Tearful goodbye to beloved series – but look, here’s more!

Review of: The Painted Queen

Authors: Elizabeth Peters & Joan Hess
Publisher: Harper Collins
Source: Purchase, Barnes & Noble
Grade: C

With an iconic (and contentious) ancient artifact to track down and a string of bizarre murders to solve, Victorian-era archaeologist Amelia Peabody Emerson goes out in a blaze of glory in The Painted Queen, author Elizabeth Peters' final book of her beloved Egyptological series. The story’s exploration of the famed portrait bust of Queen Nefertiti was the manuscript Peters (aka Barbara Mertz) was working on at the time of her death in 2013. Later fleshed out by Mertz's friend and fellow mystery writer Joan Peters, it carries the saga of the Peabody-Emerson family into the 20th century. 

Hess's ability to channel her late friend's spirit in dishing up a final dashing spoof of late Victorian adventure novels is evident as Amelia and her irascible husband Radcliffe Emerson (known affectionately as Peabody and Emerson) fend off assassins, tomb robbers and master criminals with the aid of Peabody’s every-handy parasol while also tackling a mystery surrounding Nefertiti's portrait.  

The story begins with the intrusion of a sinister-looking man who utters the word "Murder" before collapsing with a knife in his back as Peabody is enjoying a well-deserved bath. But was murder what the deceased really said or only an artifact of her vivid imagination? 

"I assure you, Emerson, my hearing is unimpaired," Peabody responds when questioned about her recollection. 

"No doubt,” her husband replies, “but the ability of a dying man to articulate clearly is impaired." 

Alas, this reader must admit that the ability of a dying author to write clearly may also be impaired. And although Amelia's longtime fans will delight in her last adventure, the numerous health issues that plagued both Peters and Hess (who died shortly after the manuscript's publication) mar the telling of this final story.  

I'd like to have seen another pass (or two) by editorial eyes, while acknowledging that more effort probably would have been beyond the strength of Hess, already struggling with serious illness. And despite the charming and informative foreword by another Peters' fan, Egyptology professor Salima Ikram, I wonder whether newcomers to Amelia's saga will understand the enigmatic insertions of "Manuscript H" within the text of The Painted Queen. (In the world of the series, Manuscript H were editorial insertions from the diary of Peabody's and Emerson's son, Ramses.)

Although I was tempted, as were many other reviewers on Amazon and Goodreads, to give this final volume of the Peabody-Emerson saga a lower than three-star review, the words of a “how to review books” page came to mind: review the book in front of you, not the book you hoped to read. I hoped to read a full-fledged, fuller-blooded Elizabeth Peters’ mystery, but the book in front of me, although far below Peters’ best, was still a workmanly novel full of the deliciously-gossipy archaeological tidbits for which Peters is famed. Still, readers new to the saga who may wonder what all the fuss was about would do better to explore the more than a dozen earlier books of the Peabody-Emerson saga, beginning with its initial volume, The Crocodile on the Sandbank. 

***

I had no sooner hit “publish” on last week’s post about classes to reenergize writerly souls than more delightful items hit my inbox.

First – NaNoWriMo has again renewed its partnership with Wesleyan University for a second year of online NaNo prep classes  beginning September 1. I raved about the quality (and low cost) of this class last year, and am thrilled to see it return. Wesleyan has a wonderful creative writing heritage. The cost of $29 per each of the five approximately two-week long classes represents a 50 percent discount available only to NaNoWriMos. 

You say you’ve never participated in NaNoWriMo? Announce your intention to join this November and give yourself the benefit of the half-off cost. (Or check with NaNoWriMo) if cost is still an issue for you, but don’t miss out.) 

Next – Carve Magazine has added online writing classes, beginning August 30. I haven’t tried them, but as a Dallas resident, I’m proud of the reputation this Dallas-based literary magazine has acquired. Click on “classroom” at the site for details.

Finally – Lonestar INK rides again! This Dallas writing conference returns February 28-March 2, 2019, promising workshops, writing contests, agents, editors, pitches, the whole shebang! Because the enthusiastic crowd this past February overflowed the facilities available at the Dallas Public Library, organizers are working to find a more comfortable venue. The price probably will be a little higher than 2018’s, but still hundreds less than comparable conferences. Look for Lonestar INK’s website to go live the last week of August.

Cozy up to summer's mystery beach reads

As temperatures in Texas climb steadily above the 100-degree mark, I find myself reluctant to undertake anything strenuous – even in reading. Usually, I welcome books that challenge my mind, that require my undivided attention. But that was before temperatures reached stratospheric records. Now all I want are reads that can be conducted in front of a fan, that could be laid down languidly between sips of something cool.

Goodbye long reads, strenuous reads, anything that requires more than a modicum of mental effort. Give me books that don’t scare me (much) and don’t make me cry (more than a little). Books that give me a smile and a happy ending. Books that can be their own staycation.

