The Owen Archer Ensemble, a guest post by Candace Robb - plus US giveaway for A Conspiracy of Wolves

I'm happy to welcome Candace Robb here today for a guest post about the supporting cast in her long-running Owen Archer mystery series set in 14th-century York.  The eleventh and newest volume, A Conspiracy of Wolves, was published last week by Severn House/Crème de la Crime in hardcover and ebook.

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The Owen Archer Ensemble 

Candace Robb

I approach each scene with a vision of its shape and the characters involved, yet I know it will take on its own form as I write, including unplanned characters who stroll onto the set and make themselves comfortable. A few of these incidental characters not only return in later scenes, but also reappear in future books, becoming members of the series ensemble. Some first appear in a rather minor role—Magda Digby and Brother Michaelo; some are integral to the plot—Alisoun Ffulford.

Magda Digby insinuated herself into an early draft of The Apothecary Rose, her role growing from a cameo appearance—the grieving mother weeping over her son’s grave—to the final version in which she is a minor but notable character. A chance comment from my agent at the time after reading an early draft—an interesting character. Will we see her again?—suggested to me that Magda might warrant another look. That must be what woke her. Gradually, as I revised, she inspired brief scenes; I saw a role for her, and a far richer identity. The elderly woman in mourning expanded into the enigmatic healer Owen encountered on his first day in York and came to respect for her wisdom, healing skill, and long memory about the people of York and Galtres.


Brother Michaelo also made his debut in The Apothecary Rose, as the toady of Archdeacon Anselm. In Rose he was a pathetic creature frequenting the infirmary at St. Mary’s with headaches. When he failed in his task for Anselm his role seemed finished. But much to my surprise, Archbishop Thoresby took him on as his private secretary in The Lady Chapel, as his “hair shirt.” In Thoresby’s service Michaelo came to see the error of his ways and sought redemption—though on his own terms. His all too human struggles endeared him to me, and Michaelo became a character I enjoyed following.

But with Thoresby’s death in A Vigil of Spies, and the failure of Richard Ravenser’s bid to take his uncle’s place as archbishop, Michaelo’s role in the series was over. Or so I thought. But something odd kept happening as I wrote Owen’s first scenes in A Conspiracy of Wolves—Brother Michaelo kept appearing, appalled by the crime scene, yet proving unexpectedly helpful. I would edit him out only to have him reappear. I thought he’d returned to Normandy between books 10 and 11, but I was wrong.

Alisoun Ffulford was a central character in The Riddle of St. Leonard’s, a child orphaned by the pestilence, unwittingly caught up in a series of crimes. Hostile toward Owen Archer and Magda Digby when they came to rescue her, she tried to strike out on her own in a countryside terrified by the plague. She intrigued me, and her character, a stubborn child who hunted with a bow and distrusted everyone, oddly lightened the plague-haunted story. I found I could not let her go once I’d finished the book. I wanted to explore whether she would convince Magda to take her on as an apprentice, and, if so, how that would play out. By book 10, A Vigil of Spies, Alisoun matured and gained not only Magda’s but also Owen’s respect. However, she stumbled in A Conspiracy of Wolves, and that is how she’s managing to keep my interest.

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About the Author

I’m Candace Robb, a writer/historian engaged in creating fiction about the late middle ages with a large cast of characters with whom I enjoy spending my days. Two series, the Owen Archer mysteries and the Kate Clifford mysteries, are set in late medieval York. The Margaret Kerr trilogy is set in early 14th century Scotland, at the beginning of the Wars of Independence. Two standalone novels (published under pseudonym Emma Campion) expand on the lives of two women in the court of King Edward III who have fascinated me ever since I first encountered them in history and fiction.

I am a dreamer. Writing, gardening, walking, dancing, reading, being with friends—there’s always a dreaming element.

About A Conspiracy of Wolves (Owen Archer, Book 11):

When a prominent citizen is murdered, former Captain of the Guard Owen Archer is persuaded out of retirement to investigate in this gripping medieval mystery.

1374. When a member of one of York’s most prominent families is found dead in the woods, his throat torn out, rumours spread like wildfire that wolves are running loose throughout the city. Persuaded to investigate by the victim’s father, Owen Archer is convinced that a human killer is responsible. But before he can gather sufficient evidence to prove his case, a second body is discovered, stabbed to death. Is there a connection? What secrets are contained within the victim’s household? And what does apprentice healer Alisoun know that she’s not telling?

Teaming up with Geoffrey Chaucer, who is in York on a secret mission on behalf of Prince Edward, Owen’s enquiries will draw him headlong into a deadly conspiracy.

Giveaway:

During the Blog Tour, we are giving away a hardcover copy of A Conspiracy of Wolves by Candace Robb! To enter, please use the Gleam form below.

Giveaway Rules:

– Giveaway ends at 11:59 pm EST on August 15th. You must be 18 or older to enter.
– Giveaway is open to the US only.
– Only one entry per household.
– All giveaway entrants agree to be honest and not cheat the systems; any suspicion of fraud will be decided upon by blog/site owner and the sponsor, and entrants may be disqualified at our discretion.
– The winner has 48 hours to claim prize or a new winner is chosen.

Conspiracy of Wolves

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Uncovering little-known chapters in history through family lore, an essay by Julie Zuckerman, author of The Book of Jeremiah

A warm welcome and happy release day today to Julie Zuckerman, author of the novel-in-stories The Book of Jeremiah.  I read her post avidly since I seek out fiction that's connected to family history research.  Hope you'll appreciate her essay as well.

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Uncovering Little-Known Chapters in History
Through Family Lore 

Julie Zuckerman

From an early age, I was fascinated by the family tidbits I’d hear from my mother and other relatives. I made elaborate family trees, thrilled I could fill in the names and birthplaces of at least eight of my great-great-great-grandparents. Like most Jews of Eastern European descent, my relatives were born in shtetls, small villages, in the Galicia region of what is now Poland, or in areas of Russia or Lithuania. The migration to the United States of my immediate ancestors began with one set of great-grandparents, who arrived in the 1880s on their honeymoon, and finished in 1929, when my then-17-year-old grandmother and her two younger brothers joined their father and an older sister already in America.

I captured micro-details in hand-written notes or early word processing programs (“He was tall and had a sense of humor” or “Her three children were very bright”). Some bits had slightly more narrative to them, such as this note from a conversation with my great-uncle, who never lost his thick Galician accent: [sic] “There was no problems. We had no problems, but in 1919 there was a pogrom and 22 people died. The pogrom was on a Thursday morning…”

With so many family details and characters filling my head, naturally I used many of them as inspiration for various plotlines and backstories in my new novel-in-stories, The Book of Jeremiah. There is mention of someone dressed as a woman and smuggled out of Russia to avoid the Czar’s army (inspired by my great-grandfather), civil rights volunteers in Mississippi during Freedom Summer (after writing the story, I learned my uncle was one of them); and Jeremiah himself, who serves in the U.S. Signal Corps during World War II (inspired by my grandfather).

