Elizabeth Peters

• Born: September 29, 1927
• Birthplace: Canton, Illinois
• Died: August 8, 2013

Types of Plot: Amateur sleuth; cozy

Principal Series: Jacqueline Kirby, 1972-; Vicky Bliss, 1973-; Amelia Peabody, 1975-

Contribution

Barbara G. Mertz uses her tremendous energy to write in two opposing genres, mystery and detective fiction (as Elizabeth Peters) and gothic romance (as Barbara Michaels). The bridge between Mertz’s alter egos is her knowledge of history, especially that of ancient Egypt. Her nonseries Peters titles are essentially historical romances hung on suspense plot lines. Her reputation as a mystery writer rests on her three detective series, particularly on the Amelia Peabody books.

In Peters’s series characters, she has created three distinctly different heroines, each educated, independent, and driven by curiosity as much as by a sense of justice. At one end of the spectrum there is Jacqueline Kirby, a university librarian who takes love where she finds it but does not allow herself to be defined by romantic entanglements. At the other end is Amelia Peabody (later Emerson), whose Egyptologist husband regards her as his equal (while the reader and Amelia know that she is his superior). The intermediate stage is occupied by Vicky Bliss, for whom Peters has invented Sir John Smythe, a delightful but unsuitable lover who disappears at the end of each book, thus relieving Vicky of the customary denouement of marriage and leaving her free to play the field.

Although sex and violence are never too far away, these soft-boiled sleuths remain unruffled by either. Peters’s detectives appeal to cozy mystery fans, who do not mind a little hot sex in the interest of relieving the tensions that naturally build during the course of investigating murder. Exotic settings, unlooked for chivalry, unladylike derring-do from mothers and librarians, and a good dose of historical adventure have built for Peters a devoted readership. Jacqueline, Amelia, and Vicky have also bolstered the ranks of women on the crime-fighting side of crime fiction.

Biography

Elizabeth Peters was born Barbara Louise Gross on September 29, 1927, in Canton, Illinois, the daughter of Earl Gross and Grace (Tregellas) Gross. She attended the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, where she studied Egyptology. Peters received a bachelor of philosophy degree in 1947 and a master of arts degree in 1950, the same year she married Richard R. Mertz. She completed her doctorate in 1952 with a dissertation titled “Certain Titles of the Egyptian Queens and Their Bearing on the Hereditary Right to the Throne.” Following a pattern typical of her generation, Peters worked after marriage as a typist and secretary before having a baby. She followed her husband to various cities in the United States and abroad, cities that she would later use as settings in her fiction both as Elizabeth Peters and as Barbara Michaels.

Under her own name, Peters published two popular books about Egypt, one in 1964 and another in 1966; her first Barbara Michaels book was published in 1966. When her editor suggested that she write more lighthearted books about modern heroines using exotic locales, she borrowed the names of her two children, Elizabeth and Peter, to form her new pseudonym. A true storyteller, she has produced at least a book per year. Peters was divorced in 1969. Her two-hundred-year-old stone house outside Frederick, Maryland, reportedly houses cats, dogs, antiques, and a ghost.

A former president of the American Crime Writers League, Peters has been a member of the editorial board of The Writer, the editorial advisory board of KMT, A Modern Journal of Ancient Egypt, and the board of governors of the American Research Center in Egypt. In 1989, Hood College named her an honorary Doctor of Human Letters. In 1990, she won the Agatha for best novel for Naked Once More (1989), and in 1998 the Mystery Writers of America named her a Grand Master.

Analysis

By the time Barbara Mertz began writing as Elizabeth Peters, her talents as a spinner of romances were already well developed. Writing her dissertation had taught her to handle a long manuscript. In the late 1950’s, she and her husband, Richard R. Mertz, collaborated on several thrillers; although these early works were never published, they served as an apprenticeship in form, plotting, and character development. Her first published novel was a gothic romance, The Master of Black Tower (1966; as Barbara Michaels).

