She often said that writing the Amelia Peabody books allowed her to be an archaeologist from the comfort of her armchair. Her novels and short stories won many awards in the US and she was made a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America in 1998. While Mertz will probably be best remembered for the Peabody series, she will be much missed as a leading light of the Sisters in Crime organisation and as one of the founders of the annual Malice Domestic fan conventions dedicated to more traditional crime-writing in the style of Dorothy L Sayers, Josephine Tey and Margery Allingham.
A further 18 Peabody novels followed, up to 2010, often featuring loving – and very funny – pastiches of Christie, Conan Doyle and Rider Haggard. The majority were under her Michaels persona, but she was beginning to write as Elizabeth Peters, a pseudonym taken from the names of her daughter and son, and in 1975 she launched Amelia Peabody (along with Amelia's husband, Radcliffe Emerson, and, later, their son Ramses) on her fictional career in Crocodile on the Sandbank. Her divorce spurred her on to produce 16 novels over the next 10 years, though she was always wary of condescending reviewers who used the word "prolific". It was only when she and her husband moved to Germany for two years that she discovered the life of a writer, first as an Egyptologist and then as a novelist under the name Barbara Michaels, with the publication in 1966 of the gothic romance The Master of Blacktower.
Unable to find a job in academia, she took secretarial work, which was easier to obtain if she hid the fact that she had a PhD. She was enrolled in the University of Chicago on a scholarship in 1947 and was awarded her BA, then MA and her doctorate in Egyptology in 1952. She was born Barbara Louise Gross in Astoria, Illinois, during the great depression, the daughter of a printer and a teacher, and maintained that she "fell in love with Egyptology at the age of 13" on a trip to a museum.
Crocodile on the Sandbank by Elizabeth Peters
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