Over on Twitter I’ve been joining in with #HistFicMay. It’s a lot of fun and if you are on Twitter yourself you might try having a look at the hashtag. Each day historical novelists are invited to tweet about some aspect of their work. The last few days have been research, an area where the average historical novelist can talk until the most enthusiastic reader has beaten themselves unconscious head butting a wall in the hope that they will stop.
One question was ‘What was the hardest thing to research?’ It’s a beautifully open question. Most difficult fact to track down? Most traumatic? (One person said that researching the slave trade wasn’t a lot of fun and my own research on the English occupation of Ireland left me a bit shaken.)
I’m going to go for ‘Most likely to have you freeze to death in a snowstorm while sheltering in an unheated stone hut 3,000 metres up the Andes.’
It’s a good story and every so often I tried to interest people in it and they completely blank me. Whether this is because they’ve all secretly done something equally daft or whether they can’t believe I’m not making it up, I don’t know. But here goes again.
When I was writing ‘Burke in the Land of Silver’ I described him crossing the Andes, which the real James Burke did on his way to spy out the possibilities of a British fleet making a landing on the west coast of South America. Burke misjudged the time to travel and ended up crossing in snow. The account of the trip makes up half a dozen or so pages in the book, but they worried me because I had no idea what crossing the Andes was like in snow. There are accounts of crossing in summer but I felt that the experience at the beginning of winter must be very different. In the end, I decided that the best way to find out would be to do it myself.
Somehow I persuaded my wife (who hates riding) that this would be a good idea.
Burke had made his journey at the beginning of winter but our schedule meant we had to make it in October, in the southern spring, but still snowy in the Andes. We weren’t going to be able to cross down to Chile as the pass was officially still closed, so we couldn’t legally take our horses over. We decided that we would climb to the summit of the pass and turn and come back down.
We were following the route taken by General San Martin, who had crossed the Andes on his way to liberate Chile in 1817. Wisely, he had done it in high summer. When we arrived at our starting point, a ranch outside the city of Mendoza, the rancher who was to guide us up said that he strongly advised against doing it until the weather had improved.
We went ahead anyway. The idea had been to see what it was like for Burke and we found out.
It was cold. Very, very cold.
The road up starts easily enough. People take four wheel drives up there to admire the view. Gradually, though, it gets steeper. Quite a lot steeper.
We rode all day, until we arrived at the only refuge: a stone hut at 3,000 metres.
There were some bed frames and we took the woollen hides from the Western-style saddles and those were our mattresses. We piled any spare clothing on top of our sleeping bags and that was our beds for the night.
It’s not true that there was no heating at all. There are some very dry scrubs growing on the mountain, easily uprooted and carried back to the hut, mainly because they weigh practically nothing.
The good news is that light, dry wood burns very easily. The disadvantage is that the fire lasts hardly any time at all. Still, apart from the smoke blowing back down the chimney, it created a lovely warm spot immediately in front of the fireplace for as long as it lasted.
You could cook on it too.
Water came from a stream that ran past the hut. First thing in the morning, it was covered in ice.
One of the horses decided that a night up there was no fun at all and ran off. Fortunately we had a spare (and the first one was safely waiting for us at a frontier post at the bottom of the mountain when we returned).
Despite the cold, I was stunned by the beauty of the place.
The next day we made a serious attempt to get to the summit of the pass. We almost made it too, but, in the end, the snow defeated us.
It was the coldest I have ever been in my life and I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. I’d love to do it again in the summer (apparently a week after we went the weather changed completely and people travelled up in T-shirts). My wife, though, has vetoed the idea.
And did it make any difference to the book? A few paragraphs may be more convincing.
When I read that The Illusions is a historical novel (it’s set at the end of the 19th century) that combines a story about stage magicians with supernatural elements about people playing with actual magic, I couldn’t resist it. That’s the central idea in my own novella Dark Magic although that’s one of my contemporary books. I wanted to know how another author had tackled the same issues. In fact, Hyder’s story is more similar to mine than I had expected. It pits some regular stage magicians against an evil dark magician, in the same way that mine pits a company of stage magicians against a company dabbling with Black Magic. There’s an additional twist in The Illusions, as some of the stage magicians have real magical powers as well, although they do not reveal these to their friends.