Soon afterward Peters’s editor suggested that she write the contemporary romances she later published under the pseudonym Barbara Michaels. In these books she successfully managed the transition from the gothic to a lighter style while retaining her mastery of the romance, manipulating and expanding the form but retaining its major elements and adapting them to modern settings. She also began to shed the love-as-goal central theme in favor of justice as prime mover and catalyst for adventure, mystery, and suspense.

Peters asserted that the “softer” mysteries written from a female point of view are as valid as the more violent thrillers written from a male point of view. As a scholar, Peters places truth before all else, so a major theme in her books is the conflict between superstition and reason, with reason winning every time. Despite their comic elements, both Amelia Peabody and her husband, Emerson, are true turn-of-the-century logical positivists in their rational, secular, scientific mind-set. Emerson is anticlerical and democratic, and Amelia, while firmly believing that if God exists, he is an Englishman, is nevertheless a feminist and an egalitarian (both radical positions for a nineteenth century Englishwoman), believing in the value of education as a means of producing a new and better society. Emerson’s strictures on archaeological method show the scientific mind at work, bringing order and method to this new field, and his slanderous comments on his colleagues reflect accurately relations between early (and present-day) Egyptologists.

Peters did more than draw on her archaeological knowledge to create the Amelia Peabody novels, her most popular series. Though wholly her own, with complex personalities, Peters’s characters are loosely based on historical figures. Radcliffe Emerson is similar in many ways to the early Egyptologist William Flinders Petrie—both are handsome, dark-haired, and bearded, with amazing energy, competitive spirits, quick tempers, and apt appellations bestowed by Egyptian workers: “Father of Curses” for Emerson and “Father of Pots” for Petrie.

Amelia has a namesake in Amelia B. Edwards, a Victorian woman who wrote the travel diary A Thousand Miles Up the Nile. She lends Amelia Peabody her taste for adventure and her eccentricity, as well as the nickname of one of Edwards’s friends, “Sitt Hakim,” or “Lady Doctor.” Another of Amelia’s spiritual forebears is Lady Hilda Petrie, wife of Sir Flinders. Hilda was also a scholar who enjoyed the archaeological life and was, like Amelia, unstoppable in her investigations. Actual historical figures make brief appearances throughout the series, lending verisimilitude—a few of these include E. A. Wallis Budge, the keeper of the Egyptian collection at the British Museum and Emerson’s professional rival, and James E. Quibell, who requests medicine for Petrie’s party during a documented historical occurrence. The excavation sites and travel routes are so well detailed that Amelia’s adventures may be followed on a map or excavation guide. Finally, Amelia’s voice and writing style are a perfect match for the journals, diaries, and letters of Victorian women travelers, with the original historical spellings of Arab and Egyptian names intact.

Between 1972 and 1975, Peters established three series characters through whom she could explore a second theme, that of the autonomous female, a woman whose happiness is not conditional on capturing a man. Independent women in the early 1970’s were widely considered pathetic, if not desperate, or worse, sexually aberrant. With the characters of Jacqueline Kirby, Vicky Bliss, and Amelia Peabody Emerson, Peters developed three variants of the independent woman, at the same time bringing changes on the romance form by creating heroines for whom marriage and monogamy are not life’s most important issues. At the same time, she avoided the rape solution common to romances, in which the strong-minded heroine is overcome by superior force.

Jacqueline Kirby Series

All Peters’s heroines are committed to some abstract value, whether it be truth, scholarly integrity, or Jacqueline Kirby’s simple belief that murder is wrong. That is why her heroines, even the least experienced, must solve the problem that the book presents, no matter what the danger. University librarian Jacqueline Kirby, who first appears in The Seventh Sinner (1972), is decidedly independent. A mature woman with two children in their early twenties, she makes no mention of the children’s father. During the course of the series, she exhibits several personas. As the stereotypical librarian, with her long copper hair snatched back in a tight bun and a pair of glasses perched precariously on her nose, she is the no-nonsense professional; with her hair flowing down her back and her voluptuous body clad in an emerald silk pants suit, flirting with some male target, she is a version of her era’s Total Woman.