In case anybody else is in the same place, I have some suggestions. 

Usually, I’m a thriller kind of person. Global-level stakes, strenuous action, and of course, explosions. But when summer strikes, I turn to cozies. You know, the gentle mysteries, usually featuring amateur sleuths, low body counts, and minimal gore. 

I’m not averse to re-reading old favorites, but my most recent read was a newbie, Hope Never Dies, by Andrew Shaffer. You know the latest from the satirist who brought us (under his pen name, Fanny Merkin) Fifty Shames of Earl Grey will be hilarious. Shaffer doesn’t disappoint with Hope Never Dies, a road trip/mystery featuring a Holmes/Watsonish pairing of former POTUS Barak Obama and ex-veep Joe Biden that even those of multiple political persuasions can enjoy.

image: pixabay

How much trouble can two guys who were once world leaders get into as they try their hands at solving a murder without their accustomed accoutrements of power? The answer is – plenty. For a low-tech person like me, Hope Never Dies offers another bonus -- the paperback version was easy to tuck into the bag of swim stuff I toted to the pool and dipped into while keeping an eye on my grandkids.

I’m now dipping into a relative newbie from an old favorite author: The Painted Queen, co-written by late, lamented mystery divas Elizabeth Peters and Joan Hess. It's the final chapter on Peters’ fictitious old-style Egyptologists Amelia Peabody and her irascible husband Radcliffe Emerson.

Mystery lovers as well as Egyptologists mourned the death in 2013 of Peters (aka Barbara Mertz). Happily, Peters left behind notes on the final chapter of her heroes, completed by her friend and fellow mystery writer Joan Hess shortly before Hess’s own death in late 2017. (Talk about the curse of the pharaohs!) 

Now out in paperback, The Painted Queen showcases Hess’s ability to channel her late friend’s spirit in dishing up a final dashing spoof of late Victorian adventure novels as Peabody and Emerson (the couple’s pet names for each other) fend off assassins, tomb robbers and master criminals with the aid of Peabody’s every-handy parasol while also tackling a real-life mystery surrounding an iconic portrait of enigmatic ancient queen Nefertiti.

I’ve been able to sleep soundly through the nights during the reading of these cozies. But, you say, you like your readings a little chillier. For something that can make me shiver even while the mercury climbs, I love the gothic mysteries of Carol Goodman. Goodman also writes YA, but for adult readers I recommend any of her stand-alone mysteries, from the original Lake of Dead Languages, to this year’s release, The Other Mother. 

But for readers who, like me, favor exotic locales and a dash of history with their mystery, try The Night Villa (centered around the excavation of a house buried in the 79 AD eruption of Vesuvius and The Sonnet Lover with its bonus of original Renaissance-style sonnets.

All include Goodman’s blend of women academics, murder, and eerie, even downright spooky effects. Mix, chill and enjoy on a long, hot summer day!

Adventure classics – From ghosts to ancient tombs

“The Phantom Coach”

by Amelia Edwards

***

Ghosts were for writers in the Victorian era what vampires are in the 21^st century – a source of bread and butter. The often cheesy Christmas annuals published late in the year were the Victorian equivalent of chia pets – holiday gifts for the totally clueless giver. Except instead of chia seeds, the annuals demanded stories, lots and lots of stories, to fill them. Strange though it may seem, those stories often included ghosts, the unhallowed dead earning their keep by providing holiday cheer.

Male writers were willing to supply the Christmas annual market, but it was also, aside from birthing babies, one of few creative outlets available to the increasingly educated, middle-class women writers of the era. And one of the best of those now almost forgotten women was Amelia Edwards.

Many of her counterparts of both sexes wrote not only as a creative outlet but out of desperate need to support their families. Edwards, however, was unmarried, childless and, after the death of her parents, without family ties. With only herself to provide for, her recognized talent (Dickens invited her to contribute to his Christmas annual) and energy enabled her to accumulate enough wealth to indulge a love for exotic travel. To that end, on November 29, 1873, at age 32, she and traveling companion Lucy Renshaw arrived in Cairo, “literally and most prosaically,” she wrote, “in search of fine weather.”

Fine weather, however, had been in short supply for the narrator of one of her most famous stories, 1864’s “The Phantom Coach.”

“Within a day or two of the end of the grouse season,” "Coach's" young barrister-at-law James Murray relates, “I had been out all day with my gun and had had no sport to speak of. The month (was) December, the place, a bleak wide moor in the far north of England. And I had lost my way.”

A snowstorm begins and night falls. Murray begins to fear he will walk aimlessly until he drops from exhaustion to freeze to death when the figure of an old man with a lantern appears out of the storm. Although the old man gruffly informs him that he will not be welcome, Murray insists on following him to his house. After a supper seasoned with tales of ghosts, the misanthropic host directs Murray to the nearest road where he can catch a mail coach to the nearest town.

Only, he is warned, he should watch for a signpost where one night nine years earlier, the coach tumbled off the road and into a ravine, killing all six men aboard.

