The Golden One

The Hippopotamus Pool

Popular, plucky 19th-century Egyptologist Amelia Peabody romps through her eighth archaeological adventure. When Amelia, her husband Emerson, and their thirteen-year-old son Ramses return to Egypt to begin excavation on an undisturbed Royal Tomb, they find themselves faced with a surprising new villain who is every bit as clever and resourceful as the intrepid Amelia herself!

Seeing a Large Cat

Peabody and Emerson receive a warning: "Stay away from tomb Twenty-A!" Along the way to solving the mystery, the Emersons meet a spoiled young woman, an overprotective father, and an intelligent con artist – in addition to discovering that Ramses has grown from a precocious child to a teenage heartthrob. Ramses strikes out with his adopted cousin David and beautiful Nefret on adventures that are best not known to anybody… especially Amelia.

The Ape Who Guards the Balance

Has all the elements necessary for a classic Amelia Peabody mystery: a dead body (mauled by crocodiles?), young lovers, a reunion of old friends (and enemies), archaeological discoveries – all recounted in Amelia’s own inimitable style. Excerpts from Manuscript H and letters from Nefret provide another perspective on the great detective and Egyptolologist.

The Falcon at the Portal

David is accused of forging antiquities, and the Emerson clan springs into action to help clear his name. The romantic tension between Ramses and Nefret finally comes to a head, a body is discovered at Emerson’s excavation site, and the obnoxious cousin Percy reappears.

He Shall Thunder in the Sky

It is 1914, the Emersons are in Egypt for another dig. Tensions within the family are heightened by World War I and a threatened invasion of Egypt by the Ottoman Turks. A dangerous game of spy vs. spy ensues, complete with deceit, deception, and disinformation.

Lord of the Silent

Undeterred by world war and enemy submarines, Amelia Peabody once again sets sail for Egypt – where ghosts of an ancient past and specters of a present-day evil hover silently over an inscrutable land.

The Golden One

A new year, 1917, is dawning, and the Great War that ravages the world shows no sign of abating. Answering the siren call of Egypt once more, Amelia Peabody and her family arrive at their home in Luxor to learn of a new royal tomb ransacked by thieves. Soon an even more disturbing outrage concerns the intrepid clan of archaeologists: the freshly and savagely slain corpse of a thief defiles the ancient burial site.

A Nice, Practical Career for a Woman: Some Questions for Elizabeth Peters, et al.

Editor’s note: Barbara Mertz has written nonfiction Egyptology books under her own name. As Elizabeth Peters, she is the author of many mysteries, including series starring Amelia Peabody, Vicky Bliss, and Jacqueline Kirby. As Barbara Michaels she has written gothic suspense novels. She is often addressed in correspondence and known to her in-the-know fans as "MPM" (for Michaels-Peters-Mertz). In total, MPM has published over sixty books – view the whole list here. MPM answers some frequently asked questions below.

What made you want to be a writer?

I didn’t want to be a writer. I wanted to be an archaeologist. My parents wanted me to be a teacher – a nice, practical career for a woman. When they discovered, somewhat belatedly (I had been at the Oriental Institute for six months by then), that I had changed my major, they were bewildered. But, bless them, they didn’t try to make me change my mind. I still believe, with all my heart, that young people should be allowed to follow their own aspirations and inclinations, however impractical these may seem. If they don’t try, they will never know whether or not they might have succeeded.

And who’s to say what is practical? Egyptology was an impractical career, especially for a young married woman forty years ago. Writing was, and still is, an impractical career, because so few people succeed in earning a living that way. I was one of the lucky ones; and if I hadn’t been so obsessed with ancient Egypt – as I still am – I might not have noticed that I did enjoy writing, and that some people thought I was pretty good at it. But I’ve never regretted studying Egyptology, even though I was unable to make it my career.

So how did you become a writer?

Luck, accident, or Fate! I had always been a compulsive reader. Sooner or later every compulsive reader finds herself thinking, "This isn’t a very good book. I’ll bet I could do better." So I tried. My first book, an espionage thriller, was written in collaboration with my then-husband. He provided the plot outline, I wrote the book. It was awful, partly because I was just learning how to write and partly because it wasn’t my kind of book. I wrote two more novels, solo, before I began to get a sense of what I wanted to write. Unfortunately, nobody wanted to publish that kind of book. It wasn’t until Mary Stewart and Victoria Holt hit the bestseller lists that publishers realized mysteries written by women, about women protagonists, could make money. (This despite the fact that authors like Phyllis Whitney had been doing it for years!) I finally sold my first mystery during this period. I’m not particularly proud of The Master of Blacktower [by Barbara Michaels], but I was able to sell it because it was what publishers were looking for just then. By that time I had learned that I loved to write, and I kept at it, learning with every book, and finally developing what I like to think of as my own style. Or is it styles?

So was The Master of Blacktower the first book you sold?

The first book I sold wasn’t a mystery. I had despatched my early unappreciated mss. to every publisher in New York, every one of whom promptly returned them. When the third ms. made the rounds an editor at one of the publishing houses liked it. She couldn’t persuade her boss to buy it, but she recommended an agent. He couldn’t sell that book either, but without him I probably could not have sold the next, which was a nonfiction book on Egyptology. These days it is much more difficult to sell a book without an agent, and much more difficult to get a good agent. But it can be done.

Can you recommend others’ books to your agent?

I’d like to help aspiring writers; I’d like to help everyone in this suffering world. But I can’t recommend a manuscript I haven’t read, by a person I don’t know, to my long-suffering and very busy agent. I am very fond of him and want to stay in his good graces.

Where do you get your ideas?

I am sorry to say that this question has become something of a bad joke among writers. The only possible answer is: "Everywhere." You don’t get ideas; you see them, recognize them, greet them familiarly when they amble up to you. A few examples from my own experience: Reading Arthurian legends and articles about the Cadbury excavations inspired The Camelot Caper [by Elizabeth Peters]. An oddly shaped bag of trash some lout had tossed onto the shoulder of a country road make me think about bodies in trash bags and led eventually to the skeleton on the road, in Be Buried in the Rain [by Barbara Michaels]. Like all skills, this one can be honed with practice, but if you have to ask the question you probably shouldn’t try to write a novel or short story. And if you ask a writer who has heard that same question dozens of times, she may come back with some snappy answer like, "There’s a drugstore in North Dakota where I order mine."