The Jackal's Head (1968)



Listening: Young Girl

Althea "Tommy" Tomlinson is a woman with a plan. When she was a child, her father's career as an Egyptologist was ruined by a charge of forgery she is sure was false--an event that she is also sure was ultimately responsible for his untimely death in a car accident. And now that she's an adult, she's back in Luxor, at the archaeological site that was her childhood home with a plan, to clear his name. But it quickly becomes apparent that if the artifact in her father's possession was not a forgery then it must be from an unknown tomb...and not just any unknown tomb, but that of the legendary queen Nefertiti. And someone will do anything to find it first.

Spoilers Below



The Jackal's Head was MPM's first foray into non-Gothic territory. Gone are the saturnine lords of the manor, the hoop skirts of the mid-nineteenth century, and those tinges of supernatural horror from her first two books. With her new pen name she tries out a new style--a modern-day woman untangling an archaeological mystery set in MPM's own field of Egyptology, alongside a budding display of the humor that will blossom into something really special in her later books. You can almost feel her sigh of relief as she tries her hand at something that feels a little more like home.

Tommy is MPM's first stab at the modern heroine--some of her character traits and those of her love interest will make it into later books and their leads, in more endearing ways. But in '68, MPM is either still playing to what editors thought readers wanted from a romance (which she'll lampoon in later books), or she just hadn't shaken loose of old inhibitions yet. Most noticeably, Tommy's love interest, the creepily older John McIntire, once throttles her badly enough to leave bruises and then confesses to having been in love with since she was fifteen--hence my choice of listening. And even though McIntire belatedly worries about being some kind of father-figure to Tommy, which she vehemently denies, that's the way it comes across. Maybe it wasn't so bad in the late sixties, but now it reads like pedophilia.

Tommy, though only 25, is sometimes overly critical of the younger generation's style and taste.A lot of these early MPM heroines will have that disdain for the younger generation Tommy displays, even while they're members of it themselves. It's a little jarring. She's also unpleasantly hostile to the other women in the book, with plenty of internalized misogyny on display.

Still, it's easy to see the author's knack for conjuring up a good mystery with a surprise twist and plenty of action, in which the heroine gets to play a delightfully proactive part. And MPM's passion for the history of Egypt shines through, even while she gently laughs at the absurd lengths to which historians carry their love sometimes.

It's a start down the road to the books of the Barbara Michaels/Elizabeth Peters I love. But it's just that--a start. Luckily, MPM learned fast, and a lot of the missteps that appear here will vanish, never to be seen again.

Favorite Line: "Hate is a destructive emotion, but it does not destroy the object of hatred. It destroys the one who hates."

Rating: **

Notes:
*This is the first MPM novel set in Egypt--something that will make fans of her later books feel sentimental, I'm sure. It's not hard to be when Luxor and its archaeological foundation feel like such a precursor to the Emerson home.

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