2011 Books – The Mummy Case

As if I don’t have enough serial novels to catch up on, a friend introduced me to the Amelia Peabody series. Great, now I have yet another series to get through. The Mummy Case by Elizabeth Peters is the third book in the series (but from my understanding, you don’t have to read the books in order).

The book is written as Amelia’s diary, and though I was put off by her haughty attitude at first, I had to keep reading because I had been informed that Peters was brilliant, so I plugged away.

Since it is her diary, we, of course, are introduced to Amelia (Peabody) Emerson first. Then she introduces us to her husband, Radcliff Emerson. Emerson is almost the exact opposite of Peabody. Where she is calm, reserved, and in control, Emerson is always quick to anger, or get frustrated, or overly emotional. Peabody puts on the air of perfection in everything she says and does. Emerson just goes with the flow.

I was interested in reading the book, not just because it came highly recommended (read: it was thrust into my hands and I was told I had to read it), but also because I like mysteries and I love archeology. Well, both Peabody and Emerson are archeologists headed to Egypt to do some digging and find themselves immersed in a mystery.

Another thing that makes the book intriguing is that Elizabeth Peters (whose real name is Barbara Mertz) has a Ph.D. in Egyptology, so she brings detail to the story that might not have otherwise been included by a typical mystery writer. And those details just added to the depth of the story.

But back to the book…

We’re also introduced to the third member of the family, young Walter, who is referred to after his introduction as Ramses. Amelia describes her son as “catastrophically precocious” and though his age isn’t mentioned, I’m guessing he’s around eight years old. Ramses and his cat, Bastet, have a knack of getting into trouble. And they’re about to go on their first archeological dig, which worries Peabody but delights her husband.

From there the story continues as a typical mystery: there’s a mysterious death, several suspects, Peabody and Emerson are followed, kidnapped, and so on. Oh, and Ramses and Bastet (who he always refers to as “de cat Bastet” as in “Good night, Mama. Good night, Papa. Come along, de cat Bastet”) are doing their own digging and trouble making.

While Amelia is rather verbose in her use of the English language, Emerson is much more direct. And young Ramses, much to the chagrin of his mother, is just as verbose as she is, though she often reprimands him for taking too long to explain things. Hinted at above, Ramses has a speech “defect” which is really just his way of annoying his mother. Apparently, in the earlier books, he had a lisp. Though that has been corrected, he now can’t pronounce the “th” sound… so “the” is “de” as in “de cat Bastet” and words like “another” come out “anodder.” But despite his intentional mispronunciations, his vocabulary is quite extensive (hence his precociousness) … and often humorous.

One of my favorite scenes in the book happens about halfway through. Young Ramses is taken aboard a wealthy woman’s boat and when his parents arrive for dinner, they find out that Ramses had to be locked into a room (he tried to free her pet lion cub) with a guard. When the parents go to get their son to return home, he’s not in the room. Emerson immediately surmises:

“I’ll wager she neglected to nail the porthole shut…” and the parents find their son hanging just outside the porthole… ”

He had stuck, in actuality, somewhere around the midsection, owing to the fact that the pockets of his little suit were filled with rocks. “It was a singular miscalculation on my part,” Ramses remarked somewhat breathlessly, as Emerson set him on his feet. “I counted on de fact, which I have often had occasion to establish t’rough experiment, dat where de head and shoulders can pass, de rest of de body can follow. I had forgotten about de rocks, which are interesting specimens of de geological history of —”

“Why did you not pull yourself back into the room?” I inquired curiously, as Emerson, still pale with alarm, ran agitated hands over the child’s frame.

“De problem lies in my unfortunate lack of inches,” Ramses explained. “My arms were not long enough to obtain sufficient purchase on de side of de vessel.”

All of the scenes in the book are so well described that you can picture everything… and the characters are just as well formed. Ramses and de cat Bastet will have you chuckling while you’re trying to figure out who the bad guy might be. And, for the record, I noticed that even Amelia seldom calls Bastet simply “Bastet”… even she refers to her as “the cat Bastet.”

Great book, fun read, even educational… and will extend your vocabulary. I loved it.