Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 April 2009
A question of John S. Wilson concerning indecomposable representations of metabelian groups satisfying the minimal condition for normal subgroups is answered negatively, by means of an example. It is shown that such representations need not be irreducible, even when the group being represented is an extension of an elementary abelian p–group by a quasicyclic q–group of the type first described by V.S. Čarin, and the characteristic of the field is a prime distinct from both p and q. This implies that certain techniques used in the study of metabelian groups satisfying the minimal condition for normal subgroups are not available for the corresponding class of soluble groups of derived length 3.