Jacqueline’s sharp mind is furnished with a mixed bag of information that she uses to unravel the mystery, elucidating it in the library at the end of the book. Her trademark is a large handbag containing a faintly satirical variety of useful objects. The purse itself often comes in handy as a weapon. Another constant is that she enters the action with an academic swain but leaves the party with a debonair police officer, proving herself to be as attractive to men of action as she is to men of intellect. She is pointedly autonomous by choice.

Jacqueline is not only independent, indeed she is cynical and hard-nosed, willingly placing herself and others in jeopardy to solve the mystery. In her, Peters has developed a woman with a tough mind and high standards who is, nevertheless, extremely sexy. Peters uses the series to criticize the classical mystery form; more specifically, in The Murders of Richard III (1974), she draws on her knowledge of Ricardian scholarship to provide a corrective to Josephine Tey’s uncritical The Daughter of Time (1951).

Although the Jacqueline Kirby books are basically classically plotted mysteries, their plots revolve around private vices and satirize petty human pretensions. The Murders of Richard III makes fun of the antiquarian defenders of Richard, Die for Love (1984) mocks a convention of romance writers in New York, and in The Seventh Sinner plagiarism motivates murder in a Roman art institute.

Vicky Bliss Series

Peters’s second series heroine, Vicky Bliss, is an art historian, a woman who finds men drawn to her for all the wrong reasons. She is not above breaking and entering in pursuit of the solution to the mystery, which she explains in classic fashion in the last chapters. Vicky Bliss pursues the Schliemann treasure in Bavaria in Trojan Gold (1987), a pre-Viking chalice in Sweden in Silhouette in Scarlet (1983), and an art forgery ring in Rome in Street of the Five Moons (1978).

What is unique to the Bliss series is the slim, blond, English jewel thief and confidence man Sir John Smythe, who first appears in Street of the Five Moons. Smythe commonly avoids violence by withdrawing from the action, but when Vicky is involved, he cannot choose that option but must stand and fight. In an inversion of the typical romance plot, Bliss usually rescues Sir John as they solve the mystery. After several romantic interludes, he disappears, leaving Vicky to resolve the mystery on her own, only to appear in the next book, to her mingled delight and disgust. The love-hate relationship between the two adds tension and spice to the plots.

In Smythe, Peters has developed the perfect foil and demon lover for an autonomous woman. Because marriage was the implicit goal of any sympathetic heroine in the 1970’s, when the series began, Vicky might have been expected to face another of the era’s emerging social questions: the two-career problem. Peters, however, does not impose on her sleuth the burden of giving up crime fighting so that her husband can have a fulfilling career as a jewel thief. Instead, she makes him a bit of a slippery cad, thereby sustaining the romantic tension from novel to novel without endowing Vicky with false hopes or an inclination to pine.

Amelia Peabody Series

Peters develops her final variation of the autonomous female character in Amelia Peabody in Crocodile on the Sandbank. This series, unlike the others, is written in the august and convoluted prose common to Victorian novels and is at once a crashingly good high romance and a satire so delicious that large portions of it beg to be read aloud. Using the style and plot devices of the gothic romance in the Peabody series, Peters combines the theme of marriage between a man and a woman who are equals in every way with an investigation into the conflict between faith and reason in which the ghosts and walking mummies are explained rationally as the concoctions of the villains.

Although Peters bowed to her publisher’s requests for more “sensational” titles for several of the earlier Peabody books (The Curse of the Pharaohs, 1981, and The Mummy Case, 1985), the series later followed her original artistic intent of using lines from Egyptian literature that have symbolic significance for the story at hand. The titles thus add a further element to the mystery, as readers seek the source of the quotation and consider its relevance.