All that said, The Illusions has very little in common with Dark Magic. For a start, Dark Magic is a novella while The Illusions is very long. I had an e-book, so I can’t say how many pages there were but it seemed to take a while to read. It also has quite a large cast of characters. As the story goes on you learn which of these characters are important and which are secondary and the relationships between the important characters become clear. At the start of the book, though, the characters are introduced one by one and it is not at all obvious what they have to do with each other.
The first person we meet is Arter Evans but he dies quite early on. The character who matters is his assistant, Cecily Marsden, always known as Cec. Cec appears soon after Arter, but the opening paragraphs are entirely from Arter’s viewpoint and this makes it difficult to immediately relate to Cec – a difficulty increased by introducing her in terms of what she has learned of magic, rather than how she feels about it.
No matter. A few pages later, Arter is dead and Cec flees to “the one person in all of Bristol that might be able to help”. So we meet Skarratt. There’s a hint that Cec does not like Skarratt. She’s right not to – he’s a thoroughly unpleasant piece of work – but we do not know why she dislikes him so much or, indeed, why he is the one person who might be able to help.
No matter (again), for we leave Cec and are introduced to Eadie. She is picking at a loose thread on her dress. She is, we are told, nervous.
I am not one to insist that it is always a crime to ‘tell’ rather than to show, but it would be nice to occasionally see things internalised. If we were in Eadie’s head we would see that she was nervous. We would not have to be told that she picked up a loose thread “nervously”, nor that she is “reassuring herself” that she does not need to be frightened.
Perhaps there simply isn’t time to get into Eadie’s head, for we are about meet another character, George Perris. They are both there for a séance. Eadie intends to expose such seances for the frauds they are. (I never quite worked out how but I may just not have been paying attention.) Perris’s approach is more direct. He breaks up the séance, causing real distress to the sitters. Eadie is angered by this and berates Perris but, already, she can’t miss that he is “one of the most handsome men she’s ever seen”.
Somewhere in the roomful of characters at the séance there is another significant person in the story, but don’t try to work it out because now we are in Paris at a performance by Valentin, who is seeing visions of a woman called Olivia who…
You see why I was frustrated at this point.
Once the characters have come together and we know the relationships between them, everything makes a great deal more sense. The plot is quite complicated but revolves around a feud between Skarratt on the one hand and Valentin and George on the other. Valentin and George are putting on a magic show intended to cement George’s reputation as the greatest magician in England, while Skarratt is set to wreck it largely out of spite and jealousy. Fortunately for George both Valentin and Cec possess real magical powers with which they are able to foil at least some of Skarratt’s evil plans.
The story draws in the early days of moving pictures (Eadie is developing new techniques, though we learn little of the technology), and a complicated series of relationships as the characters (except the loathsome Skarratt, of course) sort themselves into romantic couples.
The descriptions of tricks from the Golden Age of magic are fascinating, though I fear the author is often as misdirected as the audience. The thing about magicians is that they often seem to do things that appear impossible. This doesn’t mean that they actually do impossible things, but some of the descriptions of the tricks here clearly are impossible. This means that the distinction between the tricks that are being done by expert magicians are difficult to distinguish from those which are being done by expert magicians who are also possessed of genuine magical powers. That, I think, weakens a central element of the idea behind the book. By the end (no spoilers) stuff is happening that is clearly absolutely impossible. In fact, so impossible that you would think even the audience would notice. But perhaps they, like us, are lulled into a false sense that it’s all just a magic show by the number of impossible tricks they have witnessed from regular magicians. It’s still odd that Valentin is prepared to do some of these tricks given that he is supposed not to be letting his friends know about his magic powers. Never mind: it’s a dramatic ending to the book.
The failure to show us how the characters feel, rather than just to tell us what they are feeling, meant that they never really came alive for me. As a result, I found my interest slipping. On the other hand, I was drawn back in by the plot, which zips along. I had the impression that it was written more for younger readers who may be less worried by the rather two dimensional characters and more interested in the plotting, which is fair enough. If that’s you (or a young friend) you may well enjoy this book.
Dark Magic
If you like the idea of seeing real magic and stage magic mixed together, but in a more contemporary context, you might consider reading Dark Magic. All the stage magic in the book is true to life (I’ve spent far too long hanging round with magicians) and the ‘real’ magic is gloriously over-the-top. Reading The Illusions, I did feel that there was an absence of real jeopardy. With all this magic and evil flying about, nobody seems to get really hurt. (There’s one broken limb but it heals rapidly and with remarkably little pain.) For me, a book with ‘real’ magic and a villain like Skarratt really wants to have some seriously unpleasant things happening. Be warned: Dark Magic does do horrible things to its equivalent of Skarratt. On the other hand, it is often laugh-out-loud funny (or so reviewers tell me). I’m not sure that The Illusions wouldn’t benefit from more humour, come to think of it.
