The Lady Killers

Dinner with Charlaine

Rhys very late on Wendesday evening--I've been traveling all day to the Anhinga Writer's Conference in Gainesville, FL and just come back from dinner with the rest of the faculty, including my old friend and fabulous lady Charlaine Harris. Charlaine, for those of you who have lived under a stone for the past couple of years, is the creator of the Sookie Stackhouse vampire mystery series that is now the hit HBO TV series True Blood.

Charlaine is our beacon of hope for all in the mystery world. She was a midlist mystery writer for years, writing two well-appreciated but not earth-shattering series, then she took a huge risk and wrote something that defied categorizing--a funny, sexy, Southern vampire mystery series. Most publishers didn't want to touch it. After all the mantra these days is "where does it go on the shelf?" but one publisher took the risk and the series came out to little fanfare. Then the fans found out about it and gradually by word of mouth it built up a reputation. Then HBO came to her and the rest, as they say, is history. At one time earlier this year she had six books in the top ten on the NYT list.

And the interesting thing is that the whole mystery community is delighted for her. We are always a supportive bunch, not seeing each other as rivals but as fellow pilgrims, and seeing all these good things happen for Charlaine remind us that they can happen to any of us one day.

But tonight at dinner I had a chance to see the other side of fame and fortune. Crazy people now email her and tell her how she has to write her books. She meets people who have filed their teeth into vampire fangs. She needs security when she appears in public.  She has to give several interviews each week.

So maybe I'm glad that I write about genteel aristocrats in 1930s London. I don't expect crazed followers of royalty to stalk me and demand that I change my books, or obsessed historians fantasizing about Molly Murphy. I did get a hate letter once from a Welshman who claimed that I made Wales look primitive and backward in my Evan Evans books. He also said that I knew nothing about Welsh police procedure--which was funny as I'd sat down with police at headquarters in Colwyn Bay and in Caernarfon before I wrote the book.

Tomorrow I give the first of my workshops. Let's hope there are no wacky would be writers waiting for me...

Almost at the End

I'm sending the end of the world in on Friday, if I haven't melted away entirely by then.  Portland is supposed to be cool and rainy, not bitterly hot and sunny.  The zucchini seem to be the only things enjoying it.

Researching this book has been both illuminating and depressing.  I discovered early on that even non-monotheistic peoples have the same pattern in their end time beliefs -- except the Babylonians who seemed to think the worst was over with the Great Flood.  After that, the hardest part was deciding what to put in.  Rather like a novel for which one has done piles of research and found really cool stuff.  But most of that stuff doesn't advance the plot at all.  Really, once I'd discussed one cult that followed a charismatic leader to its doom, that pretty much covered it.

But there were a lot of interesting permutations that might not be well known, so I threw those in , like the Mumyjums and the Doomsealers.  Also, it was fascinating to realize how many of our western concepts of the end of the world began before the dawn of recorded history.  On the other hand, many that we take for granted now started in novels and films.  So be careful what you invent.  The next generation may assume it's fact and make a religion out of it!

Sharan

Introducing Trillian

I have just adopted a dog from the county animal shelter, after 8 months without. Trillian is a border collie/black Lab mix, about 4 years old. Her face is very like Willow's--the dog I lost last November after 13  wonderful years.

 She was so scared when she was picked up (collarless) that they couldn't give her her shots, so she was kept in their isolation unit. When I first saw her through the bars, about a week later, she backed out of the cage into her outdoor area. I kept talking to her, quietly, and she came in to listen. Then they let me see her one on one in their big outdoor pen. At first she wouldn't come near, but soon she was sitting beside me and letting me hug her. Next time I visited, she let me comb her.

She came home with me on Saturday, and has been learning so fast ever since! Just now, she actually pushed through the dog flap without my opening it a little first. She's been out on the school field behind my house (still on the leash for the present) and gets on very peacefully with my friends and their dogs.

She's a sweetie!

Book news: I've been wondering why I was sent 4 copies of the Manchester University alumnus magazine. Flipping through it at lunchtime, I discovered I'm quoted in it, in an article about students' leisure reading. To tell the truth, I have no memory whatsoever about ever sending the info! I got several paragraphs, including several mentions of my books :-)

And I just signed a contract for a large print edition of one of my Regencies. MISS JACOBSON'S JOURNEY, originally published in 1992, has a Jewish hero and heroine, a bit out of the way for the usual run of the genre. Also available as an ebook at RegencyReads and other ebook sellers.

