His father, Thomas Emerson, was a good-hearted but easygoing man who failed to satisfy his cold-hearted, ambitious wife.
A small inheritance from a distant relative enabled him to escape his mother's control, and the aristocratic marriage she had arranged for him, and pursue his studies as an Egyptologist.
In Crocodile on the Sandbank, during a visit to the Cairo museum, the Emersons encountered Amelia Peabody and her friend, Evelyn Forbes.
When he first appears in Crocodile on the Sandbank, Emerson is described (by Amelia, thus romantically) as tall, well-muscled, with "sapphirine" eyes and dark, wavy black hair.
However, he has shown genuine anger and a willingness to use violence often enough to make him feared by all the petty criminals and crooked antiques dealers in Egypt.
More established and careful archaeologists, including William Flinders Petrie and Howard Carter, the discoverer and primary excavator of the tomb of Tutankhamun, are presented more positively.
The Emerson family adventures, to date, are set in Great Britain, Egypt and Palestine during the British Imperial period, beginning in approximately 1890 and extending through the 1920s.