Barbara Michaels

Barbara Michaels was a pen name of Barbara Mertz (1927-2013), an American Egyptologist and novelist who wrote 29 suspense novels as Barbara Michaels and more than 35 mysteries as Elizabeth Peters.

Barbara Louise Gross was born in Canton, Illinois, on 29 September 1927. She studied at the University of Chicago and its Oriental Institute, earning a PhD in Egyptology in 1952. Under her married name she wrote two popular histories of ancient Egypt in the 1960s, Temples, Tombs, and Hieroglyphs and Red Land, Black Land, both still in print. She died at her home in Frederick, Maryland, on 8 August 2013.

Her first novel, The Master of Blacktower (1966), was published as Barbara Michaels. Ammie, Come Home (1968) was adapted as the television film The House That Would Not Die. As Elizabeth Peters she created the Victorian archaeologist Amelia Peabody in Crocodile on the Sandbank (1975), a series that reached twenty books, as well as the Vicky Bliss and Jacqueline Kirby mysteries. She won Agatha Awards in 1989 and 2003, was made a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America in 1998 and received a Malice Domestic lifetime achievement award.

For collectors. Collectors of her work often gather all three names together: the early Egyptology books as Barbara Mertz, the gothic novels beginning with The Master of Blacktower, and the Peabody series beginning with Crocodile on the Sandbank.