I spent the earliest years of my life in a small town in Illinois – and when I say “small”, I mean fewer than 2000 people. It was an idyllic sort of existence, I suppose, except for a few minor disadvantages like a nationwide Depression and the fact that my home town had no library. For a compulsive reader this was a tragedy more painful than the Depression. Luckily for me both my parents were readers. From my mother and a wonderful great-aunt I acquired most of the childhood classics and some classic mysteries. My father’s tastes were more eclectic. By the time I was ten I had read (though I won’t claim to have understood) Mark Twain, Shakespeare, Edgar Rice Burroughs, H. Rider Haggard, Sax Rohmer, Dracula and a variety of pulp magazines, to mention only a few. I don’t doubt that the sensational novels and magazines influenced not only my reading habits but my later plots. There was quite a lot in them about lost civilizations, ancient curses, and animated mummies.
Ancient Egypt has always been an inspiration to writers of sensational fiction. There is probably no other ancient culture so evocative and so seemingly mysterious. Bizarre animal-headed gods, monolithic temples, tombs filled with treasure . . . it’s great stuff, even if you know that the historic facts do not substantiate that view of Egyptian culture.
My love affair with the real Egypt began when that same wonderful great-aunt took me to the Oriental Institute Museum at the University of Chicago, in which city we lived at the time. Everyone should have a great-aunt like that; she considered it her duty to pound culture into the unwilling heads of her younger kin. After that experience I was no longer unwilling. It’s impossible to explain an obsession. That is what Egypt was for me, from then on. A goodly number of young people feel the fascination; it usually follows the dinosaur craze. Most of them grow out of it. I never did.
After graduating from high school I went to the University of Chicago – not because it had a world-famous department of Egyptology, but because it was close to home and I had received a scholarship. Practicality was the watchword. I was supposed to be preparing myself to teach – a nice, sensible career for a woman. I took two education courses before I stopped kidding myself and headed for the Oriental Institute. I studied hieroglyphs and other forms of the language, and got my doctorate when I was twenty-three.
Much good it did me. (Or so I believed for many years.) Positions in Egyptology were few and far between and, in the post-World War II backlash against working women, females weren’t encouraged to enter that or any other job market. I recall overhearing one of my professors say to another, “At least we don’t have to worry about finding a job for her. She’ll get married.” I did. And they didn’t.
During the next few years I did manage to get to Egypt several times, and each visit strengthened my initial fascination. I had given up the idea of a career in the field. Instead I had begun writing mystery stories, because I enjoyed them and I hoped to earn a little money. They were terrible. My first book to be published was not a thriller but Temples, Tombs and Hieroglyphs, A Popular History of Egyptology. It was followed by Red Land, Black Land, Daily Life in Ancient Egypt. Finally that degree had “paid off” – in a way I never expected. Perhaps I should have taken this as an omen, but I kept on writing mysteries and finally got one of them published. It was a “Gothic romance”, as they were erroneously called in those days, under the name of Barbara Michaels. The first book I wrote under the Peters pseudonym proved I hadn’t got Egypt out of my system. It was a contemporary thriller, The Jackal’s Head, without any of the appurtenances of supernatural fiction; but there was a lost tomb and a golden treasure and considerable skullduggery.
It has taken me over a quarter of a century to realize that I love to write, and that that career is the one I should have pursued from the beginning; but my obsession with Egypt has not faded and I doubt it ever will. I go “out”, as we say in the trade, at least every other year, and I use my training and my experience in what is probably my most popular mystery series, written under the Peters name: the saga of Victorian archaeologist Amelia Peabody, who has been terrorizing 19th-century England and Egypt through fourteen volumes (so far). The effects of my childhood reading linger; Amelia has encountered walking mummies and found lost tombs and lost civilizations. The books are fantasies in that sense, but they are soundly grounded in fact and they give me the best of two possible worlds. I collect Egyptological fiction, and attend every film featuring archaeologists, good and the bad. Some of the books are very bad indeed – not because of the wildness of the author’s invention but the ineptitude of plotting and style. The wilder the better, say I. One can never have too many mummies.