The joy of writing historical fiction is that much of the story is given to you by history. When I was writing my latest,Burke and the War of 1812, I didn’t have to invent reasons why Burke might be fighting in Canada: the War of 1812 was a real thing and British troops were fighting there.
The Battle of Queenston Heights by eyewitness James B. Dennis
I wanted to tell the story of how the Native American tribes were drawn into the war and that was easy too. The British were heavily involved with some Native American leaders, so I have James Burke building links with the Shawnee people, who were amongst the first to fight alongside the British against the invading Americans. I would have had Burke working with the Shawnee in any case, but I was delighted to discover that there were rumours at the time of two British soldiers (and who’s to say it wasn’t James Burke and his regular sidekick, William Brown) who were advising the Shawnee before the Battle of Tippecanoe, which features in the story.
I also had to explain some of the political background and give an idea of what life was like in Washington in 1812. Again, the facts are readily available and there is some wonderful gossipy detail thanks to memoirs of the time, so I have James Burke in Washington, doing what he does best, which is spying on the enemies of Britain. And it would be helpful to get the political background to the Native American alliances as well, so it would be handy to have Burke at a famous tribal meeting near modern Tallassee, Alabama.
Fun as all this background detail is, you can’t really write about the War of 1812 without covering the American army’s march north to Canada, so William Brown is doing his own spying in the American force, while Burke is planning the defence of Canada alongside the British General Brock in York (now Toronto).
So there’s the outlines of the story already written for me. Now all I have to do is to get James Burke and William Brown to Indiana to meet the Shawnee, before packing Burke off to Tallassee. Then William has to be marching from Dayton, Ohio, up to Detroit, while Burke is in Washington. Burke then has to get from Washington to Toronto, to meet with Brock before heading west to Windsor. By then I need William to have slipped away from the Americans so that he can gather the latest intelligence from the Shawnee before he meets up with Burke so that they can both witness the American defeat at Detroit.
All this has to be done using riverboats and horses and communications can’t include radios or telephones. And you have to be aware of any limitations on travel. (In an early draft I had Burke sailing up a river before I realised I had just sailed him over the Niagara Falls.)
So, yes, I don’t need nearly as much imagination to outline a historical novel as I do when I’m inventing a whole vampire sub-culture around Brampton Cemetery (in Something Wicked). But the mechanics of making all the moving parts work together brings its own problems. Sometimes you can even come up with solutions for mysteries history can’t explain. For example, Nelson was able to destroy the French fleet in Egypt because it remained vulnerable at anchor long after it should have put out to sea. Historians often wonder why but in Burke and the Bedouin we learn about the British agent who killed the courier carrying orders from Napoleon for the fleet to set sail.
Historical fiction: where history writes the plots and plots may write the history.
It’s Friday morning and time for me to write my weekly blog.
It’s been a good week. Saturday was publication day for the latest of my James Burke books, Burke and the War of 1812. We had a party. There was a cake.
It was quite a night and, frankly, not a lot got done on Sunday. And, after that, the weather was so nice that not a lot got done for the rest of the week either.
I suppose I should buckle down and get on with promoting the book. Unfortunately, books don’t sell themselves. If people don’t hear about them, they won’t get read. So marketing, not writing, is my priority now. If you read Burke and the War of 1812, you can help by writing a short review on Amazon.
I’m getting very excited here with the official launch of Burke and the War of 1812 coming up tomorrow. I quietly made the paperback available earlier, so if you want it on paper for launch day, you can order it today and it should arrive at the same time as the e-book is released.
I’m having a party at home with a few friends, which will, inevitably, feature tango dancing. We’ve also got a White House cake made with flames bursting from the centre to reflect the burning of the White House in 1814. That’s after the events in the book, but it’s the only thing most people know about the War of 1812, so we couldn’t resist having a White House fire as our centrepiece. I hope to have photos to share next week, although whenever we do have a party taking photos seems to be the last thing on anybody’s mind. Fingers crossed we remember this time.
There’s always a degree of excitement with any new book, even though this will be the eighth in the James Burke series, alongside the other seven novels I’ve written on other subjects. I’m particularly enthusiastic about this one, though, because the political situation between America and Canada has led to a revival of interest in what was, until a couple of months ago, a very little-known war in the UK. It’s better known in the US, but comments on social media suggest that many Americans have a very limited understanding of what actually happened. I’m guessing that Canadians will be better informed and I’m hoping that they’ll buy the book anyway because they do like to remember how they saw off the United States then, as they’re hoping to do again now.