Lastly: my website host, Geocities, is going to stop hosting free websites. Any suggestions for a good host will be welcome.

Carola

RIP Harry Patch

Jane here, (late blogging because I was out visiting friends yesterday,) continuing the historical theme. This week Harry Patch, the last surviving British army veteran of World War 1, died aged 111. He hadn’t spoken about his war experiences till he reached 100; then he began to share them, and as he had all his marbles, his memories and insights were telling, reminding us all, young and old, what we owe to the “lost generation”.

I’m no expert on the first world war, and what I know about it is what “everyone knows”: the horrors of the trenches, death, wounds, courage, loyalty, determination, leading at last to a victory of sorts, that left the world changed for ever. I’ve read some poetry and memoirs – Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves. I haven’t read much at all written by the tommies in the trenches, men like Private Harry Patch.

My ignorance was brought home to me yesterday, by a very interesting comment on BBC radio from Professor Jay Winter of Yale University, a specialist on World War 1. He made the obvious point that the image we all have about the first World War owes an enormous amount to the poetry and memoirs of the men who fought in it, because they had experienced it all at first hand. Then he pointed out something I hadn’t taken on board, though I should have: that those poets and memoir-writers, with just a couple of exceptions, were junior officers, “of the junior officer class”, because being an officer was still largely a class thing in those days; most of them came from backgrounds of relative wealth and privilege. How much does that affect their view, and ours?

Nobody who endured those four dreadful years could escape their horror, whatever their background, and whether they were on active service or on the home front. Nobody could fail to realise that victory in 1918 didn’t produce a “land fit for heroes.”  Europe had lost a generation, and the loss affected everyone.

But what about the way we view the Great War today, generations later? It’s still customary to consider the years just before 1914 as a golden age for Britain in many ways, a long beautiful summer which the storms of war cruelly shattered. For the young officers that must be how it felt.  They were keenly aware of what had been lost, over and above the tragedies of the war itself. Their world of  privilege, if not actually destroyed, was shaken to its foundations, and those foundations continued to crumble.

Yet looking back – and I agree with whoever said that hindsight gives us 20-20 vision – we can see that World War 1 resulted in progress. Despite recession, and another war so soon after the “war to end war,” society changed for the better for most of its members, certainly for people like Harry Patch. And I'm sure, if I seek them out, I'll find people who took this view also at the time, but whose work was overshadowed and is less well known.

Isn’t this a graphic illustration of the truth that confronts everyone writing about a past era? Make good use of the words of contemporaries from your chosen period, as long as you’re aware of exactly who is doing the writing.

Buzzing about Colorado ... take one

Ann Parker here, Monday's child, stampeding in early on Sunday. I'm writing this from the Breckenridge abode of mystery author Beth Groundwater ... Beth and I did a joint signing at the Breckenridge Welcome Center to benefit the Summit County library. We took turns standing out front of the Center, handing out bookmarks and chatting up passersby ("Do you like mysteries?").
Today was a "get to know Breckenridge's past" day, with an historical walking tour, followed by a fascinating wander through the Breckenridge home of Barney L. Ford, an escaped slave who (as the website explains) "prospered and became a prominent entrepreneur and black civil rights leader in Colorado." There's more information about Barney Ford here on the Breckenridge Heritage site and here at BlackPast.org. And heeeere's Beth (below), bookmarks in hand.
 

Outcast Dove

The ninth book in my Catherine Levendeur series, The Outcast Dove, has finally been reissued in trade paperback. My publisher took a while deciding the format. It's now just the same as the hardcover, only cheaper.  I'm pleased because it's really my favorite of them all, Solomon's book, dealing with his personal demons and the tightrope that all Jews at that time lived on.  In case you didn't see the cover the first time, here it is.

I also had to stop writing this blog to call the paramedics after my mom fell and neither of us could get her up again.  Maybe I should order new knees after all.  Never a dull moment.

Sharan

Picky, picky, picky!

Rhys here. My goodness, Wednesday comes around quickly when you're rushing all over the place, speaking at bookstores at night and entertaining three lively little grandchildren during the day! I've been enjoying the posts on getting history right. I also hated history at school. All those dates and kings and nothing about real people that would have been fascinating. That is why I love historical mysteries so much, both the reading and the writing. For the first time I feel I'm there.