Anyway, if stage magic and dark forces are your thing, why not read them both?
Dark Magic is available on Kindle and in paperback. The Kindle edition costs just £1.99.
Last week I spent an afternoon at Tyntesfield. It’s a National Trust property near Bath.
It was bought in 1844, by William Gibbs, a merchant who had made a vast fortune out of guano. The idea of using bird droppings for fertiliser was new at the time. It revolutionised Victorian agriculture and made Mr Gibbs one of the richest man in England. In 1863 he made the first of several significant remodellings of the house. A high church Anglican, he believed that building in gothic style evoking the English Church of the Middle Ages was an act of religious observation rather than just architectural extravagance. In this he followed the example of the Catholic architect, Pugin.
The architecture was not only designed to reflect High Anglican religious principles but incorporated space devoted to worship. An oratory, with stained glass windows, allowed William Gibbs to gather his family and all the servants to pray together morning and evening.
As William approached the end of his life, he commissioned his own chapel. This was no small private chapel (that was the oratory) but a church larger and more splendid than many parish churches. Indeed, the local vicar, nervous of losing his flock to his elaborate neighbour, petitioned the Bishop to deny consecration to the building, so it could be used only by the family. As this included servants, guests and estate workers, there must have been an acceptable congregation. Services were conducted by the family’s own chaplain, who had a specially built house in the grounds.
Building of the chapel started in 1873 and was completed in 1875 , the year of William Gibbs’ death. It is fair to say that he saw the building of this remarkable chapel as the apotheosis of his life — the crowning glory of Tyntesfield.
Victorian Gothic was dismissed as a ridiculous affectation for much of the 20th century, but it is beginning to come back into fashion. Nowadays, though, we see the religious references in the architecture (if we see them at all) as rather absurd. My first reaction on seeing Tyntesfield (a reaction I suspect I share with many of its visitors) is that it is gloriously, wonderfully mad. It is, though, quite beautiful and made for taking pictures of.
Looking through the photos I took, it is obvious that I did not take nearly enough. I must go back. But here, to be getting on with, are some of my pictures from the end of April. (All of these are exteriors. Inside is so vast and so mad that it defeated me, but I will try again on another visit.)
The Williamson Papers
Someone asked if this was a research trip and I said no, it had been entirely for pleasure. But it does relate to my books: not the James Burke series, which are firmly set in what historians call the long 18th century, but the Williamson Papers. My trilogy about the adventures of John Williamson, first in Borneo (The White Rajah) and then India (Cawnpore) before he returns to London (Back Home) is set around the time that Tyntesfield was being built. The money for Tyntesfield came from international trade. John Williamson is in Borneo and India because Britain trades with these places and alongside the trade comes colonial rule with all the problems, practical and moral, that that brings. Williamson returns to London where he discovers that the vast wealth that created Tyntesfield does not reach everywhere and that the poor of London are as exploited and repressed as the inhabitants of the colonies.
The Williamson Papers are not a revisionist history of colonialism. They are a first person account of Williamson’s experience and, while he is unhappy with some of the things he saw, he basically supports his country and sees a lot of good in what it does. The stories are full of excitement and incident (closely based on fact) but they should also make you question both what is now called the Empire Project and some of the fashionable revisionism which unthinkingly condemns everything that the Victorians did overseas. Unsurprisingly, I suppose, John Williamson has never had the popularity of James Burke (partly because there are only three books) but I think this is sad. I’m proud of John Williamson and he has had lovely reviews. Why don’t you make an author very happy and give them a try?
I was at a party this weekend given by a tango friend. Some of the people there had vast experience of lots of different dance forms, so the conversation turned to dance history. I was talking to somebody who was very into 18th and 19th century dance and he was telling me how the waltz arrived in England. He mentioned the importance of Lady Jersey who was the queen of Georgian Society in the early 19th century.