The Book of Jeremiah spans eight decades, from the Depression to the modern age, with stories jumping back and forth in time. Conducting research was one of the highlights of the writing. I’d delve into a historical event, or Google things like “Depression-era Bridgeport” to see photographs and get an idea for a detail, and I’d come away with new ideas for characters or the plot.

One example that unfolded this way was the knowledge that my relatives were—and are—Zionists who believed Jews should have a homeland. For example, David Ben-Gurion, who later became Israel’s first Prime Minister, stayed with my great-grandparents on an early fundraising trip to Albany. The need to realize this vision became more acute, of course, once the horrors of the Holocaust were well-known.

Photo of the author's grandfather in the Army

In 1947, the United Nations approved the Partition Plan to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine, but it was clear the surrounding Arab countries were gearing up for war. Shortly after the UN vote, President Truman—urged on by his formidable Secretary of State George Marshall—invoked the Neutrality Act, making it illegal to supply arms to either side of the brewing conflict. Frightened by the prospect of what would happen to the 600,000 Jews in Palestine, not a few of whom had already survived the concentration camps, American Jews mobilized their support behind The Jewish Agency, the highest political body of the Jewish people, and its defense wing, the Haganah. My great-uncle and my cousin, a teenager at the time, became part of network of gunrunners, smuggling arms and supplies to the Haganah.

My uncle and a friend would pack up guns, their wives serving as lookouts, and they’d make deliveries of the packages to somewhere in Queens, with “Hadassah” written on the boxes. My cousin remembers walking through Grand Central Station, nervous as hell, carrying a stash of guns in his gym bag. The gunrunners were helped by dozens of non-Jews as well: Irish-American longshoremen and police officers, even the mayor of New York, who sympathized with their cause.

In researching this chapter of American Jewish history and working this family tidbit into my story “Clandestiny,” the most fascinating character I came across was Adolph “Al” Schwimmer. Schwimmer was a pilot in the U.S. Air Force in World War II and awarded a medal of valor for his service. In 1947, at the request of Ben Gurion, he left his job as a flight engineer at TWA to recruit fellow airmen and buy planes for the Israeli Air Force-in-formation. He headed a vast aircraft smuggling operation, which included purchasing and refurbishing used aircraft, including U.S. military planes, which were flown to Israel via Florida and Czechoslovakia under the guise of a fictious Panamanian airline. Over 30 bombers and cargo planes were acquired in this manner. Schwimmer was nearly arrested several times before fleeing to Canada and then to Israel, where he continued to help the nascent Israeli Air Force during the War of Independence. Schwimmer – Ben Gurion said at the time – was the Diaspora’s single-most important contribution to the young state’s survival.

author Julie Zuckerman

Shortly after his return to the United States in 1949, Schwimmer and five others were tried and convicted of violating the Neutrality Act. The judge stripped Schwimmer of his voting rights and his veteran benefits and slapped him with a $10,000 fine, but he did not sentence him to any jail time. Schwimmer went on to move to Israel, where he founded Israel’s largest aerospace company. Though Schwimmer never asked for a pardon – he worried that a second Holocaust might be perpetrated should Israel lose the war—but President Bill Clinton granted him one in 2001.

A few months after I wrote the first draft “Clandestiny,” in which one of plotlines takes inspiration from Schwimmer’s story, he passed away on his 94th birthday. The full story of how American Jews like Schwimmer and my relatives helped the young Jewish state is too complex for the space allotted, though I remember thinking at the time of my research that if I should ever write a biography, I would be honored to write his. According to one obituary, Schwimmer resisted all appeals to write his memoir, asking, “Who would be interested?” From the small amount that I learned through my research, I can imagine many who would be.

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Julie Zuckerman’s fiction and nonfiction have appeared in a variety of publications, including The SFWP Quarterly, The MacGuffin, Salt Hill, Sixfold, Crab Orchard Review, Ellipsis, The Coil, and others. The Book of Jeremiah, her debut novel-in-stories, was the runner-up in the 2018 Press 53 Award for Short Fiction, and is due in May 2019. A native of Connecticut, she resides in Modiin, Israel, with her husband and four children. Learn more at https://www.juliezuckerman.com/

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A Comedy of Errors: an essay by Alan Bardos, author of The Assassins, a historical novel about the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand

I always get new insights into history and historical fiction writing from authors' guest posts, and the following essay by Alan Bardos is no exception.  He discusses the lesser-known background to a pivotal historical event and how he worked fictional characters into the story.  Thanks to Alan for contributing his essay and photos, and I hope you'll enjoy reading along.

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A Comedy of Errors

Alan Bardos 

The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand was one of history’s greatest turning points, but it happened by accident. Everyone knows the story ends with the death of the Archduke and his wife, Sophie, putting into play the diplomatic crises that lead to the First World War. It is perhaps less well known that the events leading up to the assassination were a terrible comedy of errors that culminated in a world-changing tragedy.

It was this combination of tragedy and comedy that first drew me to the story and, I hope will draw people to a novel about the assassination, despite knowing the ending! The assassination of Franz Ferdinand happened as a result of a whole series of mistakes and missed opportunities right from the beginning.

When the assassins travelled from Belgrade to Sarajevo, Nedeljko Cabrinovic, the biggest liability of the conspirators, met a police detective from Sarajevo on the train in Bosnia. The detective was a friend of his father's, who was a businessman and pillar of the community, which had created a lot of conflict with his radical son.

The policeman had recently seen Nedeljko’s father and struck up a conversation with Nedeljko to catch him up on family news. This made Gavrilo Princip, who was traveling separately but by accident sitting in the same train carriage, nervous. Cabrinovic’s easygoing nature had already endangered the other assassins during the journey. The policeman noticed and asked Cabrinovic who Gavrilo was and why he was staring at them, but his suspicions were not raised any further. A simple request to see Gavrilo Princip’s papers would have revealed that he was travelling illegally and put pay to the whole plot before the assassins reached Sarajevo.

Lateiner Bridge, Appel Quay (now called Obala Kulina Bana).
The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand happened at this corner,
turning into Franz Joseph Street (now called Zelenih Beretki).

This reflects the Austro-Hungarian Government’s attitude to the threat placed by the nationalist movements in their Balkan provinces. No attempt was made to counter them because the security services did not believe they existed, let alone posed a threat. The repeated warnings of a possible assassination were ignored by the local military governor, General Potiorek, the Archduke himself and the Austro-Hungarian Government. The idea that half-starved schoolboys could be any kind of a threat was too ridiculous to contemplate.