I was doing an event last night with fellow Lady Killer Ann Parker and with Juliette Blackwell who writes a new series about a witch (not the Harry Potter sort but a real esrious witch who brews herbs etc). And the subject came up about getting everything right and readers finding inaccuracies both in history and in place.

The problem for me is not knowing what I don't know. I try to do good research. I can look up all the major facts for one of my stories. I have my map of New York, 1900 for Molly and my London map for Georgie. I have photos. I have reference books. I go to London and New York and walk routes that my characters take. I interview people. But there are always going to be silly little things that I wlil get wrong and some "expert" will not hesitate to tell me I have done so. "Taxies didn't have meters in 1930" or things of that ilk. Mostly I'm really glad to learn something I didn't know as it enriches my knowledge for future books. That the royal family prefered Daimlers to Rolls Royces, for example at that time. Several people have written to tell me that.

But sometimes the mistake is so unimportant--so picky--that I wonder why the reader bothered to write to me. I'd leap to write to someone who put a skunk in UK (Martha Grimes did it once. I've never really taken to her since), but things like saying a particularl train used to leave a ten past ten and not ten o'clock. Does it really matter? Does it impact the validity of the story?

How I envy Jane and her Roman Britain times. We have a general overview of their lives but so much is not known that she has the power to make it up when necessary. I can't make anything up about 1930s London. I'll even get a letter if I put a dish on the menu at Rules and they didn't serve it in 1930. Okay, I suppose it matters to someone who was there nd who knows and I suppose it does detract from their enjoyment of the world I have recreated if a small nagging detail is wrong.

But in the end it is fiction. If my characters didn't really exist then I have actually created a parallel universe London and New York for them and in my version things can be ever so slightly different! I remember once meeting a woman in Wales when I was there for my Constable Evans books. As you may know, Llanfair was a fictitious village but I had to put it in a real setting because of all the routes up Snowdon. So the locals know where it is.

She said, "I've a bone to pick with you. When the car goes off the cliff in that book, why didn't he just run to the Youth Hostel?"

I replied to her "Because I am God and in my world I have obliterated the youth hostel." 

I should try saying that in reponse to all picky picky pickies in future!

So dear readers, give us a break. You have no idea how hard we work on research. If the mistake we made is one that we really should know and really impacts the story, then we should hear about it. If however it's a piece of trivia that really doesn't matter, please shut up. Writers have fragile egos and telling them they goofed will send them into deep depression. They may never write another word.

fact or fiction?

In the interests of full disclosure, let me say right away that I am not and never have been a historian. History is one of the few subjects I failed at school. I got tired of dates, kings, and battles and (with a few other precipitating factors) wrote an exam paper in the style of 1066 and All That, a book that anyone interested in English history should know. I therefore dropped history after the fourth form (ie at 15, for US readers). That took me as far as the Battle of the Salamander--oops, that's the Battle of Salamanca, date unknown. 1812? 1813? 1814? Somewhere around there. Does it matter that I'm not sure?

Well, it would matter if I was writing a novel set in whatever year it was, or in which the battle was mentioned by someone who ought to know. I wrote 32 Regencies, set between 1805 (actually pre-Regency) and 1821 (when the Regent had become king but was not yet crowned, owing to a dispute over whether his wife would be crowned queen at his side). I learned as much as I could, in my non-historian way, about whatever year a given book was set in, and did my best to be accurate.

In part that's because I'm an obsessive looker-up of unimportant trifles. It's not just history I try to get  right, it's whether a street runs uphill from east to west or vice versa (I remember Jane's story about the inn she had to move because there was no source of water where she originally put it). If I'm writing about a real place, I want to be sure I'm describing it the way it is. I went to Padstow, Bodmin, and Launceston on my recent trip to England to make sure I was describing them correctly in my Cornish mysteries. I can't always go everywhere I'd like to, alas. That's one reason a lot of my books are set in imaginary places! But even my imaginary places are in a certain part of the country and conform to the kind of countryside found there.

My flowers, wild and garden,  bloom at the proper time of year. I don't have skunks running around the Lake District chasing sheep (unlike a certain Regency author who shall remain nameless).  When I describe an Aikido move, it's after consulting someone who practises Aikido about what she would do in the given circumstances.

Obviously, I believe in accuracy. Within reason. As Ann points out, we're never really going to know what it was like living in the past. Any two contemporary accounts of the same event are likely to differ. It doesn't really matter if 90% of the small proportion of people in the world who recognise the name Henry VIII believe he had VIII wives and executed all of them. 90% of the people who read our books will never notice the very few mistakes the 7 of us make ;-)  and most will not even notice misspellings, bad grammar or typos.

