Amelia Peabody Emerson liked nothing better than to camp for a season in a nice dry tomb while her husband excavated a nearby site. After all, that was how she met him!
Crocodile on the Sandbank introduces us to Amelia Peabody, a Victorian bluestocking who is roughly 30 years old, and who absolutely refuses to live the life that society expects of her. When her father dies she takes her inheritance and does what she’s always wanted: she goes to Egypt to visit archeological sites.
This is in 1884, at the dawn of scientific archeology. Maybe the pre-dawn. Amateur treasure hunting was debatably giving way to professional science.
Amelia rescues an abandoned Englishwoman, dodges a kidnapping attempt by a mummy, and invades an archeological dig run by the Emerson brothers, neither of whom are capable of standing in her way. The brother who eventually makes that brave and foolhardy attempt, of course, ends up being the love of her life. But then, as Amelia puts it in The Mummy Case, she believes that marriage “should be a balanced stalemate between equal adversaries.”
The Amelia Peabody series is the romantic, suspenseful and riotously adventurous history of that marvelously balanced stalemate, set amid the mystery of Egypt and the tumult of The Great Game of European politics in the Middle East that culminated in World War I.
Amelia was not Elizabeth Peters’ only heroine. Another of her avatars was art historian Vicky Bliss, first introduced in Borrower of the Night. Vicky’s job at the National Museum in Munich is to authenticate art works and, all too often, to uncover art thieves and forgers. That’s how she meets and falls for her on-again/off-again lover, John Smythe, who just might be a thief, forger, or possibly a spy! What he isn’t, usually, is around long enough for Vicky to find out who or what he really is, whether they have a chance at a real future, and whether or not she’ll have to turn him in. The pieces finally all come together in The Laughter of Dead Kings.
Jacqueline Kirby was probably the heroine who most resembled the author’s own self. Introduced in Seventh Sinner, Jacqueline, like her creator, was a librarian who became an author. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Unlike Amelia and Vicky, the romantic subplot in the Kirby series is that Kirby has become a romance writer! And, in Die for Love, Jacqueline solves a murder at a Romance Readers’ Convention.
Dr. Barbara Mertz, who wrote these marvelous stories under the pen name of Elizabeth Peters (she also wrote gothic horror under the name Barbara Michaels) died August 8, 2013 at the age of 85. Her last book was A River in the Sky, the 19th Amelia Peabody book.
She’ll be missed, as will all of her heroines.
Leave a Comment