This gave me the opportunity to place my fictional characters at the heart of the story. Specifically the central relationship between my feckless lead character, Johnny Swift, a disgraced British diplomat; and Lazlo Breitner, a methodical Hungarian official, in a marriage of opposites that drives the narrative forward.

Breitner is well aware of the threat from the assassins and does everything he can to stop them, right up to confronting his nemesis, Franz Ferdinand, to beg him not to go to Sarajevo; but he is not believed.

Sarajevo City Hall. Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie left
here for their fateful journey on 28th June 1914.

To try and get evidence of the plot Breitner coerces Johnny into joining the conspirators, embedding him in their boardinghouse. Johnny who has been sent to Bosnia on a fool’s errand to get himself killed after cuckolding his superior, is eventually glad of the opportunity to redeem himself.

He manages to ingratiate himself with the assassins and joins in their reckless behaviour that should have got them caught. He discovers their plans and motivations; but Johnny’s decadent nature ensures that he fails to make use of the information. Realising the enormity of his error, Johnny foils the first assassination attempt that is made.

A bullet hole in the Graf & Stift car which Franz Ferdinand and Sophie were travelling in
when they were shot; the bullet went through the side of the car
and hit Sophie in the abdomen. Museum of Military History in Vienna. 

He replaces the Archduke’s chauffeur in an effort to claim the much deserved credit. Then, as happened on the 28th June 1914, takes a wrong turn, stopping the Archduke’s car in front of Gavrilo Princip when General Potiorek notices the mistake. Princip didn’t even look when he fired two shots that changed the world and propels Johnny on a journey through the major events of the twentieth century.

author Alan Bardos

This was the last in a whole series of errors and bad luck that led to the assassination. They say that the side that makes the least amount of mistakes wins a war. It also seems to be the case for the side who starts them.

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The Assassins is published by Endeavour Media: Amazon UK | Amazon.com


I'm a graduate of the MA in TV Script Writing at De Montfort University, and I also have a degree in Politics and History from Brunel University. Writing historical fiction combines the great loves of my life.

Please follow me on:  Facebook | Twitter: @Bardosalan | Goodreads

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Writing the Forbidden, an essay by Ann Weisgarber, author of The Glovemaker, set in 1888 Utah Territory

I'm happy to welcome award-winning historical novelist Ann Weisgarber back to Reading the Past. Her atmospheric latest, The Glovemaker (Skyhorse, Feb. 2019), focuses on Deborah Tyler, who resides with her beloved husband, Samuel, in Junction, a tiny Mormon community set amid the cliffs and canyons of remote Utah Territory in 1888. While this is excellent character-centered literary fiction, its plot feels as taut as a thriller, with slow-building external and internal tensions. Samuel, a traveling wheelwright, is late returning home, worrying Deborah, and leaving her to face the consequences of helping a desperate stranger. The presence of the man, a suspected polygamist on the run from federal marshals, would throw her community into danger. The Tylers and other Junction families, who don't believe in plural marriage, are already feeling pressure to conform to standard Mormon practices. The Glovemaker stands out for its well-wrought setting and its portrait of faith, independence, and courage at a pivotal historical moment. Read more about the background to the novel in the essay below, and I hope you'll pick up the book yourself to learn what happens next.

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Writing the Forbidden

Ann Weisgarber

When I was a kid and company came to dinner—and this especially meant relatives—we were forbidden to discuss politics and religion. If the conversation ground down into an awkward silence, the weather was a safe bet. So was the latest home repair adventure that went awry. But politics and religion? Absolutely not.

So what have I done? I broke my family’s rules and wrote The Glovemaker where, gulp, the novel takes place in Utah Territory during 1888 when the federal government had cracked down on men with plural wives.

In other words, a novel with characters who are influenced by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, polygamy, and politics. I didn’t set out to do this. But when I was on vacation at Utah’s Capitol Reef National Park, I stumbled across the name of a married woman who owned twenty acres of orchards.

I was fascinated by her since her husband had disappeared from census records. I tried to find his death certificate but didn’t have any luck. I searched my favorite website, www.findagrave.com, and couldn’t find his gravesite or a marker.

There was very little information about the woman other than the land deed was in her name, she didn’t have any children, and she was marked as married in the census records rather than widowed. What had happened to her husband? Had she waited the rest of life for him to come home to her?

I read books and articles about the area hoping to find clues about her. To my surprise, I learned that during the 1880s the federal government was determined to banish polygamy and federal marshals tracked down men with plural wives. Some of these men attempted to evade arrest by hiding at a place called Floral Ranch. The ranch was close to the woman’s home.

The story began to haunt me. A woman whose husband has disappeared. Men charged with the felony of polygamy hiding at an isolated ranch. Federal marshals hunting for them.

But wait. Write a novel that deals with religion? And in a subtle way, write about politics? Neither are polite dinner talk. They’re controversial. People have strong opinions about one or both. I could upset readers.

Yet, religion and politics are part of our everyday lives. Aren’t there times when one or both shapes people’s lives? How can someone write a novel about Harriet Tubman and not bring in the political climate of her day? Imagine a novel about Henry VIII that doesn’t refer to his split with the Catholic Church. Or The Scarlet Letter without the Puritans’ code of conduct.

Books are meant to make us think even as they entertain us. They are meant to shake us up. But most important to me was the woman who owned twenty acres of orchards whose husband had disappeared from all records. She was a Mormon who lived during perilous times for the church. Her life wasn’t easy or safe.

Even so, I was uneasy about writing a novel that dealt with religion. To help me decide what to do, I went to Utah and visited her grave. She wasn’t buried near other family members but was alone.

I didn’t want her to be alone or forgotten. So I broke the rules and wrote The Glovemaker.

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Ann Weisgarber was born and raised in Kettering, Ohio. She has lived in Boston, Massachusetts, and Des Moines, Iowa.

In addition to The Glovemaker, she is the author of The Promise and The Personal History of Rachel Dupree, which was longlisted for the Orange Prize and shortlisted for the Orange Prize for New Writers. She lives in Texas.

For more information, please visit her website at https://annweisgarber.com.

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Finding the Fantasy in Hittite History, an essay by Judith Starkston, author of Priestess of Ishana

Thanks to Judith Starkston for contributing a new essay for my site today.  Her new historical fantasy novel, Priestess of Ishana, is set in a land based on the history and culture of the ancient Hittites.  She explains her world-building process below...

