CROCODILE ON THE SANDBANK - Book review

The first Amelia Peabody novel, Crocodile on the Sandbank, was published in 1975.  I read her third and sixth adventures (The Mummy Case and The Last Camel Died at Noon, respectively) in 2001, and enjoyed them immensely. Thereafter I collected four more adventures over the years but have only now got round to reading them. There are twenty books in the series.

Narrated in the first person by Amelia, it is a light-hearted period piece beginning in 1880: her father has died, leaving her a wealthy woman – she was ‘visited by streams of attentive nieces and nephews assuring me of their devotion – which had been demonstrated, over the past years, by their absence... A middle-aged spinster – for I was at that time thirty-two years of age, and I scorned to disguise the fact – who has never received a proposal of marriage must be a simpleton if she fails to recognise the sudden acquisition of a fortune as a factor in her new popularity. I was not a simpleton. I had always known myself to be plain’ (p4).

Elizabeth Peters gets the tone just right – an emancipated and forthright woman in a man’s world.

She was keen to travel, her ultimate destination being Egypt. While en route, in Rome her chaperone, Miss Pritchett fell ill and returned to England. By chance, Amelia helps a destitute young woman in the street; Evelyn Barton-Forbes has been ruined and abandoned by her callous lover Alberto: ‘She was English, surely; that flawless white skin and pale-golden hair could belong to no other nation... The features might have been those of an antique Venus or young Diana’ (p10). Evelyn becomes Amelia’s companion and they travel to Egypt. Evelyn ‘was too kind, and too truthful. Both, I have found, are inconvenient character traits’ (p77).

Amelia needed to obtain certain supplies to sail on the Nile. ‘If I had not been a woman, I might have studied medicine; I have a natural aptitude for the subject, possessing steady hands and far less squeamishness about blood and wounds than many males of my acquaintance. I planned to buy a few small surgical knives also; I fancied I could amputate a limb – or at least a toe or finger – rather neatly if called upon to do so’ (p44).

Before long the pair encounter two archaeologists – the Emerson brothers: gruff, bearded irascible giant Radcliffe and the amiable Walter. Radcliffe Emerson reminded me of Conan Doyle’s Professor Challenger.

It is obvious that Amelia and Radcliffe spark off each other, two strong wills competing: ‘Peabody had better retire to her bed; she is clearly in need of recuperative sleep; she has not made a sarcastic remark for fully ten minutes’ (p242).

Her nursing skills are needed more than once. ‘I tore up my petticoat in order to fasten his arm to his body so that it would not be jarred unnecessarily. He had his wicked temper back by then, and made a rude remark. “As you would say, my lord, it is just like one of Mr Haggard’s romances. The heroine always sacrifices a petticoat at some point in the proceedings. No doubt that is why females wear such ridiculous garments; they do come in useful in emergencies’ (p168).

The Emerson dig is sabotaged, there are strange, possibly supernatural, things going on, and Evelyn seems at great risk... An enjoyable historical romance and mystery.

Elizabeth Peters is the pen-name of Barbara Mertz and also wrote as Barbara Michaels; she received her PhD in Egyptology in 1952. She died in 2013, aged 85.