The Dominic Felse Omnibus: Piper on the Mountain / Mourning Raga / Death to the Landlords

The Felse Investigations #5, 9, 11

by Ellis Peters

Amateur sleuth Dominic Felse finds himself in a deadly game of cat and mouse in Czechoslovakia in "The Piper on the Mountain" before finding himself embroiled in two more mysteries set in India in "Mourning Raga" and "Death to the Landlords".

501 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

A pseudonym used by Edith Pargeter.

Edith Mary Pargeter, OBE, BEM was a prolific author of works in many categories, especially history and historical fiction, and was also honoured for her translations of Czech classics; she is probably best known for her murder mysteries, both historical and modern. Born in the village of Horsehay (Shropshire, England), she had Welsh ancestry, and many of her short stories and books (both fictional and non-fictional) were set in Wales and its borderlands.

During World War II, she worked in an administrative role in the Women's Royal Naval Service, and received the British Empire Medal - BEM.

Pargeter wrote under a number of pseudonyms; it was under the name Ellis Peters that she wrote the highly popular series of Brother Cadfael medieval mysteries, many of which were made into films for television.

Reviews

[Surreysmum · Rating 3 out of 5]

Comprises The Piper on the Mountain (1966); Mourning Raga (1969); Death to the Landlords (1972). The protagonist of these three novels is not Inspector Felse of Peters' other modern detective stories, but his son Dominic, who as a young man without a settled career has the advantage of being able to be transported to exotic settings without improbability. The setting of Piper is iron-curtain Czechoslovakia, the other two India, and all three bear marks in their detailed descriptions, visual and sensual, of actual travel by the author. In fact, those descriptions are as interesting, I think, as the plots themselves. I also found the political themes interesting - all three are essentially anti-violence (tho' Peters stands on no soap-boxes), and the first is essentially a protest against the Cold War spying mentality, while the Indian ones are in reaction against terrorism. Dominic is joined, in the Indian novels, by a co-protagonist Swami, who is at once mystical, highly principled and intensely practical - and completely non-violent (an interesting quirk in resolving violent plots). In Piper, Dominic joins a group of young people holidaying in Europe, a holiday quickly directed by one girl (Tossa) to a particular region of Czechoslovakia, where she is secretly trying to uncover the mystery of her stepfather's death. A British SS agent she contacts is murdered, and it is the Czech authorities (with Dominic's help, of course) who eventually discover that the murder of the agent was accomplished by one of his British superiors. Dominic & Tossa have a bonding experience... Mourning Raga takes Dominic & Tossa to India as chaperones for a 14-year-old who is half-Indian, half-American, and who is kidnapped by a film director hoping to extort money from her American filmstar mother. The twist here is that the director is the confidante of the young people through much of the novel. The Swami does some deus ex machina manoeuvring. Death to the Landlords introduces modern terrorism in both its naive & cynical forms - the naive get killed off, of course. A subsidiary romance between two unconventional young Indian people ensues. Good fun.