Anyway, I have a party to prepare for, so this is all for this week’s blog. I’ll see you next week and let you know how it went.
It’s just a week until Burke and the War of 1812is published and I’m concentrating on trying to publicise that and organising a party to celebrate, so I don’t have a lot of energy to write a blog post this week.
Burke and the War of 1812 involved more research than anything I’ve written for a while. The war in North America is new territory for me and the history is not as well-known as it probably should be. It’s also, since I started writing, become suddenly and improbably contentious (and a big shout-out to Donald Trump for all his help in promoting the book).
I’ve put a lot of work into trying to make the story of the run-up to war and the opening battles accurately reflect the history of the conflict. It’s made me think again about the importance of research in writing historical fiction so I’ve dug out something I wrote on this subject years ago. It’s still relevant now and I hope you enjoy reading it.
Research in historical fiction
I’m going to a meeting of the London Chapter of the Historical Novel Society this weekend. The topic for discussion is historical research.
This is a subject dear to my heart. I’ve blogged about it once or twice before, and Jenny Kane has chipped in with her own perspective as an archaeologist turned novelist. So why am I struggling so hard to think of anything that I might say on Saturday?
I think part of the reason is that research is always, in the end, a matter of judgement and, indeed, personal preference. There are some purists out there who seem uncomfortable with any fiction at all in their historical fiction. An author who dares to admit that sometimes they just make stuff up can infuriate this kind of reader/writer. At the other extreme, there are authors who will cheerfully ignore any historical details that get in the way of their stories which can often seem hardly “historical” at all.
We all have different amounts of knowledge and different ideas of what is important. I have just been reading a discussion about historical inaccuracy in which one contributor is furious about the misrepresentation of Finns during World War II. She ridicules an author’s ignorance and points out what she sees as blatantly obvious errors. However, it turns out that she is a Finn herself. Her irritation is perfectly genuine and justified, but it is unlikely that any of the English readers that this story is clearly aimed at will be aware of many (if any) of the mistakes. They are still mistakes, of course, and anyone who relies on the story to inform them about the historical facts will end up feeling foolish. But, in fairness, this isn’t what the author was doing. Non-fiction accounts of the Eastern Front are available. The novelist is using this as a setting for a work of fiction. If the period detail is accurate enough to carry along the reader, does it matter that it is not exactly right?
The problem here is that what worries one reader will not necessarily worry another. Moving away from historical fiction for a moment, I once read a thriller in which a key element was that a computer memory stick that held a lot of data would be larger than one which contained very little. This is an error so egregious that it is difficult to understand how someone whose novels seem generally well based in the 21st-century could possibly have made such a mistake. However, I was able to overlook this and enjoy the book. My son, on the other hand, found this impossible to ignore and considers this book one of the worst he has read by that author. Returning to history, I recently read a book in which a sharpshooter in a British Napoleonic regiment wore a green jacket. Because this is something that I am writing about (in Burke at Waterloo), I am all too aware that the green jackets were not awarded to individuals within regular regiments but were worn by specialist rifle regiments. This was one of several details in this novel that left me feeling that the writer did not understand his period and that much of what he said had to be viewed with considerable suspicion. When, in the same story, someone threw fivepence (not five pennies) to a beggar, I decided he had pre-empted decimalisation by a century and a half and I almost gave up reading. Others, though, have praised the same book.
Personally, I like history in my books to be accurate. But I’m not a professional historian and, even if I were, I would not necessarily be writing about the period that I’m an expert on. I was very conscious when writing Burke in the Land of Silver that, as an English writer, I was likely to make mistakes with Argentinian history. In fact, Argentinian friends who have read the book have been perfectly comfortable with my interpretation of their history and I am delighted by that. I suspect, though, that they are being generous and that there are errors that they are not pointing out to me.
