ELIZABETH PETERS – Crocodile on the Sandbank. Dodd, Mead & Co., hardcover, 1975. Paperback reprint: Fawcett Crest, 1976. Many other reprint editions, both hardcover and soft.

   Crocodile on the Sandbank is a wonderfully amusing romp in Egypt in the 1880s with all the trimmings — dahabeeyahs (houseboats), royal tombs, and mummies, both dead and walking. Into the world of archaeology blunders a self-proclaimed “middle-aged spinster” (age thirty-two) who has used her newly inherited fortune to leave England and her avaricious relatives.

   Sensing herself to be plain, Miss Amelia Peabody has decided against marriage, saying, “Why should any independent, intelligent female choose to subject herself to the whims and tyrannies of a husband? I assure you, I have yet to meet any man as sensible as myself.” But then she meets Radcliff Emerson, a voluble and single-minded sociologist. A Tracy-Hepburn relationship immediately develops.

   Where she meets Radcliff is at an archaeological dig he and his brother share on the Nile. Amelia and her companion, a young woman she befriended in Rome, have stopped there for a brief visit, but the short stay they envisioned is lengthened by a series of threatening events, endangering the artifacts and finally the lives of the four protagonists.

   The story is told from Amelia’s viewpoint. She is exceptionally well educated, full of endurance, and never, never forgoes her principles. Peters’s skill is in keeping the friction inherent in this situation amusing, yet making the characters just realistic enough to be credible and immensely likable. And though the reader realizes the outcome of the plot before Amelia does, it doesn’t matter, it is the interchange between the characters that is the delight of the book.

   In further adventures, presented in the form of Amelia’s memoirs — The Curse of the Pharaohs (1981) and The Mummy Case (1985) — she marries Emerson and returns to the Nile with an expanded cast of characters, including her precocious son, Ramses, and an Egyptian cat, Bastet.

   Peters (whose real name is Barbara Mertz, and who also writes as Barbara Michaels) has written such other entertaining novels as The Jackal’s Head (1968), Borrower of the Night (1973), The Copenhagen Connection (1982), and Die for Love (1984).

         ———
   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.