I’m writing the next James Burke book. Or rather, I’m trying to write it but instead I am alternately bashing my head against a keyboard, playing an inordinate amount of Spider Solitaire, and writing this.
Burke in Ireland was a rather more downbeat book than most of the James Burke stories. I had set off to write the usual adventure yarn, but I was distracted by the sheer awfulness of British rule in Ireland at the end of the 18th century. The story I told was closely based on an actual historical event and historical facts meant it had to go in a rather gloomy direction. (Plus I thought that reading about Irish history might help people understand how we got to where we are today.)
Anyway, after that I decided I wanted to get back to the more light-hearted Burke (if stories that regularly feature torture and brutal death can really be described as light-hearted, but they sort of are). So the next book in the series is to revisit Baroness Orczy territory with Burke and the Pimpernel Affair seeing our hero freeing some British agents from a French gaol. The idea was something light and frothy with not too much need to get caught up in the historical detail.
Oh how the gods of HistFic must have laughed. It turns out that almost every element of the plot has involved quite a bit of actual history, from the routes used to smuggle British agents into Paris to the organisation of the gendarmerie. One scene, in which Burke is for once helping a woman to dress rather than undressing her, meant a visit to the V&A to see just how the dress would have been fastened. (My subsequent correspondence with the V&A is still on-going at this point.) Probably the nadir was reading the memoirs of Napoleon’s chief of police, Fouché (really not a nice man).
The V&A says buttons but it looks more like hook and eye to me
The thing that is driving me mad, though, is that the book features an escape from the Conciergerie in Paris. At the time of the story (1809) the Conciergerie was used to house political prisoners and spies. (There were some regular prisoners but they seem to have been there just until trial and they were probably housed in a separate area.)
Now the Conciergerie still exists. I’ve often noticed it on the Île de la Cité and now I know what it is I fully intend to visit. Only that’s tricky now because of covid. Plus even when I do visit it won’t help me that much. The Conciergerie has been substantially rebuilt since 1809 and an initial draft put the whole place the wrong way round because nowadays you enter through a completely different side of the building.
Conciergerie today (edited from Google Street View)
I’ve found plans of the ground floor in 1809, but they aren’t that useful because political prisoners were almost certainly kept one floor up. Part of that area has been “preserved” but preserved in a way that has completely destroyed the original architecture to make what is effectively a shrine to (of all people) Marie Antoinette. (And that, in a sudden burst of good taste, seems to be no longer open to the public.)
We do have descriptions of the first floor – or at least of parts of it. So, in an attempt to be realistic, I’ve had to try to reconstruct the plans of somewhere the actual geography of which is almost totally lost. The problem is that ‘almost’. Just enough is known to pretty well guarantee that, whatever I write, someone will explain that the corridor I’ve put from A to B would actually have had to have gone by C. (I’ve even found an old account that explains that pretty well the only specific location I’ve given must be wrong. Rewrites beckon.)
Conciergerie in 1790
So there are the geographical problems. Now we come to the organisation.
The Conciergerie is part gaol, part court-house, part archive, and part administrative office. It’s an old royal palace. If Fouché had an office there (and it’s quite credible that he did) security would have been an issue. It’s the sort of building where there might well be some civilian gaolers but there are also likely to have been military guards. I’ve assumed that with the fighting in the Peninsula and the recent war with Austria, quite a few of these will be veterans who have returned to France injured and who are either being allocated to less demanding duties or awaiting postings back to their regiments. Do I know this? No, but I do have some idea how armies work and it seems a reasonable assumption (and one of the reasons I’m mentioning it now is so that anybody who knows different can correct me). It seems that prisoners who are being held there for interrogation as spies will be under special guard and I’ve assumed the military. Probably not the gendarmerie, who consider themselves above that sort of thing. (Gendarmes were elite troops.) So I have guards watching over a small number of political prisoners/spies. I’ve put on just a couple of guards doing the actual static guarding. I think they will spend most of their time sitting down, looking at an empty corridor with a few cells, and being bored out of their minds. But eventually (and let’s not go into the details because spoilers) there’s a breakout attempt. There will be a fight. It’s the dramatic climax of a James Burke novel: of course there’s a fight. So the question of what the soldiers are armed with becomes pretty crucial. At which point I turn to the wonderful hive-mind that is Napoleonic enthusiasts on Twitter and they say (without having been given all these details): muskets.
At one level, muskets make a lot of sense. But they are heavy and these guys spend most of their time sitting in a guard room. And if you are, for example, entering a cell to kick someone who is making too much noise, a musket not only gets in the way but can rapidly become a liability when the prisoner leaps up and grabs it off you. It’s not as if you are going to have it loaded in any case. If you carry it loaded as you go about your daily business I reckon the chances of an accidental discharge are very high and the chances that it will fire when you want it too are quite low (but again this is an expert’s chance to tell me I’m wrong).
I’m guessing that you might have muskets in the guardroom so that you can present arms and generally look soldierly for officer’s inspection, but that they mostly stay there. I think by 1809 the chances of you having an infantry short sabre are low but that you might well carry a bayonet on your belt and use that at a pinch.
Who knows? Hopefully someone reading this who will put an answer in the comments or (given that this is WordPress and commenting isn’t always as easy as it should be) write to me at tom@tomwilliamsauthor.co.uk.
Anyway, those are some of the things to consider in escaping from the Conciergerie. Let’s not even start on court protocol in the Tuileries (I’m sure Napoleon had it all documented but I think I can assume nobody’s read it lately so that’s something I don’t have to worry too much about), or the state of the road from Paris to Malmaison.
When I wrote my contemporary fantasy Something Wicked, research meant a couple of trips to Brompton Cemetery. (There’s quite a lot about tango in it, but I knew that already.) It was much easier to write than historical fiction and (because fantasy fans are voracious readers) very profitable. No wonder I know several HistFic authors moving into fantasy.
I’m planning to stick with historical fiction for now – and not just James Burke. (If you haven’t read The White Rajah yet, please give it a go.) But I am tempted by Urban Fantasy. Meanwhile, if any of you have an encyclopaedic knowledge of French prisons in 1809, with special reference to the Conciergerie, please do get in touch.
So here we are: The White Rajah is back on Amazon after a break while I did all the boring stuff that let me get the rights back and put it out again under my own ‘Big Red’ imprint.
It’s a big day. What can I say that I haven’t said already? Not a lot really.
It’s the first novel I ever wrote and it’s been tweaked a couple of times, though what I’m publishing here is the same as the version published by Endeavour.
When I first wrote it, it was turned down by several mainstream publishers as (according to my agent) “too difficult for a first book from an unknown author”. He told me I should write some more accessible mainstream historical fiction first. Hence the Burke books – all five of them so far and a sixth in progress.
Meanwhile The White Rajah was published by a one-woman publisher in the USA (JMS Books) who did an amazingly good job with it. The Burke books, though, weren’t a good fit for her company so they went to a small UK publisher and The White Rajah went too.
It was not the best of times for publishing. The White Rajah was eventually followed by two more books to make a trilogy, but the books remained “difficult” and though there were occasional promises of more aggressive marketing, sales languished.
With the change in the way books are sold, I decided to self-publish. I started by republishing the first three Burke books and the results showed conclusively that my books do better with the marketing love that self-published books get lavished on them. Two more Burke books and two contemporary fantasies followed and were successful enough for me to decide to add The White Rajah to the self-published list. (The two other books will follow.)
So here we are. The White Rajah is a more reflective novel than the Burke books. There are fights and dashing adventures. There is even a love story (though not a conventional one). But the book raises issues about colonialism and the Empire project. There are a lot of questions but ultimately no answers. Perhaps as we are all encouraged to look again at Britain’s 19th century history, this is a book whose time has come. Hollywood seems to think so: a film based on the life of James Brooke (the eponymous White Rajah) is due out next month.
I hope you read it and enjoy it. Let me know what you think. As life moves back to normal I hope I may be able to get out and talk about it if any of you want to ask me.
I’ve been working on the next book about James Burke and I have a scene where he is fighting his way out of the Conciegerie in Paris. (This one is a lot of fun and a bit of a relief after the rather heavy story in Burke in Ireland.) I was looking up some floor plans of the old Conciergerie building when I realised that some key elements are still standing and the building is open to the public. I got quite excited. I could make a trip to Paris and explore the building. It would be fun and it would get me into the zone for writing Burke’s adventures there.
Only, of course, I can’t. Paris really isn’t a good place to be right now and, besides, the Conciergerie is closed.
It’s thrown me rather. I’m only working on the first draft and, unusually for me, my first draft is fast and dirty. (Most people say you shouldn’t edit as you go, but I can’t leave a mistake on the page once I notice it.) So I should be able to just leave this bit open and carry on with the rest. But writing (even though I write spasmodically) has been one of the things that I have been able to keep going through the last year. There has been little or no chance to dance with tango friends, going abroad to ski is out of the question, we have, for months on end, been unable to visit our son and even the street skates have been cancelled. Now covid is coming for my writing!
It’s disconcerting.
I think this period, where we are finally supposed to be able to leave home but all the places we might go remain closed to us – this is, in many ways, harder to deal with than just being stuck in place. As we re-emerge, blinking, into what I think will be a very changed world, we will, like all animals coming out of a long hibernation, find the transition back to daylight quite difficult.
Stay well; remember your mental health is as important as your physical health. Look after yourselves.
Last Friday was publication day for Burke in Ireland which is the third new book I have published in lockdown. (They weren’t all written in lockdown, though Something Wicked mostly was. Plus I had a short story that was published in a collection last summer. There should have been parties. (The publisher was going to throw a proper launch party for the short stories.) Something Wicked should have been on sale at tango clubs (there’s quite a lot of tango in it). I should have been getting drunk and having fun with friends. And, instead … nothing. The sound of tumbleweed rolling across the desert of my social life. It’s affected sales – of course it has. There’s no excitement, there’s no buzz, there’s no word of mouth.
So, like everyone at some point over the past year, I’ve allowed myself a brief pity party, but then the sun came out and I was able to enjoy the good weather outside. I’m so lucky to live near Richmond Park.
And the river …
I even got to cycle as far as Hyde Park.
And then today I found this lovely review for Something Wicked.
See: life’s not so bad. And lockdown can’t fo on forever, can it?
Of course, you could always make things even better by buying one of my lockdown books (or read them on Kindle Unlimited). Click the images to be taken to the Amazon page.
How have you been spending lockdown? And what do you do when it’s all getting just too depressing?
I recently read a blog post from Kate Vane (@k8vane) about how, if you review books, worrying about star ratings messes with the way that you enjoy your reading.
I couldn’t agree more. Just knowing that you are going to have to write a review changes your whole approach to your reading, and not necessarily in a good way. And star ratings are the tool of the devil.
Why I review on my blog
I’ve already blogged about how I was planning to cut back on reviewing. Since I wrote that (just six weeks ago as I write this) I’ve done a couple of book reviews. They take time to write and are in addition to my regular blogs. So why on earth do I do it? In these two cases (and there are more on the way) I was asked to: not necessarily by the author. I get asked to review by authors, publishers and journals and I get books from NetGalley who expect a review in exchange for a regular supply of quality free books. And I like having my books reviewed, so it seems only fair to review books by other writers. Even so, I do often have my doubts. Then I get thanks from a reader who has enjoyed my review or from an author who is grateful for something I have said and then I seem to keep going.
So I write my review. My reviews are quite long and will probably mention things I felt didn’t quite work as well as the things that did. Some authors are less than thrilled at this approach, but the blog post is supposed to be a ‘proper’ review for critical readers. An edited (usually totally positive) version will make its way to Amazon in time. Which is where we meet the evil star system.
Star ratings
By the time it gets to Amazon, my 800 word nuanced blog post has already been reduced to 600 words or less explaining why it’s a good book. (If it isn’t a good book, I’ll generally try not to review it, though I’m happy to make an exception for people like Jacob Rees-Mogg.) But then my 600 words have to be reduced to one of five star ratings. It’s mad.
(The obvious answer is not to post on Amazon, but writers need those Amazon reviews to make sales, so in the end I’m going to post.)
What does it all mean?
Kate (Remember her? She wrote the blog that started this off) is one of those people who avoids 5* ratings.
I only give it 5* if it’s exceptional
A lot of my friends are like that, which is annoying if they are reviewing my books, because analysis of Amazon ratings shows that most people give 5* or (much less often) 1* ratings. Basically, they rate books as ‘Great’ (5*) or ‘Rubbish’ (1*). The middle rankings are less likely to feature.
EDIT There has been a lot of discussion on this on my Twitter feed so I’m adding this useful summary graph from rendors.com (as posted by them on Quora)
But whether you tend to 4* or 5*, there really aren’t that many options for reviewers like me and Kate. Both of us avoid ratings under 3. She avoids 5 and I avoid 3 (we’ll see why in a moment), so basically both of us end up usually choosing between 3* and 4* (Kate) or 4* and 5* (me). Basically, for most books, my 800 word review has come down to a binary choice.
Interpreting the ratings
Kate gives an explanation of her ratings. 3* is ‘good but flawed’, 4* means she enjoyed it and 5*, as we’ve seen, is ‘exceptional’.
I’ve always been nervous to explain the ratings I give, but here they are:
5* — I recommend this book to anyone reading my review
4* — I think this book is a good read for anyone who likes this genre (“It’s the sort of thing you’ll like if you like that sort of thing.”)
3* — It’s OK
2* — It’s not OK
1* — This book is a disaster.
The horror of the 3* rating
I have a friend who wrote a review of a book of mine, praising it to the skies and then giving it a 3* rating. When I pointed out that she had given it a negative review, she said that of course she hadn’t.
The thing is that if you are rating on Amazon, you are using the Amazon rating system and Amazon considers 3* a “critical” review. People are continually arguing with me about this, but Amazon are totally upfront about it. Click on ‘See all reviews’ for a book and this pops up:
Also remember that (as I said above) the commonest rating on Amazon is 5*. Most books will average somewhere around 4*. Giving them a 3* review will generally pull their rating down and, by and large, I don’t want to pull authors down. So I avoid 3* reviews. You may well feel differently, but just be aware what you are doing. A 3* review is not neutral.
Being nice – or not
This is the nub of the why I personally find the horror of the star rating hanging over me while I read.
I’m happy to say that I think a character is under-developed or that there are some unlikely coincidences holding a plot together. I know that I upset some writers by being critical, but I’m writing a review on my blog for people who are interested in writing. I doubt they will reject a book that I review (remember I generally only review books I like) because I said that I thought there was an unrealistic portrayal of women in the 19th century. It’s pretty well a given nowadays that 19th century women will be portrayed unrealistically: it’s only because I write about the 19th century myself that I either notice or care. But when the review gets onto Amazon people will reject a book because it has a 3* average rating. So what if I think that the portrayal of women as feisty lawyers is just too much to allow a 4* review? (I refused to review a book recently that centred on a woman planning a legal career before the law was changed to allow women lawyers in Britain.) If the book, apart from this one detail that hasn’t worried the publisher and won’t worry most readers, is quite a good read, do I post 3* or 4*? It’s clearly not really worth 4*, but most people aren’t going to be worried by its historical howler, so is it really just ’OK’ and getting the dreaded 3* rating? Or do I say it’s three and a bit and nudge up to four?
In the case of the book I mentioned, my decision was that, as it was likely 3* and I care about basic history, I would not read or review it at all. But there are other cases which are more marginal and there my rule of thumb is ‘always nudge up’. If the author is well-known with a big publisher behind them, then my rating doesn’t matter and I can unleash my inner critical Rottweiler, but self-published authors and writers at small presses rely on those Amazon ratings for their survival. Yes, if they are seriously bad books I will not rate them. If they deserve to be driven out of the writing community I will give them 2* or even 1*. But how many writers are so truly terrible that it is for me (or almost anyone else) to say that they just shouldn’t be writing? Because, as it gets harder and harder to get books seen in a crowded marketplace, a poor star rating can destroy any chance of serious sales. (And, in this context, ‘serious sales’ can mean hitting three figures.)
When I write a review, I can speak as I find. I have annoyed friends by being less than gushing about their work. But they have (mostly) forgiven me. But when I have to produce that wretched, meaningless, frankly obscene, Amazon star rating, I know that I can do real harm. Knowing that can suck some of the pleasure out of the book.
It’s a funny time to be living through, isn’t it? On the one hand, there is so little going on, while on the other I seem to be overwhelmed by things that need doing. So here is what’s happening in my world.
I’m publishing my second contemporary urban fantasy book next week. Something Wicked is out on the 19th and is on pre-order now. (There will be a paperback edition very soon.) What’s Urban Fantasy? Well this one is set around Brompton Cemetery and it has vampires in. Does that help? It’s got quite a lot of tango in too, because I really like tango. (And so do vampires.)
Something Wicked is my first full-length contemporary book. I dipped my toe in the water last year with a novella, Dark Magic. I’ve recently released an audio version of that. It will be available on Audible shortly but until then you can already get it through Google Play, Apple and others. To celebrate that (and as a sort of warm-up act for Something Wicked) I’ve had the Kindle edition of Dark Magic on offer this week at 99p/99c. The offer goes on until early Monday morning if you still want to catch it. (Do. I’m reliably informed that people laugh. And get scared.)
Anyway, what with promoting Dark Magic and making final pre-launch tweaks to Something Wicked, there hasn’t been that much time to work on the next James Burke book. Well, next but one, actually, because the next one is already written and Burke in Ireland will be published on 19 March. That’s a darker side of James Burke and I’ll be interested to see what people make of it.
I do have to get a move on with my next story, though, because I know that there are people waiting to see what happens after the retreat from Talavera that ended Burke in the Peninsula. I don’t want to make any promises as we’re in the very early stages of sketching out the story, but it should involve an undercover mission into France and, if I can manage it, at least a passing encounter with the Empress Josephine. I do hope I can work her in, because she was a really interesting character. Burke has already been intimately involved with a queen and a princess (in Burke in the Land of Silver), relationships that the real James Burke probably had. I doubt he’ll get to sleep with an Empress but at this stage of the plotting, who knows?
I’m not done with promoting existing titles, though, because I’m taking back control (to coin a phrase) of the John Williamson stories. The success of the relaunched Burke series has made me realise that my books do better when I’m able to keep a closer eye on them. The three books (The White Rajah, Cawnpore and Coming Home) are no longer available on Kindle for the moment, but all three will be republished over the summer. That will mean more cover designs, more adverts and yet more struggling with formatting and cover templates, but if it means more readers, it will all be worthwhile.
So: a short blog post this week. Now you know what I’m up to, I hope you’ll forgive me.