Crocodile on the Sandbank

In Crocodile on the Sandbank, Peters uses stock characters such as the Plain Jane, the Innocent Heiress, the Irascible Grandfather, the Wicked Cousin, the Faithless Lover, the Poor-But-Honest Hero, and the Bad-Tempered-But-Lovable Older Man and stock situations such as the midnight elopement and the missing will, but she infuses new vitality and a large dose of humor into a plot that is as old as the Egyptian tombs in which it is set. With wicked wit, Peters brings her fast-paced novel crashing to a highly satisfying conclusion: the unmasking of the wicked and married bliss for both pairs of lovers.

The Curse of the Pharaohs

The arrival of a son in The Curse of the Pharaohs completes the Emerson family. Walter Peabody Emerson, called “Ramses” because of the resemblance of his profile to that pharaoh’s, is the perfect academic offspring—“catastrophically precocious,” long-winded, and nearly always right. Amelia sees Ramses through the unsentimental eye with which she views the universe, recognizing his strengths (he is very bright and always obedient) and weaknesses (he would get dirty in a vacuum and has a fine Jesuitical mind that allows him to escape parental prohibitions). She addresses him as if he were an adult. Ramses allows Peters to comment acerbically on children and domesticity.

Amelia is not only the central character but also the engine that makes everything work. While she loves her husband and son passionately, she sees them with a clear eye and manages them firmly, Emerson with sex and Ramses with direct orders. She also manages everything else. Her excursions into detecting lead the couple into deadly peril, from which Ramses has lately taken to rescuing them, once from being immured in a flooded tomb (The Mummy Case) and once from a cellar in the decaying castle of a depraved aristocrat (The Deeds of the Disturber, 1988).

Nonseries Novels

Peters’ nonseries novels are more grounded in the romance tradition. Her female characters tend to be young, often students, and make errors in judgment that lead to danger. The prize for unraveling the mystery is the love of the hero and sometimes the added bonus of giving up her work to join in his. Allure, sexual sophistication, and a somewhat inferior intelligence quotient are generally assigned to bad women. Male characters are assigned to each heroine in pairs, though only one may turn out to be a villain. Because Peters’s main themes in these novels have to do with the individual struggle for self-definition and love, she focuses her plots on matters of private rather than public morality.

In all her novels, Peters uses her historical training to create realistic plots that involve genuine historical problems or artifacts. For added romance, she locates the stories in glamorous foreign cities or at archaeological sites and exploits her special knowledge to provide verisimilitude in the story line. In The Jackal’s Head (1968), model Althea Tomlinson discovers the secret of her father’s death as well as the lost tomb of Nefertiti in Egypt. Undergraduate Carol Farley journeys to Mexico and falls in love with pyramids while searching for her runaway father and helping to break a drug ring in The Night of Four Hundred Rabbits (1971). D. J. Abbott, a graduate student in anthropology, discovers human remains along with mammoth bones in Arizona in Summer of the Dragon (1979).

Peters’s Characters

Peters sees the exotic locales and sophisticated people in her stories through mildly Puritan and very American eyes. The foreign city is a place of excitement, danger, and decadence, where the heroine must fight to protect her values and virtue. People of wealth or good family who do not also work for a living are soft and corrupt. The villain is often a suave and superficially attractive aristocrat, while the hero is a hardworking American who is knowledgeable but uncorrupted by foreign ways.

Peters’s heroines, however, are not Puritans. They regard sex as a normal human instinct and enjoy it, or expect to enjoy it. Love is distinguished from sex and is an irrational but pleasant state achieved only with the right man. Its arrival is sudden, unbidden, and final. Jacqueline Kirby’s rejection of love’s final solution to her problems and Vicky Bliss’s half love for her disappearing jewel thief do not invalidate this generalization but point up the independence of the two women and keep the reader turning the pages to find out whether this time it will be different. If it is, it will be the men who change, and the characters will be promoted to the bliss of an equal relationship like that enjoyed by the Emersons.