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Finding the Fantasy in Hittite History

Judith Starkston

“I invoke you, Lelani, Sungoddess and Queen of the world below. May this witchcraft be undone. May the tongue that spoke this evil and the hand that worked it burn into ash which I will bury in the world below.”

With this incantation, the main character of my historical fantasy, Priestess of Ishana, begins a rite to cleanse her city of the deadly pollution of a burn curse. Tesha is a priestess and this magical performance is her duty. The curse might turn against her and torch her in a burst of demonic flame. That is all part of the excitement of fiction set in a historical world that believed in magical rites and supernatural interventions of gods and goddesses.

In Priestess of Ishana, I wanted to immerse my reader in the Near Eastern Bronze Age of the Hittites (~1200 BCE), but at the same time gain the storytelling power and freedom of fantasy. Guy Gavriel Kay, a renowned writer of historical fantasy, adopted the phrase “a quarter turn to the fantastic” to describe his melding of history and fantasy—that is, fiction that is “nearly our known history but not quite.” A blend of fantasy and history came naturally to writing the Hittites, steeped as their culture is in practices we call magic. Historical people and places lurk as inspiration behind my fictional world. That’s reflected in changed names that hint at the original (for example, Hittites to Hitolians).

Well-written fantasy has “rules” for the magic therein. My fantasy uses primary historical sources and Hittite beliefs for that framework. The novel’s magical rites are based on specific details taken from the written records—far stranger than anything I could have made up.

In my Hitolian fantasy world, curses are the last remaining magic (or so the characters assume), and the priestesses learn rites to counteract this pervasive danger. This focus arises from historical reality. Translations of the vast collections of clay cuneiform tablets from the royal archives reveal a Hittite obsession with curses in the prayers and rites.

In constructing a “How to Undo a Curse” scene for Priestess Tesha, I dug into the available fragments of curse rituals (nothing is complete or simple in Hittite primary texts). The opening lines in this post, for example, are adapted from a couple sources. The notion that words have tangible power is found in almost all Hittite rites; evil tongues and counteracting magical words abound. Words were the bridge to the gods, the road to accessing supernatural power. They are especially powerful when said in conjunction with analogical magic—actions that reflect what the practitioner wants to happen.

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Tesha crept next to the dead man. She raised the loaf high over him. “I invoke you, Lelani, Sungoddess and Queen of the world below. May this witchcraft be undone. May the tongue that spoke this evil and the hand that worked it burn into ash which I will bury in the world below.” The words calmed the beating of her heart.

She shut her eyes and knelt on the damp floor, wincing as the muck penetrated her gown.

She held the bread stuffed with absorbing chickpea paste. The rite decreed she start at the dead man’s forehead. The reek of burnt flesh tortured her nose and pulled her stomach.

She leaned over the body, touching with the bread what was left of the brow below his graying hair. The horror held her gaze. She hesitated. The rite had to be done perfectly. Usually this requirement for proper order gave her joy. Now she clung to it for courage, but something was wrong and she could not say what. Had she skipped a step? She hadn’t. She went on, bread held to the corpse.

“Come into this bread, foul curse. Your pollution endangers all who come near. I bind you into this bread.”

She moved downwards to the man’s chest and shoulders where his tunic had burned away, revealing flesh and bone, charred black.

“Come out of this body, evil curse, so that when this loaf is burnt into ash as you have burned this man, you may return to the dark realm below where you belong. As the smell of bread entices both the good man and the bad to eat, so let the smell entice you into this bread.”

Tesha rose and moved to the altar holding the chickpea stuffed loaf in front of her to avoid the pollution it contained.

~

Tesha moves the curse from a dead body into a loaf of bread stuffed with chickpea paste, while saying, “As the smell of bread entices both the good man and the bad to eat, so let the smell entice you into this bread.”

The “stuffing” is meant to absorb the evil like a sponge and contain it until the priestess can burn the loaf and thus send it back to the Underworld where curses were thought to originate.

At this point you might be scratching your head, chickpea paste, curses in loaves of bread? I couldn’t make this stuff up. Fortunately, I didn’t have to. Careful reading of Hittite rituals provided me with great source material for fantasy. My Hitolian priestess is a skillful practitioner of magic that would sound very familiar to a Hittite priestess.

~

Judith Starkston has spent too much time reading about and exploring the remains of the ancient worlds of the Greeks and Hittites. Early on she went so far as to get two degrees in Classics from the University of California, Santa Cruz and Cornell. She loves myths and telling stories. This has gradually gotten more and more out of hand. Her solution: to write fantasy set in the exotic worlds of the past. Fantasy and Magic in a Bronze Age World. Hand of Fire was a semi-finalist for the M. M. Bennetts Award for Historical Fiction. Priestess of Ishana won the San Diego State University Conference Choice Award. Judith has two grown children and lives in Arizona with her husband. For a free short story set in her Bronze Age historical fantasy world (and a cookbook of foods in her novels), sign up for the newsletter on her website.

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Love Song: Frankfort, Michigan, an essay by Lee Zacharias, author of Across the Great Lake

It can be a magical experience to read historical fiction that captures the essence of a place from long ago. In today's guest post, Lee Zacharias writes eloquently about the setting for her new novel and the reasons why she chose it. Coincidentally, Frankfort happens to be a place where I've traveled many times; I look forward to revisiting it by reading Across the Great Lake, which is published today by the University of Wisconsin Press.

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Love Song: Frankfort, Michigan

Lee Zacharias

In many ways my new novel, Across the Great Lake, is a love song to a time and place. The setting is more than backdrop. It is the long-lost beloved, the place my narrator Fern yearns for. In fact, the novel began with place; I knew the setting before I knew any of the characters or their stories, that beautiful northwestern Michigan town with its shady streets, gracious old houses, Lake Michigan's crystal-clear water, the pristine beach, steep bluff beyond, most of all the haunting call of the foghorn, now long gone.

But it would be wrong to say I invented the characters simply to populate the novel. They and their stories grew out of that place, just as we are all formed, one way or another, by the places we come from. As Eudora Welty said in her essay "Place in Fiction," it does far more than "furnish a plausible abode for the novel's world of feeling," it "is the ground conductor of all the currents of emotion and belief and moral conviction..." Location serves to make the characters real.

My narrator, Fern, behaves the way she does and feels the way she feels, because of where she comes from, high on a hill above the loveliest of lovely streets in a town that sits on the opposite side of its harbor from what was still in the 1930s the industrial hub of Benzie County, the infinitely less lovely village of Elberta that is home to the apprentice deckhand, Alv, and many of the other sailors. The Frankfort of my novel is the domain of officers, Elberta the realm of iron workers, switch operators, and ordinary sea men.

