The younger ones are going out and doing all kinds of different things.ĮP: Well, as I said, when Ramses became a young man I suddenly realized, here we are on the eve of World War I, and I'm going to have to do something with it, I can't ignore it. PW: In this new one, it seems as though you're concentrating on bringing the younger Emersons, Ramses and Nefret, in as almost equal characters to the elders-is that your plan?ĮP: I don't know that I set out to do it deliberately, but it's been working out that way.

But I cannot abandon my dear Amelia I'll go on as long as she can. And so I did want to wind up a lot of the stuff I'd left hanging-some of which I hadn't figured out until I actually had to do so. But I had seen the events in it coming since Seeing a Large Cat. Did you have people worrying that perhaps there wouldn't be another book?ĮP: I did get a number of letters saying, 'Oh my God, don't tell me this is the last, you've finished it off!' It wasn't the last, it was the culmination of the last four books, which I call 'The Eternal Quartet,' à la more distinguished writers like Durrell and people like that. PW: In the previous book, He Shall Thunder in the Sky, you tied up a lot of plot threads. I thought it'd be fun to show what he thought of her, and what he was doing on the side. In the first place, I'd been giving his mother's view of him all these years, which is a little unfair. And that was when I introduced this second point of view, which I thought was necessary. So as Ramses approached 16, I thought, oh my goodness, I'm going to have to make some changes here. EP: Ramses the terror-he was described by someone as the most awful child in mystery fiction, which I thought was a huge compliment! I put him in for comic relief, because I found him quite hilarious, and a little pathetic in a way, when you consider his parents and what a terrible time he had trying to win their respect and keep up with them.

Seeing a Large Cat by Elizabeth Peters