sixties; the Edgar remains the major American honour of her career, given, characteristically, for a book about the collision of love and evidence.