American crime writer and Egyptologist who created the feisty parasol-wielding Victorian heroine Amelia Peabody
The American author Barbara Mertz, who has died aged 85, once described archaeology as "probably the most unproductive profession you could ever get into", yet under her pen names she made a highly successful career from writing about it for almost 50 years.
In Britain she was probably best known as Elizabeth Peters, author of 38 crime novels firmly in the traditional "cosy" school, 19 of which featured her feisty parasol-wielding Victorian heroine Amelia Peabody, whose adventures among the pyramids and mummies of Egypt in the early years of the 20th century were a feminist mirror image of those of Indiana Jones. That Mertz knew her stuff when it came to Peabody's escapades is unsurprising since her first published works, under her married name, were textbooks: Egyptology: Temples, Tombs and Hieroglyphs (1964) and Red Land, Black Land (1966), both of which remain in print.
Between the academic Mertz works and the Peters novels, however, she adopted her first pen-name, Barbara Michaels, under which she wrote suspense, gothic, supernatural and romantic mysteries (29 in all), determined to earn a living to support her children after she and her husband divorced in 1969. Among her legion of fans and an extensive social network of fellow writers in the US, the names Mertz, Michaels and Peters became interchangeable.
She was born Barbara Louise Gross in Astoria, Illinois, during the great depression, the daughter of a printer and a school-teacher, and maintained that she "fell in love with Egyptology at the age of 13" on a school trip to a museum. She was enrolled in the University of Chicago on a scholarship in 1947 and was awarded her BA, then MA and her doctorate in Egyptology in 1952. She married Richard Mertz in 1950.
Unable to find a job in academia, she took secretarial work, which was easier to obtain if she hid the fact that she had a PhD. It was only when she and her husband moved to live in Germany for two years that she discovered the life of a writer, first as an Egyptologist and then as a novelist under the name Barbara Michaels, with the publication in 1966 of the gothic romance The Master of Blacktower.
Her divorce spurred her on to produce 16 novels over the next 10 years, though she was always wary of condescending reviewers who used the word "prolific". The majority were under her Michaels persona, but she was beginning to write as Elizabeth Peters, a pseudonym taken from the names of her daughter and son, and in 1975 she launched Amelia Peabody (along with Amelia's husband, Radcliffe Emerson, and, later, their son Ramses) on her fictional career in Crocodile on the Sandbank. A further 18 Peabody novels followed, up to 2010, often featuring loving – and very funny – pastiches of Christie, Conan Doyle and Rider Haggard.
While Mertz will probably be best remembered for the Peabody series, she will be much missed as a leading light of the Sisters in Crime organisation and as one of the founders of the annual Malice Domestic fan conventions dedicated to more traditional crime-writing in the style of Sayers, Tey and Allingham. Her novels and short stories won many awards in the US and she was made a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America in 1998.
She often said that writing the Amelia Peabody books allowed her to be an archaeologist from the comfort of her armchair. Surrounded by cats – and cats always featured in her Peabody books – she lived in a farmhouse in Maryland, which was much admired for its extensive gardens. She had a reputation for loyalty and generosity to her fellow writers and was known for her in her enthusiasm for cigarette smoking and drinking neat gin.
She is survived by her children and six grandchildren.
• Barbara Louise Mertz, novelist and Egyptologist, born 29 September 1927; died 8 August 2013
