Dr. Barbara Mertz, trailblazer.

Barbara Mertz, right, with Charlotte MacLeod, 1989
Photo by Elizabeth Foxwell

It is impossible to grasp that the ebullient Barbara Mertz, aka MWA Grand Master Elizabeth Peters and Barbara Michaels, has left us at age 85. I first met her when I interviewed her for a University of Maryland journalism class. After 2 hours I emerged, somewhat dazedly (a typical state of affairs in Mertzdom), with a 17-page, single-spaced transcript and a friendship that would endure for nearly 30 years. To her I owe a great deal, not least my career in mystery and—like many other writers—warm memories of her encouragement, support, and singular presence.

Barbara's storming of considerable bastions in her life and career has benefited women from many walks of life as well as mystery readers and writers. When she was a graduate student in Egyptology at the University of Chicago, she was asked, more than once, why she was taking the place of a man, and why was she there anyway, because she was "just going to get married." She was divorced at a time when single parents were regarded as strange creatures, and she worked hard to support two children by publishing a minimum of two books per year and reviewing books. Well into her seventies, Barbara was descending into Egyptian tombs and maintaining a schedule that would make someone a quarter of her age relapse onto a Victorian fainting couch. Always embroiled in some offbeat enterprise, she once took me with her to purchase a cowboy hat, because she was embarking on a tour with Sharyn McCrumb and Joan Hess that would feature their country-music song stylings.

Given today's popularity of intrepid Victorian archaeologist Amelia Peabody Emerson and her inimitable spouse and son, as well as Barbara's Agatha Award for the Jacqueline Kirby novel Naked Once More, it is easy to forget that she had to fight to write humorous mysteries. Unease existed in the publishing world about reader receptivity to humor, and she had to adopt the Peters pseudonym for these books while maintaining the Michaels pen name for her twists on the Gothic novel. She created a stir with Borrower of the Night when art-historian heroine Vicky Bliss ditched two handsome men for a more attractive new job.

Friday's Forgotten Books: Charlotte Armstrong's The Chocolate Cobweb (1948).

 . . . [W]ho is to guarantee that evil itself wouldn't answer?
—Charlotte Armstrong,
The Chocolate Cobweb 53

 At the urging of author Dorothy Cannell, I read Charlotte Armstrong's The Chocolate Cobweb (1948) and thought its edge-of-the-seat suspense and masterful writing fitting for Patti Abbott's Forgotten Books series. The Chocolate Cobweb was filmed as Merci pour le chocolat (dir. Claude Chabrol, 2000) and features Isabelle Huppert.

Art student Amanda Garth is diverted when she learns that she may have been switched at birth with the son of noted artist Tobias Garrison. Via this episode, she wangles an introduction to Garrison and his immediate circle: his fluffy wife, Ione; his remote son, Thone; and his old actress friend, Fanny Austin. But all is not well. Was the death of Thone's mother, Belle, really an accident? Is the motherly Ione implicated in cold-blooded murder? And are dark events happening all over again?

Charlotte Armstrong Lewi (1905–69) received the Edgar for Best Novel for A Dram of Poison (1956), a favorite book of critic Anthony Boucher. Her novel The Unsuspected (1946) is on the Haycraft-Queen Cornerstone list of essential mystery works and was filmed with Claude Rains. Author Jan Burke, in a Clues column, fittingly dubbed Armstrong's work "suburban noir."