I visited Frankfort once as a girl, a girl who grew up at the southern end of the lake, among the steel mills and oil refineries of Indiana's Calumet region. No one swam at our beach, which was often littered with dead alewives. The water was polluted. And so when I saw Frankfort I thought it was the most beautiful place I had ever been. To live there would be like living inside a sunlit picture post card.

Lighthouse, Frankfort, Michigan (photo: Mark Johnson)

My reality was a sky dreary with smoke from the mills, a treeless lower middle class street lined with the cramped tract houses that had replaced the fouled prairie. I fell in love with Frankfort because I recognized Elberta, its railyard and asphalt tanks near the beach that stored petroleum products from a refinery no more than ten miles from my house, those tanks that gave the village a distinctive gassy odor. Our feelings about place are as much a part of us as the color of our eyes or shape of our toes, and I hated where I lived and longed to escape.

And so when I was twelve Frankfort became the locus of my other life, the fantasy I wished to live instead of the all-too-real world that seemed to drag out the sentence of childhood and adolescence that bound me to Hammond. In Frankfort I would be able to walk wherever I wanted to go. In Hammond I played in the school band, and every time the director called an evening rehearsal I had to ask for a ride from my father, who always let me know what at inconvenience it was. In Frankfort, I would be one of the teens playing volleyball on the beach instead the awkward pubescent ridiculed by the neighborhood boys. In Frankfort I would be free, not just of Hammond but of myself. Such, I imagined, is the power of place.

And yet Fern is no princess in my fairy tale other life. Tragic things happen to her. She is responsible for another. Though she belongs to a class my teenaged self aspired to, her unconscious sense of privilege contributes to the harm that will haunt the rest of her years, that will transform a lively, adventurous little girl into a woman incapable of fully engaging with her adult life. For her childhood is synonymous with the place that exile denies her. She yearns for Frankfort because it is hers. And as I wrote I yearned with her, but the reason I yearned for Frankfort and the lake my own father once sailed was because they had never been mine. The only way I could claim any part of them was to inhabit her, to write her story as if it were memoir.

~

photo credit: Traci Arney

Lee Zacharias is the author of a collection of short stories, Helping Muriel Make It Through the Night; three novels, Across the Great Lake, Lessons, and At Random; and a collection of personal essays, The Only Sounds We Make. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the North Carolina Arts Council, North Carolina's Sir Walter Raleigh Award, Southern Humanities Review's Theodore Christian Hoepfner Award, Prairie Schooner's Glenna Luschei Award, and a Silver Medal in Creative Nonfiction from the Independent Publisher Book Awards (the IPPYs).

Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in numerous journals and been recognized by The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Essay, which reprinted her essay "Buzzards" in its 2008 edition. She taught at the University of Arkansas, Princeton University, and the University of North Carolina Greensboro, where she is Emerita Professor of English, as well as many conferences, most recently the Wildacres Writers Workshop. Find her online at http://leezacharias.com.

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On writing Lone Wolf in Jerusalem, a guest post by Ehud Diskin

In today's essay, Ehud Diskin, a bestselling author in Israel, writes about his reasons for writing historical fiction and the research process for his new novel.  Lone Wolf in Jerusalem was published by Greenleaf Book Group in August.

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On Writing Lone Wolf in Jerusalem

Ehud Diskin

I wanted to write the history of Israel in the 1940s prior to the establishment of the state of Israel and to tell about the people who fought hard for it --- to tell the story of the Jews who survived Europe after WWII and came to Israel to establish a Jewish state. I took into consideration that today, a lot of people don’t read history books, and in order to tell the history also to those people, I decided to write a historical novel. I used elements of suspense, action, drama, adventure, and romance, so that it will interest most potential readers.

Originally the book was written in Hebrew, and the fact that it had rapidly became a bestseller proved my intent.

My novel is set in the same time period as Leon Uris’s Exodus. I wrote my novel as someone who knows Israel and its history in the 20th century. I am a seventh generation Israeli. I was born and lived as a child in a besieged Jerusalem, fought in three wars and reached the rank of a colonel.

As a result, I could truly imagine the story of the fictional hero of the book, David Gabinsky, who leads a courageous group of Jewish partisans in Belarus and after the war, makes his way to Jerusalem to help his people find freedom from the British. The characters in the book are fictional, but the history is accurate. The reader finds himself involved with the characters of Jerusalem in those days, and learns through the main characters, the true experiences of people who lived during that time.

When I wrote this book, besides reading many books about that period (there is a bibliography list in the end of the book), I researched and reviewed a lot of documents. In Israel in the 1940s there were three Jewish undergrounds who fought the British. Each of them had a different point of view not only ideologically, but they saw each event differently. I had to research to find out what really happened. I interviewed people who lived at that period; they were in their 80s and 90s. I visited all the places in Jerusalem that I wrote about. I researched the names of the streets in those days, and in the beginning of the book there is a diagram map of Jerusalem related to the relevant period and to the book.

Besides being recently published in English, the novel was also translated in Russian. A Russian reader sent me letter expressing her enthusiasm for the book and why she felt it was an important look at Israel. I am pleased because it shows that the idea of telling the history through a historical novel was successful.

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Ehud Diskin was born in Jerusalem. He served as an officer in combat roles during Israel's wars, as detailed in his memoir, Yes, It's Possible, and ended his military career with the rank of colonel. After attending the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he earned a PhD in business management and became the director of the LIBI fund, collecting contributions from all over the world to provide support for the education of soldiers. Later, he left the public sector and became a businessman, establishing several successful enterprises in the United States. Find out more and read reviews of the original edition at lonewolfinjerusalem.com.

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Il Viaggio: What Inspired My Journey to Write Claire’s Last Secret, a guest post by Marty Ambrose

In today's guest post, Marty Ambrose writes about the background to her new historical mystery, which centers on the "haunted summer" of 1816 – when a group of young people gathered in a large villa by Lake Geneva, creativity was sparked, and considerable drama ensued.  Read on for her account of the circumstances inspiring Claire's Last Secret.

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Il Viaggio: What Inspired My Journey to Write Claire’s Last Secret

Marty Ambrose

Byron once said, “I awoke to find myself famous.” – Truly, it is every writer’s dream to be thrust into a world of sudden, unfolding adoration for one’s work. But the inspiration for Claire’s Last Secret was more of a nightmare: I “awoke” during my summer teaching hiatus to find myself with a back injury that left me practically housebound on an island, in between writing projects, and feeling like the world was passing me by.

Even though my husband was my rock, I felt isolated. People get busy. Time moves on. But I was waiting, not sure what was going to happen next. I watched a lot of the History Channel. I texted friends. I binge watched Netflix (loved “Shetland”!). And I read. New books. Old books. Classic books. Whatever books. And, slowly, in spite of the future’s uncertainty, I came to appreciate that I had given the gift of stepping out of life for a while and could just let my imagination run free.

