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?
With Burke and the War of 1812 just three weeks from publication, there are all sorts of bits and pieces to talk about this week, so please bear with me.
First up, for anyone who has missed it so far, here’s the cover:
The fort is a generic example of the period, as imagined by my cover designer. It’s not Fort Detroit, which features in the story, but there were plenty of other forts attacked during the war and I’m happy to go with this one. If you’re interested, this is a contemporary picture of Fort Detroit.
I’m excited about this book. It’s the eighth in the series and, although all the books seem to sell reasonably well and James Burke definitely has his fans, Burke is unknown outside of a small number of Napoleonic fiction aficionados. Perhaps the current issues between the United States and Canada will give the book a contemporary relevance that might bring it to a wider audience. That’s the hope, anyway. As ever, that means I need all the reviews and recommendations I can get, so if you read and enjoy the book, please tell all your friends. It takes quite a long time to research and write one of these and I’m getting lazier as I get older, so if I don’t get a reasonable audience, it’s going to be a long time before we see more adventures of James Burke.
Copyright theft
Anybody who starts writing fiction for money is living in a fantasy world. A very small number of writers earn substantial amounts of money from it. Most writers – even serious writers with agents and publishers – struggle to make four figures from their books.
It’s always irritating when people copy online works without paying for them but, given that writers aren’t basically in it for the money and some people might honestly struggle to buy as many books as they would like, there are more irritating things going on in the world. (That said, there are such things as libraries – which do pay authors – and if you can afford to buy a coffee, you can buy an e-book.) What goes beyond irritating into spectacularly annoying is when Mark Zuckerberg (estimated worth $200 billion) steals books to train Meta’s AI because he clearly thinks that copyright law does not apply to him.
Some more positive technology news comes courtesy of Amazon. In the United States (not yet in the UK, unfortunately) they are trialling the idea of using AI to turn Kindle books into audiobooks. Unlike Meta, they do ask if you would like them to do this and, more importantly, if anybody listens to the resulting work, you get paid. I’ve signed up Something Wicked to see how it goes. Because it’s not available here, I haven’t actually been able to hear it. If you do, please let me know what you think.
It’s obviously unlikely that it will be as good as a professionally narrated book, although it may compare well with my own efforts with Dark Magic. If you want to judge for yourself, the audio book of Dark Magic is available on Spotify, Amazon and elsewhere. The advantage of AI computer generated narration is, of course, cost. It takes a long time to read a book out loud and professional voice actors obviously expect to be paid professional rates and, on the sales that my books generate, that just doesn’t make economic sense. If Amazon’s experiment means that I can break into the growing audiobook market, it’s got to be worth my while.
Fun times
In between preparing for the launch of Burke and the War of 1812, my beloved and I have been getting out and about to greet the Spring. Last weekend we went to Liverpool for a conference to celebrate 100 years of Art Deco. We were staying in a hotel that started life as Liverpool airport, back when flying was luxurious and fun. The hotel lovingly recreates the world of the 1920s, only with air conditioning. The people who went to the conference were lovingly recreating the style and dances of the time too.
Just four weeks until Burke and the War of 1812 is published. You can already pre-order it here: Burke and the War of 1812.
I’m getting quite excited. We’re having a party and there will be various references to burning down the White House. I think that’s the only thing most Brits know about the War of 1812 and most don’t even know that. Mention ‘war’ and ‘1812’ in the same sentence and generally people think Tchaikovsky, and Napoleon invading Russia. In fact, the War of 1812 was fought between the United States and Canada (then part of the British Empire). A lot of military enthusiasts like to reenact the battles. I never had President Trump down as a historical reenactor, but apparently he is seriously considering restaging the 1812 conflict, so the book has a contemporary relevance that most of my novels set in Napoleonic times lack. I’m hoping people will notice it and that I may even see a significant uptick in sales in Canada. What the response of my American readers will be, I’m not at all sure.
Anyway, here’s the cover. I hope you like it.
In other news, it turns out that eight of my books are amongst those stolen by Meta to train their AI. I will probably be writing more about this once Burke and the War of 1812 is out and my mind moves on to other things. For now I will just say that Meta obviously has excellent taste and recommend that you read the books that they have stolen from me rather than wait for a robot to mix them in with lots of other stolen books and make something which I’m prejudiced enough to suggest won’t be that terribly good.
Here’s the list. Click on the links to be taken to Amazon to buy them:
