Duh buh wha- wha- wha---

[flemmings]

Via someone else's lj-

Elizabeth Peters is Barbara Michaels is actually Barbara Mertz, who has also written two excellent books on ancient Egypt, Red Land, Black Land and Temples, Tombs and Hieroglyphs.

Is *that* what happened to Barbara Mertz? But she must be ancient. Those books came out forty years ago....

....and given what she thought of Ramses II, which took five vitriolic pages to express, why on earth is Amelia's son called Ramses? which always struck me as batshit anyway.

Comments

[mikeneko.livejournal.com]

I hadn't realized you were a Peters/Michaels reader.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

o_O

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

I'm not. I was a Mertz reader during my besotted adolescence. I know Peters exists but could never swallow what the kids were called and so figured Peters was one of those Who Do Not Do Their Research. And maybe she isn't- she knows Egyptians but does she know Victorians?

I still don't know Michaels at all.

[mikeneko.livejournal.com]

I will explain the differences then. Barbara Michaels books are what were called "gothics" in the '60s-'70s, that is, they've a heroine tumbling into mysterious doings of vaguely supernatural nature (plus love interest, naturally).

The Peters books are the bantery detective genre, comprising three primary series and a handful of one-shots; same deal with the ingenue + love interest - occultish doings. (Though a few of her Peters one-shots are misclassified Michaels-type books.) The three primary Peters series are 1) Jacqueline Kirby, a librarian/romance writer with no regular love interest; 2) Vicky Bliss, an art historian, whose primary love interest is an art thief; and 3) Amelia Peabody, Victorian amateur archaeologist, married to professional archaeologist Radcliff Emerson, and in later books they have sprogs and pets and expeditions and suchlike.

In general, Peters readers align loosely as those who prefer the Kirby/Bliss/one-shots and those who prefer the Amelia Peabody books, with vagueish overlappings. Hence, I prefer the former group but have read (most of) the latter; and my sister fangirls the latter but also has read the former.

Re: sprogs. As I recall, Ramses (son, real name Walter) got his nickname from his childhood resemblance to the statues in question. Nephret (ward) was the child of lost explorers and was raised in an H. Rider Haggard-type civilization.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

Well then, I might read the Peabody ones in all my copious free time. But my reaction to Elizabeth Peters, even now, is likely to be 'Oh a new Ellis Peters!! oh it's Elizabeth.'

But even Ellis Peters is too much of a slop-over romance writer for my tastes. Seems these days, that if you don't like romances it gets hard to read detective stories, which bugs me somehow.

[mikeneko.livejournal.com]

It was mainly FYI. I wouldn't think they're your thing, but you do tend to be oddly unpredictable and sister-resembling in the reading respect.

There's a huge _reading_ fandom for the Peabody books but very little fanfic. As a result, there are always a lot of yuletide requests (het and slash) for that series, but little has come of them. I've written the most Peters fanfic to date, but all of it for the Bliss series.