Much of my life, I’ve been a scholar of the Byron/Shelley circle and had a stack of unread books about them piling up in my home office. I happened to pick up Daisy Hay’s volume, The Young Romantics, and learned that she had found a fragment of Claire Clairmont’s (Mary Shelley’s stepsister) journal, saying that the famous Byron/Shelley summer of “free love” in 1816 had created a “perfect hell” for her. Of course, Claire wrote those words when she was almost eighty (something that I was surprised to learn), impoverished, and living in Florence, Italy, having outlived the two great poets and Mary by many decades. Intrigued, I wondered what it would feel like to outlive everyone who had been part of one’s youth. As the lone remaining figure of that famous quartet, she’d been left behind.

In that moment, I bonded with Claire and decided to tell her story with the “voice,” that had not been heard yet, but as a fictional memoir.

As I delved into Claire’s life, pieces came together in my thoughts: her illicit love for Byron, her roller-coaster relationship with Mary and Shelley, and her later years in Italy—and I knew I had to tell her story from two perspectives: the young, reckless Claire and the older-but-wiser Claire. We see her at two stages in her life: when she’s seventeen during the summer of 1816 and when she’s 75, living in Italy as an expatriate. This was quite a challenge for me as a writer because her “young” voice is very different from her “mature” voice; she’s an older and wiser woman in much of the book, but still so influenced by what happened to her in her younger days. Then, there was the mystery of her lost daughter with Byron. Her lovers. Her passion for life. It all coalesced into the kind of genre-bending novel that I’ve always wanted to create. Even with my background in the Romantics, I had to complete a lot more research on Claire, pouring over biographies and savoring her marvelously witty letters. She was a remarkable, but rather elusive person as the “almost famous” member of the group, and I found she inspired me with her independent spirit.

As I wrote the book, I healed after successful back surgery, wrote a grant, and had the amazing opportunity to travel to Geneva and Florence with my hubby to research the book. I awoke to find myself with a new life. Like Claire, I had the chance to see Europe with fresh eyes—in my case as an author moving in a new creative direction with my historical fiction. I saw Castle Chillon on Lake Geneva and walked in the steps of the greatness that passed there before me. I saw Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein manuscript (with Percy’s notes) at the Bodmer Museum. I wandered in the Boboli Gardens in Florence, Italy, and imagined Claire’s final years, looking back but still believing in the future.

What began as a challenging physical injury eventually became my own summer of “awakening” into an entirely new life that inspires me each day: every writer’s dream, indeed.

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Marty Ambrose has been a writer most of her life, consumed with the world of literature whether teaching English at Florida Southwestern State College or creating her own fiction. Her writing career has spanned almost fifteen years, with eight published novels for Avalon Books, Kensington Books, Thomas & Mercer—and, now, Severn House.

Two years ago, Marty had the opportunity to apply for a grant that took her to Geneva and Florence to research a new creative direction that builds on her interest in the Romantic poets: historical fiction. Her new book, Claire’s Last Secret, combines memoir and mystery in a genre-bending narrative of the Byron/Shelley “haunted summer,” with Claire Clairmont, as the protagonist/sleuth—the “almost famous” member of the group. The novel spans two eras played out against the backdrop of nineteenth-century Italy and is the first of a trilogy.

Marty lives on an island in Southwest Florida with her husband, former news-anchor, Jim McLaughlin. They are planning a three-week trip to Italy this fall to attend a book festival and research the second book, A Shadowed Fate.

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A suitable job for a woman? A guest post by Kate Braithwaite, author of The Road to Newgate

Today I have a guest post from Kate Braithwaite, whose new novel, The Road to Newgate, will be one you'll want to read if you're intrigued by 17th-century England. Its subject, the Popish Plot, doesn't get a lot of play in historical fiction, so this was new territory for me. I found myself placed in the thick of the suspenseful drama alongside Nat Thompson, his wife Anne, and their friend William Smith (more on them below). How does one bring down an odious, immoral man who's managed to sway public opinion about the righteousness of his cause?  It's a dangerous prospect - Titus Oates seems to have the law on his side as well - with no guarantee of success. Anne Thompson alternates narrating the story with Nat and William, and Kate's post illuminates the lives and roles of women in Restoration England.

There's a giveaway opportunity at the end, too, for US readers. Welcome, Kate!

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A Suitable Job for a Woman?

Kate Braithwaite

“Were there any women in the 17th century?”

This is a question that historian Antonia Fraser was asked by a male friend when she told him that her next book would be The Weaker Vessel: Women’s Lot in Seventeenth Century England. Of course it’s tongue in cheek, yet how many famous Stuart women spring to mind? There was Nell Gwynn, of course, Charles II’s mistress, orange-seller and actress. And Aphra Behn, playwright, poet and one the first Englishwomen to earn a living writing. But how many more? Given that our historical sources were written about men, by men, it can be a challenge for a historical novelist to create a strong, believable female character - true to the period, but not a Royal mistress or a talented author. The subject of my second novel, the 17th century Popish Plot in Restoration England, is full of drama and incident, but in the text books, pamphlets and trial transcripts it’s male-dominated drama. The women are missing.

The Road to Newgate is about Titus Oates, a preacher, who causes uproar in London in 1678 with wild stories of a Catholic plot to assassinate Charles II. Barricades go up in the streets, prominent Catholic Lords and priests are arrested and fake news and bigotry dominate the public consciousness. When Sir Edmund Godfrey, a Protestant magistrate linked to Oates, is found dead in a ditch and the plot stories were deemed to be true, only a brave and resilient journalist, Nat Thompson, wants to chase down the truth about Oates – at great personal cost.

These costs involve Nat’s close friends Henry Broome and William Smith, as well as his wife, Anne. Henry is a bookseller and publisher, a father-figure to Nat, a much younger man. William is a schoolteacher, quiet, sensitive and with a secret he is afraid to share with Nat and Anne. And then there is Anne. In early drafts of the story, she was little more than his wife, a character with no real agency, story arc or importance to the plot, other than making her busy husband feel guilty about leaving her at home while he is busy at work. In a contemporary story, Anne would have education, training, her own bank accounts, transport, perhaps money from her own family or a better paying job than Nat does. But the life of a seventeenth-century wife was very different. A married woman at that time belonged to her husband. Anything she owned prior to her marriage transferred to him. Husbands had the right to discipline their wives and no wife could give evidence in court against her husband. Widows had more freedom and independence but The Road to Newgate is about a married couple and whether that marriage survives in a time of tumult. Anne’s options seemed limited.

