![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Amelia Peabody author dies at age of 85
Aug. 11th, 2013 11:22 amElizabeth Peters, aka Barbara Michaels, aka Barbara Mertz died on 8 August 2013.
I came across Crocodile on the Sandbank and Ammie Come Home as a teenager on two separate occasions in the library, not realising at first that they were written by the same person. Thereafter I devoured her books with the sort of single-minded fevor that only teenagers are capable of. I had not read a lot of funny woman writers before, and I certainly had not read a lot of writer who could introduce me to Egpytology, American and English history and literature, vintage clothing, and (a topic I was totally ignorant of) gardens, while letting me go on read-apades with heroines who were bold, retiring, bookish, loud, plain, gorgeous, but every one who had a distinctive voice of her own. For years, the sole reason I wanted to go to Egypt was to play Amelia Peabody (it's on my bucket list). I wanted to solve mysteries. And that her heroines usually ended up with the guy that understood them best satisfied my need for romantic yarns without my having to suffer through romantic novels. (There was a dearth of decent romantic paperbacks at my library; other than Heyer, most were really awful - the rest were Barbara Cartland.)
She was the writer whose books, once I could afford it, would choose to buy. I developed a minor case of collector's craze and had a little list wherein I'd tick off to ensure that I had every one of her books (I do). She introduced me to the pleasure of reading mysteries and from there, detective stories. She helped me to feel that studying literature (or any other intellectual pursuit) was perfectly fine if you wanted it, because there was value in understanding the human condition.
Her later books, I felt, were not as scintillating; perhaps because I had grown away from the genre, and partly because, I think, some of the verve had gone out of her writing. They didn't seem as bright and sparkling; not as smoothly narrated as I remembered. The Amelia Peabody books seemed mired in nostalgia: I had a hard time getting into A River in the Sky (but what a lovely title) simply because I was resentful at not getting a book that told me "what happened to Amelia in the 1930s/1940s?". But it was only the last few ones: The Laughter of Dead Kings is not on par with Silhouette in Scarlet, but I adore Vicky Bliss just as much. I think the prevalence of information technology, especially the ubiquitous mobile phone, texting, social media, made the world a very different place from the one Mertz had been accustomed to building and writing about, especially those of her books set contemporaneously. It's a small pity, but when I think about it, there have been very few writers who have been able to write a good yarn where the characters are (like many of us now) constantly using mobile apps, without having to break up the prose with bits of reproduced texting and photos.
The Amelia Peabody books are still awesome. I defy anyone to read The Snake, the Crocodile and the Dog without muttering "Another shirt ruined!" thereafter.
I came across Crocodile on the Sandbank and Ammie Come Home as a teenager on two separate occasions in the library, not realising at first that they were written by the same person. Thereafter I devoured her books with the sort of single-minded fevor that only teenagers are capable of. I had not read a lot of funny woman writers before, and I certainly had not read a lot of writer who could introduce me to Egpytology, American and English history and literature, vintage clothing, and (a topic I was totally ignorant of) gardens, while letting me go on read-apades with heroines who were bold, retiring, bookish, loud, plain, gorgeous, but every one who had a distinctive voice of her own. For years, the sole reason I wanted to go to Egypt was to play Amelia Peabody (it's on my bucket list). I wanted to solve mysteries. And that her heroines usually ended up with the guy that understood them best satisfied my need for romantic yarns without my having to suffer through romantic novels. (There was a dearth of decent romantic paperbacks at my library; other than Heyer, most were really awful - the rest were Barbara Cartland.)
She was the writer whose books, once I could afford it, would choose to buy. I developed a minor case of collector's craze and had a little list wherein I'd tick off to ensure that I had every one of her books (I do). She introduced me to the pleasure of reading mysteries and from there, detective stories. She helped me to feel that studying literature (or any other intellectual pursuit) was perfectly fine if you wanted it, because there was value in understanding the human condition.
Her later books, I felt, were not as scintillating; perhaps because I had grown away from the genre, and partly because, I think, some of the verve had gone out of her writing. They didn't seem as bright and sparkling; not as smoothly narrated as I remembered. The Amelia Peabody books seemed mired in nostalgia: I had a hard time getting into A River in the Sky (but what a lovely title) simply because I was resentful at not getting a book that told me "what happened to Amelia in the 1930s/1940s?". But it was only the last few ones: The Laughter of Dead Kings is not on par with Silhouette in Scarlet, but I adore Vicky Bliss just as much. I think the prevalence of information technology, especially the ubiquitous mobile phone, texting, social media, made the world a very different place from the one Mertz had been accustomed to building and writing about, especially those of her books set contemporaneously. It's a small pity, but when I think about it, there have been very few writers who have been able to write a good yarn where the characters are (like many of us now) constantly using mobile apps, without having to break up the prose with bits of reproduced texting and photos.
The Amelia Peabody books are still awesome. I defy anyone to read The Snake, the Crocodile and the Dog without muttering "Another shirt ruined!" thereafter.