raincitygirl (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
raincitygirl) wrote2015-12-13 09:05 am
raincitygirl) wrote2015-12-13 09:05 am
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I have been re-reading Elizabeth Peters’ Crocodile on the Sandbank, and enjoying it a great deal. It’s a total “cozy” mystery. In 1884 Miss Amelia Peabody, a plain spinster of 32 living in an English village, unexpectedly comes into a fortune and decides to fulfill her lifelong dreams of seeing the Pyramids. On her way to Egypt she rescues a Fallen Woman, Evelyn Barton-Forbes, and engages Evelyn to be her paid companion. Owing to a complicated sequence of events, they end up invading an archeological dig which is being disrupted by the supposed ghost of a mummy. But Miss Peabody is on the case, armed with her wits, a sharp tongue, and a sturdy steel-tipped parasol.
This is the first in a series of Amelia Peabody mysteries by Peters, and they vary in quality. Some are hilarious and genuinely suspenseful, but with others it seems like Peters is just going through the motions to pick up her paycheque. Crocodile on the Sandbank is one of the better ones. Well worth reading, for anybody who’s in the mood for a frothy mystery with snappy dialogue, guaranteed happy endings for the good guys, and no upsetting gore.
I like cozy mysteries. There is a time for gruelling mysteries that make you cry, like Ruth Rendell’s Simisola or Reginald Hill’s The Wood Beyond, but there is also a time for curling up with a good cozy and knowing that it won’t make you cry.
Cutting for more on this subject:
Peters, real name Barbara Mertz, who died in 2013, had a PhD in Egyptology from the University of Chicago, and it shows. She manages to put in a lot of interesting tidbits about archeology, history and Ancient Egypt without disrupting the flow of the narrative. It doesn’t go “Plot, dialogue, plot, dialogue, insert 5 paragraphs re: archeology then go back to plot and dialogue until the next info-dump.” Some writers (in many different fields of fiction) never pull off that feat of managing to impart factual information that the reader needs in order to understand the plot, without seeming to insert portions of a textbook into the narrative.
That said, the book was written in 1975, and is set in 1884. Naturally the main characters have enlightened ideas about the Egyptians, but they’re still enlightened ideas by the standard of white British people of a certain class living during the reign of Queen Victoria. This is a book about white people in Egypt, with the Egyptians themselves primarily providing local colour. To do Peters credit, she does seem to get that later on in the series, and has Amelia and her husband (yes, Miss Peabody contracts matrimony!) adopt an orphaned Egyptian boy, who as an adult gets mixed up in the nascent Egyptian independence movement.
The last book in the series is The Tomb of the Golden Bird, set in 1922. That was first published in 2006, but Peters published a couple of more books set earlier in the series (they didn't have a mystery every year in between 1884 and 1922, there were gaps of several years in between the setting of each mystery). So having written Amelia's final case already, Peters then went backwards in time and filled in some of the gaps with books that were were written later, but should be read earlier in the sequence. The weird thing though, is that her last book, The Painted Queen, set in 1912, was supposed to be already finished when Peters died in August 2013 but HarperCollins has kept procrastinating on publishing it. It was pushed back, pushed back, now they're saying July 2016. I'm curious as to why. Maybe it wasn't as complete as they said, or maybe it's really awful and they're desperately editing it... Who knows.
Anyway, I've decided I'll read the books in order. I have read most of them, but in a jumble, not sequentially. And I read them so very long ago that I've forgotten a lot. Of course, due to the aforementioned variations in quality, i may find myself skimming some of the books.
Edited to add: for some reason Amazon Canada has hardly any of Peters' books available in paperback. Dispute with HarperCollins, possibly? Chapters Indigo (Canada's other online bookstore) has all of them, so they're definitely not out of print or anything. I realize many people reading this post read on an electronic device, but if you wanted to give a paperback copy to someone as a Christmas present or something (I know sometimes people in our families enjoy a good cozy mystery too), rest assured, not out of print.
This is the first in a series of Amelia Peabody mysteries by Peters, and they vary in quality. Some are hilarious and genuinely suspenseful, but with others it seems like Peters is just going through the motions to pick up her paycheque. Crocodile on the Sandbank is one of the better ones. Well worth reading, for anybody who’s in the mood for a frothy mystery with snappy dialogue, guaranteed happy endings for the good guys, and no upsetting gore.
I like cozy mysteries. There is a time for gruelling mysteries that make you cry, like Ruth Rendell’s Simisola or Reginald Hill’s The Wood Beyond, but there is also a time for curling up with a good cozy and knowing that it won’t make you cry.
Cutting for more on this subject:
Peters, real name Barbara Mertz, who died in 2013, had a PhD in Egyptology from the University of Chicago, and it shows. She manages to put in a lot of interesting tidbits about archeology, history and Ancient Egypt without disrupting the flow of the narrative. It doesn’t go “Plot, dialogue, plot, dialogue, insert 5 paragraphs re: archeology then go back to plot and dialogue until the next info-dump.” Some writers (in many different fields of fiction) never pull off that feat of managing to impart factual information that the reader needs in order to understand the plot, without seeming to insert portions of a textbook into the narrative.
That said, the book was written in 1975, and is set in 1884. Naturally the main characters have enlightened ideas about the Egyptians, but they’re still enlightened ideas by the standard of white British people of a certain class living during the reign of Queen Victoria. This is a book about white people in Egypt, with the Egyptians themselves primarily providing local colour. To do Peters credit, she does seem to get that later on in the series, and has Amelia and her husband (yes, Miss Peabody contracts matrimony!) adopt an orphaned Egyptian boy, who as an adult gets mixed up in the nascent Egyptian independence movement.
The last book in the series is The Tomb of the Golden Bird, set in 1922. That was first published in 2006, but Peters published a couple of more books set earlier in the series (they didn't have a mystery every year in between 1884 and 1922, there were gaps of several years in between the setting of each mystery). So having written Amelia's final case already, Peters then went backwards in time and filled in some of the gaps with books that were were written later, but should be read earlier in the sequence. The weird thing though, is that her last book, The Painted Queen, set in 1912, was supposed to be already finished when Peters died in August 2013 but HarperCollins has kept procrastinating on publishing it. It was pushed back, pushed back, now they're saying July 2016. I'm curious as to why. Maybe it wasn't as complete as they said, or maybe it's really awful and they're desperately editing it... Who knows.
Anyway, I've decided I'll read the books in order. I have read most of them, but in a jumble, not sequentially. And I read them so very long ago that I've forgotten a lot. Of course, due to the aforementioned variations in quality, i may find myself skimming some of the books.
Edited to add: for some reason Amazon Canada has hardly any of Peters' books available in paperback. Dispute with HarperCollins, possibly? Chapters Indigo (Canada's other online bookstore) has all of them, so they're definitely not out of print or anything. I realize many people reading this post read on an electronic device, but if you wanted to give a paperback copy to someone as a Christmas present or something (I know sometimes people in our families enjoy a good cozy mystery too), rest assured, not out of print.
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