Barbara Mertz, aka Elizabeth Peters
I was saddened to read in the Times Books section over the weekend that the Egyptologist and writer Barbara Mertz had died. Mertz, at age 85, had had a long and prolific career as a writer. In all, she wrote nearly 70 books only two of which, Red Land, Black Land: Daily Life in Ancient Egypt and Temples, Tombs and Hieroglyphs: A Popular History of Ancient Egypt, were published under her own name. Her career as a fiction writer began in 1966 when she used the pen name (at her agent's request) of Barbara Michaels to write The Master of Blacktower , but it was as Elizabeth Peters, a nom de plume derived from combining her two children's names, that she had her greatest success. It was as Elizabeth Peters that I got to know and love her writing. Peters wrote mysteries featuring bold and adventurous heroines, but her stories were always based on scholarly topics, usually from the world of archaeology. She was a trained Egyptologist and her most successful series was based mostly ...