Getting caught out in straightforward mistakes is something that I think most historical fiction authors do worry about. Fortunately I have an excellent editor who is very good at catching this sort of thing. For example, I had somebody using a Bowie knife in around 1807 which seemed perfectly uncontroversial. She pointed out that the Bowie knife refers specifically to a design by popularised by Jim Bowie who was not born until around 1796. That kind of thing can always catch a writer out and having a second pair of eyes, especially eyes that are familiar with the period, is really useful. Mistakes will still creep in, though. When I was researching the story of James Brooke for The White Rajah, I rather overdid my reading of contemporary source material and, as a result, I was able to pick up small but real mistakes in one of the definitive biographies of his life. Given that the biography was a detailed and well footnoted academic tome, I am sure that the writer would have been embarrassed at the error, but to suggest that anyone can write about historical figures in depth without having a single mistake is, frankly, unrealistic. To insist that my novels (or anybody else’s historical fiction) have no mistakes is just silly. Apart from anything else, if I checked every single “fact” in my stories, the stories themselves would never get written. In Cawnpore there is a reference to a regimental colonel. I searched for an online history of the regiment; I looked through the (very long) list of the names of the dead at Cawnpore; I read contemporary accounts; and I checked the definitive modern account. Hours later I still didn’t have the name. So you know what? I made one up.
I’m a novelist. I tell lies for a living. The best I can hope for is that the lies aren’t too obvious.
Perhaps because I write historical fiction myself, I often struggle with reading the genre. So I’ve been really pleased to have read two HistFic books lately that have been a total joy. This week I’m delighted to review both of them.
‘Red Horse’ by MJ Logue
Set in the English Civil War, Red Horse is the first of a series by MJ Logue and I’ve already started on the second.
Hollie Babbitt is a mercenary soldier, fresh from the Seven Years War in Europe. Recruited by Parliament to lead a troop of cavalry, he has some sympathy for the cause but he is mainly in it for the money, though pay is always late and he is beginning to have his doubts as to whether the Parliamentary commander, the Earl of Essex, can afford him. He’s a professional soldier, though, and with the Seven Years War over, this is the best gig he can find, so he sticks around, doing what he is good at (mainly killing people) and waiting to see his money.
One of the many excellent things about this book is the way that we sympathise with Babbitt. In a funny sort of way, he’s a likeable person. The soldiers in his troop clearly see him as an excellent commander and underneath the gruffness and casual violence is a decent man. There’s a back story that comes out little by little: a violent abusive father, a lost love who died, one or two deep friendships that are all that seem to stand between him and madness. Then one of his only friends dies and he falls further into viciousness and despair.
It’s a violent, sweary book set in a violent, sweary time. (The proportion of the population killed during the Civil War is a matter for debate, but even the lowest estimates are appalling.) Despite this, it’s immensely readable, often very funny and although terrible things keep happening, underneath it all, it is warm and humane.
Ultimately, Red Horse is a story of redemption.
I recommend it.
‘The Private Misadventures of Nell Nobody’ by Jennifer Newbold
Almost 200 years later and we have another story of somebody escaping a brutal past by throwing themselves into warfare. This time it’s the Napoleonic Wars and our protagonist is a woman who is hiding from an abusive husband by disguising herself as a man and running away to sea.
As a general rule I hate stories that feature a woman doing things that no woman in the period would ever do. But there were women who successfully passed as men in the French Wars and Jennifer Newbold makes Nell Nobody’s imposture credible.
Nell signs up to the army, but ends up assigned as a naval liaison and forms a very close attachment to Nelson. To my surprise, I found myself completely believing the story, helped by the meticulous descriptions of shipboard life and the battles she finds herself in on both land and sea.
Newbold weaves together Nell’s imaginary adventures as she struggles to keep her secret and accounts of real military victories, notably including Nelson’s triumph at Cape St Vincent. Newbold is clearly a Nelson fan and she draws a convincing picture of him. She also fleshes out Nell as a real, if unlikely, heroine.
I’ll give no plot details for fear of spoilers. The story certainly held my attention to the very end. Definitely to be recommended.
And a third
If you enjoy historical novels and are a visitor to this blog, I hope you have given mine a try. The next James Burke book, about a soldier-spy during the Napoleonic Wars, is out in Kindle on 26 April. It’s set in North America — a new theatre of war for Burke. It’s called Burke and the War of 1812 and it’s available to pre-order now.
If you can’t bear to wait until 26 April, there are seven Burke books already published. Have you read them all?