Peters has frequently commented in articles and interviews about her series characters. While some mystery authors have found series characters limiting, Peters sees the special requirements of a series character as both challenging and, in some ways, freeing. The challenge comes from the need to reintroduce the characters each time without boring continuing readers, as well as having to discard otherwise worthwhile plots that are not right for a particular character. Peters has solved the latter problem by alternating work among three different series and her nonseries fiction as Barbara Michaels.

The rewards for Peters are worth the effort: Within a series, characters can truly grow and develop, providing greater interest for readers and an opportunity for ongoing craftsmanship for the author. The Crocodile on the Sandbank is set in 1884-1885, and the series continues through the turn of the century, World War I, and the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamen in 1922. The Emersons meet, marry, rear a son from precocious child to secret agent (The Golden One, 2002), and become grandparents even as Howard Carter snatches from their grasp the greatest archaeological discovery of the twentieth century (Tomb of the Golden Bird, 2006).

Peters’s style is light and breezy. Her heroines, even the youngest, have a humorous attitude toward the world, and have, or gain, a wry self-knowledge. Her more mature heroines have a sharp eye for hypocrisy and a cynical wit that makes the exposition and the dialogue crackle. With all of its violence and corruption, Peters’s world is an essentially rational and happy one in which the evildoer has produced an imbalance. Her heroines use their intelligence and courage to correct that imbalance and live happily ever after.

Principal Series Characters:

• Jacqueline Kirby is amiddle-aged librarian who uses her sharp brain and lethal handbag in solving mysteries. Her glasses slide down her nose and her copper-colored tresses fall down in moments of excitement. She enters each story with some academic swain but leaves with another man, usually the police officer.
• Vicky Bliss is a tall, blond art historian with a keen sense of humor and a healthy interest in men. Drawn into mysteries by her work at a Munich museum, she solves them with intelligence, cunning, and breaking and entering, rescuing herself and often the hero.
• Sir John Smythe is the nom de guerre of Vicky’s lover, an English art thief of good family. He claims to be a coward but comes through when needed. He disappears at the end of every mystery, only to embroil Vicky in another scam in the next.
• Amelia Peabody is an independent, wealthy Victorian Englishwoman. When traveling to Egypt, she falls in love with the country, pyramids, and Egyptologist Radcliffe Emerson, whom she marries. Armed with an irrepressible faith in her medical and detective abilities (as well as a steel-shanked parasol and a pistol), she manages everyone and everything. Passionately fond of her husband and sensible of her son’s shortcomings, she comments acerbically on Victorian mores and solves mysteries by leaping to conclusions based on intuition, blithely changing her theories as they become untenable.

Bibliography

Johnson, Rosemary Erickson. Contemporary Feminist Historical Crime Fiction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. A very readable critical exploration of one trend in recent crime fiction that is both feminist in its perspective and historical in its setting. Elizabeth Peters exemplifies this subgenre.

Lindsay, Elizabeth Blakesley, ed. Great Women Mystery Writers. 2d ed. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2007. A good discussion of Peters, with critical commentary on Amelia Peabody, her family and her avocation.

Nichols, Victoria, and Susan Thompson. Silk Stalkings. Berkeley, Calif.: Black Lizard, 1988. This critical appraisal of various characters created by women writing in the detective genre devotes an essay to each of Peters’s sleuths.

Peters, Elizabeth. AmeliaPeabody.com. http://www.ameliapeabody.com. Peters does not have an official Web site, but Amelia Peabody does. This site is not only informative but also attractive and imaginative. Offers an author biography, publication history, and much plot detail.

Peters, Elizabeth. “PW Talks with Elizabeth Peters.” Interview by Jean Swanson. Publishers Weekly 248, no. 17 (April 23, 2001): 53. On the publication of Lord of the Silent, Peters talks about the Peabody series and her creation of the character Ramses.

Zvirin, Stephanie. Review of Tomb of the Golden Bird, by Elizabeth Peters. Booklist 102, no. 12 (February 15, 2006): 6. Favorable review of this Peabody series novel that involves the discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb. Called a “continuing pleasure.”