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Ellis Peters

Le lépreux de Saint Gilles (the leper of saint Gilles)

Roman policier (frère Cadfael)

10/18 1981

Nous sommes en octobre 1039, un mariage arrangé doit avoir lieu à l'bbaye de Shrewsbury. De quoi se plonger dans le passé anglais du XIIème s. et se dire que nous vivons une époque formidable! L'affreux vieux mari promis est assassiné, et l'enquête que démarre frère Cadfael va l'amener dans un sanctuaire pour lépreux peu ragoûtant. Encore une fois, nous vivons une époque formidable... enfin, chez nous en tous cas, puisque la lèpre malheureusement n'a pas encore été éradiquée de la surface de la planète... 

Citation de l'auteur

      "At the time I had no intention of starting a series. But there, only a few months after the St. Winifred affair, came the siege and capture of Shrewsbury by King Stephen, and the massacre of the castle garrison, ninety-four men hanged and thrown over the battlements into the ditch. A private murderer might well take advantage of this opportunity to toss a ninety-fifth among them. So there was the germ of One Corpse Too Many (1979). By that time Brother Cadfael had taken me over, apparently for good. The writing of these books has given me more pure pleasure than anything else I have done. So the line continues, each book based on some aspect of the recorded monastic life of Shrewsbury and fitted into the history of the time. Each book carries the history of the time a step forward, as accurately as possible, and into that framework my own characters and stories have to be fitted. There is a foreground and a background, in both of which sacred and secular move in counterbalance."