Barbara Mertz, meet Elizabeth Peters

I love being surprised by things I think I ought to have known but did not.  

In this instance, some background.  Growing up as an expatriate in Sweden, I had an intense interest in Egyptology.  My Swedish being vestigial, I was always on the lookout in the library or used bookstores for English language Egyptology books, as well as when I travelled to the US.  Under the circumstances, I put together a reasonably respectable personal library with Temples, Tombs, and Hieroglyphs by Barbara Mertz being a prize among the lot.  A history of both Ancient Egypt as well as a history of Egyptology.  I must have read it three or four times.  Perhaps half a dozen.

On a completely different matter.  I enjoy regional murder mystery series.  It is a pleasant admixture to my normal consumption of histories, sociology, economics, engineering,  science, etc.  One glaring gap of which I have long been aware is female English mystery writers.  P.D. James - great, read everything.  Dorothy Sayers?  Enjoy her non-mystery writings but have never really taken to Lord Peter Wimsey.  But others?  Agatha Christie, Ruth Rendell, Ellis Peters, so many others.  

I occasionally sample them but they have rarely clicked.  But I keep trying.  Whenever I see a very cheap edition at a library sale, I pick it up just as a sampler to see if it will take.

Sometime in the two or three years I purchased The Crocodile on the Sandbank by Elizabeth Peters.  My thought at the time was that Elizabeth Peters was one of the nom-de-plumes among one of the above writers who frequently wrote under multiple aliases.  

And so it has sat upon a shelf.  Until I gathered together a collection of books to be read while in convalescence from surgery.  

What a cracker.  Set in Egypt in the 1920s or so.  Yes, a little romance, but mostly strongly plotted mystery novel.  Read it in a day.  And a pleasant surprise.  It is coincidentally the first in a twenty book series of Amelia Peabody (protagonist) mysteries.  Excellent.  Hope the others are as good.

But who was Elizabeth Peters?  Whose nom de plume?

Well, she's not English for starters, she's American.  More importantly to me was that she is my old friend Barbara Mertz.  Mertz was an Egyptologist and did write two books on Egyptology and one on ancient Rome, but apparently she was far better known for her mysteries under the names of Elizabeth Peters and Barbara Michaels.  

I can't say why this discovery delights me, but it does.  I like the tangled world of fortuitous events, unexpected surprises, and serendipitous occasions.