I’m fascinated by the history of the waltz. It intersects my interest in the Napoleonic era because it was widely popularised by the social activities surrounding the Congress of Vienna. (See my blog post: Partying at the Congress of Vienna.) I decided to spend a little while online to see what I could find out about Lady Jersey and the waltz.
The most useful material I found was a paper by Cheryl A. Wilson, “The Arrival of the Waltz in England, 1812”. This, as suggested in the title, puts the arrival of the waltz a little earlier than the Congress of Vienna. The waltz had started life as a folk dance in Eastern Europe, but by the 19th century it was a sophisticated ballroom dance, albeit one that was not practised in England. This changed when it was introduced into Almack’s Assembly Rooms. Almack’s was the most exclusive social club in London. Almack’s is where Lady Jersey came in. She was one of the patronesses of Almack’s and a leader of the ton, the group of socially well-connected men and women who formed the pinnacle of Society in the Regency. So influential was Lady Jersey that she was often referred to as “Queen Sarah”.
The fact that Queen Sarah had supported the introduction of the waltz meant it was here to stay, but at first it was regarded with suspicion by many people. It was the first ‘close dance’ to be popularised in England. Prior to the waltz, most social dancing involved a line of men facing a line of women with their only contact being to hold hands during some of the intricate patterns of the dance. The intimate hold of the waltz was seen as full of moral hazard. Byron (ironically, given his reputation) wrote:
Waltz—Waltz—alone both legs and arms demands, Liberal of feet—and lavish of her hands; Hands which may freely range in public sight, Where ne’er before—but—pray ‘put out the light.’ Methinks the glare of yonder chandelier Shines much too far—or I am much too near; And true, though strange—Waltz whispers this remark; ‘My slippery steps are safest in the dark!’
The Waltz: Byron
The waltz might well have deserved at least some of its reputation. It was not unknown for corners of the ballroom to be left in shadow and a tightly laced woman whirled rapidly into a turn might feel (or could reasonably feign feeling) dizzy enough to fall into her partner’s arms. There were even scandalous suggestions of osculatory activity in the shadows.
After the Congress of Vienna where it was clear that the crowned heads of Europe and their courts were happy to indulge, waltzing became more respectable. Most dance historians pinpoint its inclusion in the 1816 Regent’s Fête at Carlton House as the moment when the waltz became truly integrated into London society. While the waltz was gracing fashionable ballrooms, the folk version continued to be popular as a dance amongst the working poor of Central and Eastern Europe. As Argentina opened up to European immigration, many of those who emigrated to South America took their waltz music with them. This, of course, is where, as a passionate tango enthusiast, my interest in the waltz comes in. By the mid-1800s the waltz of Europe had morphed in Argentina into a specifically South American variant – the Vals Criollo. As tango developed later in the century, tango musicians incorporated the Vals Criollo into their repertoire and by 1910, some composers wrote tango compositions in 3/4 time, giving birth to the Tango Vals. The Tango Vals is a faster-paced version of the Viennese waltz, with a lot of turns and quick changes of direction that leave the dancers breathless. This is the waltz I love. And here I am dancing a very restrained tango vals with my beloved at our Ruby Wedding.
James Burke and the Waltz
Burke only gets to dance the waltz once in the books. It’s 1815 and he is in Brussels at the Duchess of Richmond’s famous ball on the eve of Waterloo.
They edged their way through the crowd and found space on the dance floor. To Lily’s delight, they were playing a cotillion. Burke suspected that she had their hostess to thank for that. The Duchess of Richmond was quite old-fashioned in her tastes and had probably insisted on some more traditional English dances. The cotillion was soon over, though, and it was back to quadrilles. Burke remembered the quadrilles that had played the first time he had met Lily. He could hardly believe he had not that much cared for her then. Now she seemed the most important thing in his life.
Another cotillion and then, as if to make up for such unfashionable music, the band started a waltz. Burke, like every other man in the place, had practiced the steps so that if he ever found a girl daring enough to dance it, he would not be found wanting. He was gratified to discover that Lily had obviously practiced it as well. The two of them whirled around the room until the music stopped, their cheeks red with excitement, and half dizzy from turning so enthusiastically.
I grew up on adventure stories where many of the heroes were helped by loyal sidekicks. Biggles had Algy; Sherlock Holmes, Watson; the Lone Ranger, Tonto. Back then, before the darker Batman of today, Robin was simply his trusty sidekick.
Until I started writing my own adventure stories, I didn’t really understand why sidekicks were so ubiquitous. I do now.