Scratch the surface, however, and it’s no surprise that women were not just silent or complicit in their forced domestication. Then, as now, not all women wanted to stay at home to raise children, launder, clean or cook. Not all working women were content to be servants or seamstresses. In the course of my research I learned that women as well as men engaged in the explosion of pamphlet writing and journalism during the Restoration. Take this example, published anonymously, by a woman complaining about the amount of time that men were spending in the popular coffee shops of the day. Published in 1674, The Women’s Petition against Coffee declared that men were neglecting their family duty because of the hours they spent talking, arguing and drinking coffee. They were in danger of becoming worse gossips than women and worst of all, excessive coffee was having a dampening effect on their ardour. “Never,” it reads, “did Men wear greater breeches, or carry less in them of any Mettle whatsoever.”

Source: EC65.A100.674w, Houghton Library, Harvard University
(via Wikimedia Commons)

Anne’s character – stubborn, loving, intelligent but a little naive – would never have written a document like that one, but the inspiration for a way for her to develop within the story was linked to the world of pamphlets and opinion that her husband is so engaged with. An idea fell into my lap when I was researching the printing business. Although women could not be apprentices in the print shop, a key duty of a wife in the seventeenth century was to support her husband. Women could and did learn to run printing operations, for example Anne Baldwin, the wife of Richard Baldwin, the printer of the London Mercury, who helped her husband in all aspects of his business. Widows commonly took over print shops when their husbands died. To do so effectively, they must have been working in the trade for some time.

Here then, was the perfect opportunity for Anne to spread her wings and take charge of her own fate. Although with a proud husband determined to provide for her and Henry, his printer, less than impressed by Nat’s hasty marriage to her, Anne would still have some challenges to overcome.

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Kate Braithwaite was born and grew up in Edinburgh, Scotland. Her first novel, Charlatan, was longlisted for the Mslexia New Novel Award and the Historical Novel Society Award.

The Road to Newgate, a story of lies, love and bigotry in 17th century London, will be published by Crooked Cat Books on July 16th. Kate lives in Pennsylvania with her husband and three children.

For more information, please see The Road to Newgate on Amazon.  Visit the author on her website, on Twitter, or on Facebook.

And for a giveaway opportunity for US readers:

The author is offering a giveaway of a signed paperback copy of The Road to Newgate along with a handmade book (pictured above). For a chance to win, please fill out the entry form below; deadline Wednesday, June 27th. US readers only.  One entry per household, and void where prohibited. Good luck to all!

Update, 6/28: The giveaway is over. Congrats to Sarah N, and thanks to all who entered!

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Past v. Present: The Challenges of a Historical Thriller. an essay by Terrence McCauley

In today's post, author Terrence McCauley, who writes novels set in the past and others in the present-day, describes the appeal and challenges of writing fiction set in 1930s NYC.

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Past v. Present: 

The Challenges of a Historical Thriller

Terrence McCauley

As a writer, I always look for new ways to challenge myself. I never want to keep writing the same story over and over again. I don’t think the audience want to read the same kind of story, either. That’s one of the many reasons why I love setting my stories in different time periods. For example, my University series (Sympathy for the Devil, A Murder of Crows, A Conspiracy of Ravens) are all modern day techno-thrillers with plenty of action and technology to help me keep the pace moving.

Historical fiction does not allow me that luxury. And I wouldn’t have it any other way. Writing about 1930s New York affords me another set of challenges I wholeheartedly embrace. My Charlie Doherty novels (The Devil Dogs of Belleau Wood, Slow Burn, and now The Fairfax Incident) are different from any other kind of story I tell. I write them in the first person from Charlie’s perspective because I want the reader to get a sense of what he’s experiencing as he’s experiencing it. I don’t give myself the ability to use the third person omniscient narrator because I’m afraid of getting too far ahead in the story. I have a reason for that.

When writing about a bygone era, it’s very easy for the writer to slip into something I call the "dreaded data dump," an unfortunate place where the author is anxious to demonstrate how much research he or she did on the era by packing the story with historically accurate facts. These data dumps are usually long sections that might be interesting to read, but often kill the momentum of the story. By only allowing myself to use the first person voice, I can constantly yet subtly remind the reader of the time and setting of the novel. I can either talk about the grand mansions and packed streets of Old New York, or I can have Charlie mention them as he’s moving from one location to the other on his way to cracking the case. People tend to skip over passages that are too long, and that means death to a writer and a story.

My books may be set in the past, but they’re being read by a modern audience who have all of the distractions of the day. Emails, texts, social media are all at the reader’s fingertips, especially if they’re reading on a tablet or smartphone. The last thing I want them to do is leave Charlie’s world to glance at what’s happening right now.

Getting a modern reader to relate to the 1930s is also a challenge that must be overcome. Some pick up a book like mine expecting to read a hats-and-gats drama with tough private detectives, gun molls and wise-cracking gangsters. That’s why I try to make my characters more believable by showing the people of that era are very relatable to the people of today. Many of my characters are survivors. They’ve lived through the horrors of the First World War, the boozy glamour of the Roaring Twenties and are now suffering through the horrible hangover of the beginning stages of the Great Depression. Times are bad and promise to get worse. But rather than tell the reader all of that, I have chosen to relate that story from Charlie’s point of view. He’s as world-weary as the next guy, but he doesn’t fall into the same categories of similar characters who have come before him. He isn’t idealistic, he doesn’t follow a code and he’s not above shoving someone aside to grab a quick buck. He’s a product of his time; a former detective who had made plenty of money during the corrupt Tammany Hall era, but finds himself pushed aside by the Reform movement sweeping the day. I don’t tell the reader any of this. I show them through Charlie’s internal dialogue and actions. I find this makes it easier for the reader to understand the time by seeing it all through Charlie’s eyes.

author Terrence McCauley

Another challenge about writing about the past is overcoming modern biases about the actions and opinions of characters from another age. For example, I didn’t include a female detective in Fairfax because, quite frankly, there weren’t many female detectives back then. Sure, there were a few, but not enough to make one’s inclusion in my story seem realistic. Doing so would have been jarring and, as I said earlier, the last thing I want to do is pull the reader’s eyes off the page. That also doesn’t mean I make all the women in my books flappers or house fraus, either. Instead, the women in Fairfax and my other 1930s books are strong and influential in their own way. In Prohibition, for example, Alice may seem weak, but she exudes a lot of influence over the enforcer Terry Quinn. In Fairfax, I don’t think anyone would want to find themselves across the bargaining table from the formidable matriarch Mrs. Fairfax. And one of the main villains in the book doesn’t pick up a Tommy gun and begin firing. She is far more powerful by using her intelligence and cunning to serve her cause.