As the night grows colder, a vehicle approaches. Murray steps inside, to an atmosphere, which was “colder than that of the outside air, and was pervaded by a singularly damp and disagreeable smell. . . ” .His ride with the death coach's doomed passengers has begun.

Widely anthologized, “The Phantom Coach” is also available at http://gutenberg.net/au/ebooks06/0605591.txt and on YouTube.

Edwards, meanwhile, found Egypt an equally fascinating source of creativity, as Amanda Adams details in her Ladies of the Field: Early Women Archaeologists and Their Search for Adventure. Edwards’ infatuation with Egypt would lead to the writing of her greatest writing, A Thousand Miles up the Nile, work as a co-founder of the Egypt Exploration Society and mentorship of rising young Egyptologist Flinders Petrie.

Fans of the Egyptian mystery tales of the late archaeologist Barbara Mertz (writing as Elizabeth Peters) will enjoy the many similarities between Mertz’s heroine Amelia Peabody and Edwards, from their first names to the name of their Egyptian houseboats, to their age on arriving in Egypt. But while Amelia Peabody found true love with a (fictional) archeologist, Amelia Edwards’ great love remained Egypt itself, her mission: bringing its ghosts back to life.

(Next Friday, Adventure classics continues an October of horror with “The Open Window,” by H.H. Munro, writing as “Saki.”)

Adventure classics -- Peabody & ruins: love at first sight

Crocodile on the Sandbank

by Barbara Mertz (writing as Elizabeth Peters)

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“At least we don’t have to worry about finding a job for her,” the late Barbara Mertz reported overhearing one of her professors say to another. “She’ll get married.”

The time was just after the second World War. Rosie the Riveter and her sisters were being shooed out of the labor market to make room for soldiers returning to civilian life. It was not the best of times for a young woman to earn a degree in Egyptology. And although Mertz (who did get married), declared that bringing up her children was “the most challenging, tiring, rewarding, demanding job in the world” she still wanted to be an archeologist. With a tenacity worthy of her Victorian heroine, the indomitable Amelia Peabody, Mertz turned her archeological training first into nonfiction, then into a bestselling mystery series that made its debut in 1975 with the opening book, Crocodile on the Sandbank.

Following the death of her scholarly father, self-proclaimed “middle-aged spinster” Amelia Peabody had only planned to use her inheritance to finance a conventional circa 1884 grand tour of Egypt. But that was before she met the pyramids. Or perhaps that should be, before the pyramids met her. Woman and pyramids, both have met their match.

(The illustration for this post is taken from a 1886 painting by Amelia Peabody’s contemporary, J.A. Benwell. It shows the Sphinx of Giza as Amelia describes it, with its body buried in sand.)

As has Byronically handsome, quick-tempered, and foul-mouthed archeologist Radcliffe Emerson, whose language Peabody (to give her the name Emerson will use routinely) declares beyond the ability of a lady either to understand nor reproduce.

And although Peabody asks her readers why “any independent, intelligent female (would) choose to subject herself to the whims and tyrannies of a husband,” those same readers will recognize what Peabody and Emerson spend the book learning--that the two are made for each other.

Along the way Peabody will rout the villainous Lord Ellesmere, intent on stealing the inheritance, not to mention the hand, of Peabody’s lovely companion, Evelyn Barton-Forbes. Peabody effectively adopted Evelyn after the younger woman had been abandoned by an unprincipled lover. And in the course of the book, Peabody will foster a love match between Radcliffe Emerson’s equally handsome but more docile brother, Walter, as well as saving priceless Egyptian artifacts, one of which is preserved with a startlingly unconventional formula of tapioca and water, which Mertz assures us was actually used in the same way by pioneer Egyptologist Matthew Flinders Petrie.

To risk a spoiler for my own more bloody-minded readers, the crocodile of the title is, as Peabody herself states, “a symbol of the dangers and difficulties any true lover would risk to win his sweetheart,” derived from Walter Emerson’s supposed translation of a poem from an ancient papyrus. (The 2003 Amelia Peabody’s Egypt: A Compendium, lists the poem’s sources as W. K Simpson’s The Literature of Ancient Egypt and M. Lichtheim’s Ancient Egyptian Literature: The New Kingdom.)

Mertz (or should I call her Peters?--like her own characters, she answered to a multitude of names) dishes up equal helpings of mystery, romance, humor and history in the Amelia Peabody stories, which track the career of that intrepid lady from 1885 to the 1920’s. Before Mertz died August 8, 2013, at the age of 85, she would write 19 Peabody mysteries, included in her more than 70 volumes of novels, short stories, and nonfiction under the pen names Elizabeth Peters and Barbara Michaels, as well as Barbara Mertz.

For more about Mertz, her life and writings, see her official website,
www.mpmbooks.com/.

(Next Wednesday, Adventure classics continues an April of mysterious adventures with In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote.)