So let's not get our knickers in a twist. Let's forgive ourselves, each other, and all those authors who don't give a damn about accuracy, historical or not.

I'm not saying history doesn't matter. That old saying about those who don't know their history are doomed to repeat it makes a lot of sense. (I resisted looking up who said it!) But it applies to the broad sweep of history, not the nitpicking details. The most important history book I ever read was Jared Diamond's Collapse, not a laundry list from 1816.

If anyone's wondering what the other subjects were that I failed, they were Physics and Domestic Science.

Just to brighten things up a bit, here's a picture of a Historic Building.

 

Does anyone know when it was built? Does it matter?

Carola

... All Facts and Nothing But ...

Ann Parker, Monday's child for the Lady Killers here. I had to grin at Jane's post on Fact, Fiction, and Rubbish. It's true that it's often hard to figure how what's "real" and what's not when reading about the past. Whenever I read through the newspapers of the day (the day being 1880), I have to keep reminding myself that, even though it's the NEWSpaper, it ain't necessarily fact. Daily Chronicle reporter Orth Stein was particularly notorious in this regard. As Edward Blair notes in Leadville: Colorado's Magic City, "When there was no news, Stein was at his imaginative best." Among other flights of investigative fancy, Stein invented and reported upon a vast cavern north of town, complete with stalactites, stalagmites, a bottomless lake, and an underground river.

By the same token, I try to remember to "calibrate" what I find in the letters of the day, depending on who is the writer and who was the recipient. A young man writes home to his mother about Leadville, noting in passing that he, of course, NEVER sets foot in the red-light district of town. Uh-huh.

Written words, especially when set in type, look so real. So "true." But it pays to remember that they are, after all, only words, put down by individuals with their own agendas and fallibilities, and words can lie. In the newspapers, in personal letters, in books. I suppose, thinking about it just now, photographs are somewhat the same. One can photograph a street scene at a certain time of day to show it deserted or full of people, for instance. But at least there was no Photoshop in those days!

Fact, fiction, and rubbish

Jane here, picking up Sharan’s train of thought about the amount of un-historical information that gets passed around, presented as fact. Speaking as a historian and a writer, of fiction now and of non-fiction in my BBC days, I think one of the most important skills I any writer needs is the ability to tell the difference between fact, fiction, and rubbish.

It’s amazing, and rather depressing, how much stuff is repeated and repeated, in articles, books, and especially on the Web, as gospel truth, and yet is factually plain wrong. And often it’s used as the basis of argument by people who should know better; people who have the skill and resources to check whether something is true, if they only thought it was necessary. But they don’t check. This must either be (being charitable) because they’ve picked up the information from a source they believe to be reliable; or more likely (being realistic) because they are intellectually lazy.

When we evaluate historical information from some book or website we’ve never come across before, it may be the greatest thing since sliced bread, but it may not, so we have to treat it with extreme caution. I always recommend people to ask some of the questions that we make our sleuths ask when they are attempting to solve crimes: who, where, when, why, and how?

Who wrote the bit of “history” you’re reading? A true historian, (and it’s ability that counts here, not letters after the name,) or someone with a political or religious axe to grind? When and where did he write it?…recently, or some time ago? Why did he write it…out of a desire to increase knowledge and seek truth, or to support some half-baked theory of his own? And how did he write it? Which means how (if at all) did he research, and how did he support himself while doing  it? Was someone paying him to write the way he did?

I’ll give a small example of how easily wrong information can get distributed, and mostly I’m sure the cause is sloppiness, not something more sinister. A long time ago when I began collecting books about the Roman Empire, I bought a booklet intended for youngish schoolchildren, because it had some useful photos and drawings of legionaries’ armour. When I read the rest of it I was astonished to find, in the chapter about ancient cooking, that “the Romans didn’t use olive oil for food, they believed it was poisonous.” I checked this remarkable assertion, and of course it’s arrant nonsense. A bad mistake like that made me distrust everything else in the book.  I suppose there may be people for whom this was a school text, who believe to this day that either the Romans were ignorant, or, worse, that they were right, and olive oil is poisonous!

Let’s hope most of that generation of schoolchildren have gone on to learn better, and to understand the difference between fact, fiction, and rubbish.