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:
It’s going to be a very short blog piece this week because I’m in the throes of getting Burke and the War of 1812 ready for publication. This is the eighth book in the James Burke series and I’m obviously getting better at the finishing touches because formatting it for paperback took much less time than I was expecting. I may may even be ahead of my planned publication date of 26 April. It’s always a bit nerve-wracking, though. I’ve only just got the final cover design and there’s always the danger that Amazon might object to it for one reason or another.
Some previous covers
I’d love to share the cover with you all, but apparently it’s normal to make a big deal out of the cover reveal, so I’m wondering if I should leave some time for the drum roll and general excitement. I’m not convinced that all this sort of publication build-up really helps that much for we independents. It’s different if you’re a big publisher and have to persuade retailers to stock your books, and work out what your print run is, and all that sort of thing, but that’s hardly likely to be a problem for me. Do you get excited about people talking about books you can’t buy yet? Or do you just want them to get on with publishing the things and not teasing you with promises? Let me know. Engaging with your audience is supposed to be an important part of marketing a new book but, although I’m here on my blog and on Twitter and Bluesky and Threads, engagement always seems pretty limited. Now the writing is done, I have lots of time to respond to anything people throw at me, so do feel free to ask me questions about writing, the War of 1812, or whatever. I’ll talk about tango, too, if you want.
I guess I ought to be thinking about what I’m going to write next – if I am going to write anything next. As with all my James Burke books, this one ends with a promise that ‘Burke will be back’ but I’m not entirely sure that he will be. I’m hoping that the excitement about Trump threatening to annex Canada might mean that the War of 1812 is suddenly fashionable and that this will be the book that finally breaks through and gets James Burke noticed outside the small circle (including you, dear reader) who have been following his adventures so far. If it doesn’t, I have to ask myself if I want to keep doing this. Learning to make sense of the War of 1812 came dangerously close to hard work and the book has taken me about a year to write. It’s reminded me how much easier it is to write contemporary fantasy and I know there are people who would like me to write more of the Galbraith & Pole books. Or I could just spend more time dancing (although not that much more time as we are already out two or three times most weeks and we’ll be dancing more once outdoor tango starts in the summer).
Anyway, if you want any more James Burke books, please buy this one and tell your friends to buy it too, and PLEASE post a review on Amazon. (If you’ve read any of the others and not yet reviewed – or reviewed them before I was publishing myself – please review them now.)
So that’s my life at the moment. We’re going to have a party on 26 April and someone is making a cake that looks like the White House and the icing will be singed much as the real thing was in 1814. We don’t get as far as 1814 in this book, but if there is another, I’m going to try to get the burning of the White House into that.
I usually review about one book a month on my blog, but I did much less reading of novels last year than I usually do because I was working on Burke and the War of 1812 and a lot of my reading was about Native Americans and the politics of the time. Anyway, the book is almost finished now and I’m catching up with reading and reviewing. I’ve reviewed three books already this year!
What’s the point of book reviews? I often wonder. I mean, does anyone ever look at the reviews I write and think, ‘Oh, Tom thinks that’s a good book. I’d better read it?’ I suppose it’s possible, though it seems unlikely. There are some people with review blogs whose choices have encouraged me to try books I wouldn’t usually have read. Rosie Amber’s blog is particularly good for that. She has a team of reviewers and I always look out for Terry Tyler’s reviews. She has pointed me to some interesting stuff.
Generally, I review books that I think deserve to be better known: books by indie authors and undiscovered gems. There are also writers I fairly regularly review because I just love their work so much. Deborah Swift stands out here.
I think one reason people review is because they like to show off their erudition and good taste. I love detective stories and trashy thrillers, but I don’t often review them. I thought I’d change that. Here are three books I read last year when I couldn’t face anything more serious.
David Briggs is in LA pitching his new software to businesses that remain resolutely unimpressed with it. He’s struggling and goes to the hotel bar to unwind. There he meets an astonishingly beautiful girl and one thing leads to another…
Only this isn’t one unfortunate lapse of judgement that he can put behind him. He’s been targeted by a ruthless crook who proceeds to bleed him dry financially, while ruining his life. The question he doesn’t ask until far too late is: why him? Once you’ve turned your mind to this, you’ll be ahead of the plot, but still gripped as Briggs’ world falls apart around him and one stupid mistake threatens to destroy everyone he loves.
Will reading this book teach you something about the world? Unless you didn’t already know that hooking up with ladies of the night can end badly, no, it won’t. Will it make you a better person? No. Will it keep you desperately turning pages as the frantic pace of the story carries you along. Yes, yes it will.
This is pretty much the epitome of cozy crime. It’s a lovely, relaxing read, the first in a series featuring Dorothy Martin, an American widow who has retired to the quiet cathedral town of Sherebury. This fictional location provides a wonderful English background to the various murders that Dorothy finds herself caught up in. I love seeing England from her American perspective and I enjoy meeting the characters living in and around Sherebury. I’ve already read the first three books in the series and will be back for more. Bliss!
A lot less cozy than The Body in the Transept, this is still a straightforward murder mystery. I was attracted to it because I know Oxford well, but there isn’t a strong sense of place. What you do get is a cast of interesting and (to me, at least) believable characters and a good police procedural story, well told.