Sidekicks offer all sorts of benefits to the writer. They can perform tasks that the hero cannot, or which are too tedious to bore the reader with. John Mortimer’s Rumpole, for example, uses a private detective, ‘Fig’ Newton, to produce crucial information to move the plot along. No details are required as to how Newton gets this information and, indeed, the reader doesn’t care.
Traditional adventure stories often break up the action with more light-hearted moments and a sidekick gives opportunities for banter. Sometimes the sidekick himself is a source of amusement. Lesley Charteris’s early Simon Templar stories featured Hoppy Uniatz, a Brooklyn gangster who had somehow (we never quite find out how) teamed up with our hero. His heavy accent is used to accentuate his apparent stupidity but he is unfailingly loyal and a good man in a fight. I find him quite irritating but, back in the 1930s and 40s, readers loved that sort of thing and he was the longest lasting of the Saint’s sidekicks.
The single most useful characteristic of a sidekick, as far as the writer is concerned, is that he provides somebody for the hero to explain the plot to. Imagine Sherlock Holmes without Watson, all those brilliant deductions and the reader having no clue of the basis on which he made them.
Holmes and Watson from the original illustrations in The Strand Magazine
James Burke’s sidekick is William Brown. While Burke is constantly on his dignity as an officer and a gentleman (and constantly resentful that he is trapped in the sordid world of espionage), William keeps him rooted in reality. We don’t get given many details of William’s early life but his skills as a forger and his ability with a picklock hint at a criminal past. He joined the army young and remained a private soldier until he was allocated to Burke as, officially, an officer’s servant and, unofficially, as an agent working to him on intelligence missions.
William is intelligent and resourceful and often has to work independently of Burke. (Another advantage of a sidekick is that it enables the author to run parallel story lines when necessary.) Despite this, he is convinced that he would be lost without Burke. He sums up how he sees their respective roles.
“I’m more a hit-them-in-the-goolies-and run-away kind of bloke. I rely on officers like you to write it up all nice afterwards.”
William Brown and James Burke have both saved each other’s lives on many occasions and they have a real affection for each other, but William would never think of presuming on Burke.
“There was only one bed and William did wonder if he should ask to share it, such an arrangement being common amongst travellers in small inns. In the end, though, he decided not to. The major was a good man and, in his way, a friend, but there were proprieties to be observed between a sergeant and his officer and William Brown was careful to observe them.”
Although William is something of a ladies’ man, he is married to Molly who he met in Buenos Aires [Burke in the Land of Silver]. She keeps a tavern near the Tower where James and William are based when they are in England. James is fond of Molly and is often a guest of the couple when he is in London.
As the series goes on, I find the relationship between William Brown and James Burke a pleasure to write. The relationship doesn’t exactly develop: it’s defined soon after they meet and doesn’t fundamentally change, but writing about their shared experiences and how these strengthen the link between them is one of the aspects of the books that I particularly enjoy.
The Burke books wouldn’t be the same without William Brown. He might officially be just an assistant – a henchman, if you will – but Burke would be the first to admit that the two are a team. Without William Brown, James Burke would be lost. In fact, one story (Burke in Ireland) does see Burke working alone and, though the book ends in a sort of victory, Burke would be the first to admit that things got very messy indeed.
William Brown and the Lines of Torres Vedras
In the latest in the Burke series, Burke is trying to track down a French spy ring in Lisbon in 1810. William is there with him, of course, looking for possible leads in bars while Burke hobnobs with minor aristocrats suspected of betraying their country. William’s mission proves the more dangerous and the poor man is beaten up and tortured. Another advantage of the sidekick, as far as an author is concerned, is that he can suffer the sort of beating that means that he cannot take an active part in the story for a while. That, of course, is trickier if you are the hero but sometimes the villain has to win or there is no jeopardy for the hero to overcome.
Will William recover? Will the villain who tortured him pay for his crimes? And will our intrepid duo be able to save the secret of the Lines of Torres Vedras?
You’ll have to buy Burke and the Lines of Torres Vedras to find out. It’s a thrilling spy story set against the background of the real secret of the Lines, which was a crucial element in Wellington’s strategy during the Peninsular War. Discover more of the history of the defence of Portugal and find out if William ever gets safe home to Molly.
Burke and the Lines of Torres Vedras is available on Kindle for £3.99 and in paperback at £7.99.
