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.
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.
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.
Last week I reviewed Kirsten McKenzie’s latest: a thriller about very modern vampires running a property empire from the heart of New York.
I love books that put a twist on vampire stories to allow a vampire sub-culture to flourish. That’s the thinking behind my Galbraith & Pole series. This sees the urbane 21st century vampire, Pole, working alongside the very human Chief Inspector Galbraith to deal with crimes that involve the supernatural realm. Pole is anxious that these are solved quietly in case people turn on his kind, while Galbraith just wants to avoid the panic that would spread if the world at large knew of the monsters that walk among us.
As Galbraith gets to know Pole better, he comes to realise that Pole is not a monster, but a creature very like him, but with some specific dietary requirements and an unfortunate reaction to sunlight. Over the centuries, though, Pole and his kind have learned how to adapt to what they call the Mortal world and Pole tries very hard to live a decent life without killing people for their blood.
My vampires and those in McKenzie’s Vampires of York Tower both pass unnoticed in our world. Both have emotional lives as well and, though Pole is not prone to show his feelings, he does tend to get sentimental about tango.
“Ah, the tango.” They had passed out into the square by now and Pole cast his glance upward at the sky. Galbraith thought it looked as though he was gazing up towards the moon, but it was a cloudy night and above them was only the glow of the lights of London. “Tango is, I think, a point at which your world and ours converge. The music speaks of great beauty and unbearable sorrow; of love and of death. Humans and Others both find it touches them. And the dance hall provides a neutral territory – a safe place to meet.”
– Something Wicked
For Valentine’s Day this year, I’ve decided to show a little more of this side of my favourite vampire. Next Friday, my blog will be carrying a FREE short story, Love, Death, and Tango. It’s a stand-alone story but people who have not read any of the Galbraith & Pole books might enjoy reading Something Wicked first. And to make that easier, I will be giving it away free on Monday and Tuesday (10th and 11th). The remaining two Galbraith & Pole stories will be just 99p/99c on Kindle from Monday to Friday next week (10th to 14th).
Writers give their books away to generate interest in them. We hope people will enjoy the free book and read more of the series. And they hope people will review them.
I know reviewing can be a pain, but just a few lines makes a huge difference. When the Galbraith & Pole books first came out they got some very good reviews but, as time has passed, people have stopped reviewing them and this means that they no longer sell a lot. Unfortunately for Galbraith & Pole fans, I write historical fiction (the James Burke series) that sells rather better. That means that I am under some pressure to write more historical fiction and less Urban Fantasy. I like writing Urban Fantasy, but the sad truth is that it’s the historical fiction that sells.
In the end, what books get written is decided by readers. If you want to see more Urban Fantasy, please review the books you read. And if you enjoy Galbraith & Pole, please take advantage of the offer price to buy them. Thank you
On New Year’s Eve I wrote about the year gone by, but now, with Twelfth Night almost on us, it’s time to look to the future.
I’ve been talking a bit lately about the latest Burke book, Burke and the War of 1812. It’s set, as you’d expect, in the war with the USA, which ran as a bit of a sideshow while Britain was more occupied with the war against Napoleon. It’s not often talked about on this side of the Atlantic. If it’s remembered at all, it’s probably because that’s the war where we burned down the White House. It was a strange and rather scrappy little conflict but it cast a long shadow. It defined the relationship between the USA and Canada for a long time. (No-one likes being invaded.) In fact, with Trump expressing his somewhat idiosyncratic notions on the USA’s relationships with its neighbours, memories of 1812 seem to be stirring for the first time in a while.
Last week, the premier of Ontario, Doug Ford, was asked on Fox News about Trump’s reported joke about Canada’s joining the U.S.
Ford complimented Trump’s sense of humor. “It’s a funny comment. I guess he’s still upset that, you know, in 1812, we burnt down your White House, and he’s holding a grudge after 212 years,” he said.
NBC News: Dec 10 2024
In a recent interview on Fox Business, Canadian businessman and “Shark Tank” star Kevin O’Leary expressed support for President-elect Donald Trump’s suggestion that Canada could become the 51st US state … Rooted partly in the 19th-century notion of “Manifest Destiny,” this concept has been fueled by historical events like the American Revolution, the War of 1812, and brief 19th-century annexation sentiments in Canada…
Pakistan Today: Jan 3 2025
If I were President Trump, I’d think twice before invading Canada. The last time the U.S. tried something like that— back in the War of 1812 —it didn’t exactly end well.
Jean Charest (former Deputy Prime Minister of Canada) on X: Dec 3 2024
For me, writing about that war has meant learning about a whole new theatre of war and the political background to the conflict. The book sees Burke spying in Washington and fighting alongside both Native Americans and British troops. I’ve done a lot of reading in my efforts to get things right and I’m still not sure I have. A couple of beta readers think the plot holds together but I’ll be sending it to more people who know enough about the time and the place to pick up some of the errors I’m sure remain. Let me know if you’re interested in helping with that.
It’s been harder work than most of my Burke series. I’m a lazy writer and I find the mechanics of writing hard work. If I manage a thousand words a day, I feel I’ve done well. I started writing sometime around April, having already done a fair bit of reading, and I’m pretty much written out. I suspect I may always feel this way at this stage but, right now, I’m tempted to walk away from James Burke. This will be the eighth book in the series and writing them just doesn’t seem to be as easy as it was.
Of course, a few good reviews and some sales may make me feel differently. I know writers are always asking people to leave reviews, and it’s true that they do sell books, but it’s also true that good reviews can keep us writing. As do sales. All the Burke books are available on Kindle at £3.99 or less. If you want me (or any of your other favourite authors) to write more (or faster) buying their books is a great motivator.
It’s been a long time since the last Burke book, partly because in 2023 I published the third of the Galbraith & Pole vampire fantasies. I’ve missed Galbraith & Pole while I’ve been writing Burke. Urban Fantasy is much easier to write than historical fiction, though the only time I’ve ever had to read 16th century French for my research was while I was writing the second in the series, Eat the Poor. With only three written, I’m still enjoying them. I saw a review somewhere that said it looked as if I was just having fun and taking the reader along for the ride, which is pretty much how I feel. If 2025 sees me writing something new, it will probably be the next Galbraith & Pole.
It’s about 15 years since my first novel, The White Rajah. Burke and the War of 1812 will be the 15th book. Perhaps it’s not surprising that I am drawing breath and wondering what comes next.
I’ve been traditionally published by a small press, but nowadays I self-publish. I’ve enjoyed the freedom and, unexpectedly, the improved sales that come with self-publishing. Still, it can be hard work and I don’t enjoy the marketing side of it – which is, perhaps, why I don’t give that nearly the attention that I should. It’s probably a bit late in the day to start the whole business of trying to find an agent and a publisher again but if anyone has an interest in buying the rights to an existing series, by now I’d probably be open to them. It won’t happen though.
So at the start of the New Year, like so many other people, I’m looking uncertainly at the paths ahead and wondering which one to take. There are a lot of alternatives to writing more fiction. There are tangos to dance, new places to see, even perhaps a return to non-fiction. We’ll see. In the meantime, I have a book to tidy up.
Burke and the War of 1812 should be published this Spring.