All of the devices and themes I mention here serve one purpose: to do everything I can to get the reader to buy in to the story. People read historical fiction for a lot of reasons. One reason I read it is to lose myself in a time that I might know something about, but wish to read about it in a fictionalized setting. My goal in writing Fairfax and my other 1930s novels is to introduce the reader to a time that’s not all unlike our own. A time where civil unrest and political paranoia runs rampant. A time when people worked hard and did what they had to do to survive. And to show them a protagonist who is far from a hero, but does the best he can with who he is.

The more things change, the more they seem to stay the same.

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Terrence McCauley's The Fairfax Incident is published today by Polis Books.

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Russia in Historical Fiction: A Journey of Sorrow and Strength, a guest post from Mary Anne Lewis

Today I have a guest essay by a fellow blogger, Mary Anne Lewis of Magic of History, which is a terrific new site focusing on reviews of historical fiction and history in books and on screen. There are a few novels mentioned below which were new to me, and I hope you'll find some worth adding to your own TBRs, too.

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Russia in Historical Fiction: A Journey of Sorrow and Strength

Mary Anne Lewis

From the icy winter steppe to the towering palaces in St. Petersburg, Russia never fails to enchant as the setting for a historical novel. While there are many novels from numerous eras set in Russia, it generally isn’t considered as popular as, say, books set in the Tudor era, or the first half of the twentieth century. Perhaps it’s the fact that Russia has such a repressive, bloody history, or that the Russian people tend toward a dark temperament because of all they’ve endured. Or, perhaps, it’s the lack of novels emanating from Russia since the Soviets took over in 1917.

For all of these reasons, the novelists who tackle Russia are a brave lot. It’s a huge country that’s hard to get to. Traveling the land has never been easy. The language is difficult. And, few nations have experienced the political machinations and bloody regime changes that Russia has. It’s difficult to keep the history straight, partially because there’s so much of it, and so much of it is so hard to believe.

Even readers need courage to consume Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Their books aren’t necessarily difficult, but they are sometimes hard to finish. Current day authors have also written about Russia, from the time of Ivan the Terrible to Catherine the Great to the Romanovs to World War II.

If you want to experience Russia of the old days, begin with Anna Karenina. It’s a tragedy, but also a reflection of what happens when infidelity impacts a Russian marriage and family in the nineteenth century. It’s the story of a young woman, Anna, who decides to leave her husband for the infamous Count Vronsky. Anna Karenina is perhaps the best book to showcase the Russian personality, long before the tsar was deposed and the Soviets took over.

 Some would like to go back even further, to the reign of Catherine the Great. Many excellent non-fiction books deal with this topic, such as Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman by Robert K. Massie. One novel that stands out is The Winter Palace, a novel of Catherine the Great by Eva Stachniak. It’s written from the perspective of Varvara, a serving girl who becomes a spy in the Winter Palace. She’s trusted by Catherine the Great, but the two can’t truly be said to be friends. Catherine’s life contains so many highs and lows that a book about her can’t help but be exciting.

Another book that takes place approximately at the same time is Push Not the River, by James Conroyd Martin. It’s the beginning of a trilogy about the wars fought for Polish independence in the latter part of the eighteenth century. Much of the book takes place in Poland, which was part of Russia on and off for many years. The book is supposedly based on a young girl’s diary from the period. Filled with scandals, the book has a soap opera quality about it, but when I wrote a review on Amazon and said that, the author responded to note all of it was in the diary. But books two and three come from his own imagination.

Now to move forward to the end of the Romanov dynasty. Again, numerous books have been written to detail this period. Most people interested in history know about the assassination of the tsar and the tsarina, their four daughters and their hemophiliac son. All their remains have been recovered, and DNA tests show that indeed, all seven were in two graves.

A couple of books I’ll mention aren’t necessarily among the best books about the tragedy, but I enjoyed them. The first is The Passion of Marie Romanov. Written by a Russian, Laura Rose, it’s a rather preposterous story of how third daughter Marie loses her virginity the night before she is murdered. Again, it’s supposedly based on diaries and letters, this time from the Romanov family. Unlikely or not, it’s very readable and imaginative.

 The second book, Anastasia, by Colin Falconer, is set in the 1920s, when rumors were rife that the youngest daughter of the tsar had survived the slaughter. This is another “light” book which can’t be taken seriously. It’s about a woman who claims to be Anastasia and how others try to discover the truth. Colin Falconer has written more than forty books about a variety of historical locales and has a big fan base.

Another book set in the immediate aftermath of the assassinations is White Road, A Russian Odyssey, 1919-1923, by Olga Ilyin. I loved it. Technically, this isn’t fiction, but rather the story of a young woman caught up in the Bolshevik Revolution, written more than sixty years after the fact. The woman who wrote it lived it. She describes how she fled through Siberia in the midst of a Russian winter with her infant son, all because her husband was an officer in the White Army, which lost to Lenin and the Bolsheviks. She was a member of the gentry, and her book is filled with inspiration and hope. She also details her grief at Russia losing its great artists: its authors and musicians after the revolution, something I had never considered before.

Moving forward to World War II, I’ll recommend a book that’s part of a great series by the recently deceased author Philip Kerr. It’s A Man Without Breath, about intrepid German detective Bernie Gunther. While he isn’t a Nazi, he is sent to Russia in 1943 to investigate the murder of Polish troops, and manages to escape certain death in a labor camp. While most of the series is set in Germany, this book shows that the Nazis weren’t the only cruel ones in the conflict.

I’ll mention one more book in a more modern setting. It’s Stalina, by Emily Rubin, the story of a Russian woman who travels to the United States after the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. While she wants a new life, she’s conflicted. She used to be a chemist in her homeland, but now she’s working in a seedy hotel. Again, it’s a great portrait of a Russian character.

All these books are dark, at least a little. But they open a vista into a mysterious land and the people who have called it home.

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Mary Anne Lewis is a former journalist, a historical fiction fan, and the blog mistress of http://magicofhistory.com.  Once, long ago, she worked in a library.

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“THE REAL VALUE OF THIS BOOK”: How the Sears Catalogue Shaped My Novel, a guest post by Ellen Notbohm

Over the years, I've referred many library patrons to the Sears catalog replicas in our reference collection for insight into daily life in the early 20th century. And so I was pleased when Ellen Notbohm proposed to write a post detailing how she'd used one of these catalogs in the research process for her debut historical novel, The River by Starlight, which is set in turn-of-the-century Montana and based on real-life events.  Please read on for more, and welcome, Ellen!

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“THE REAL VALUE OF THIS BOOK”:
How the Sears Catalogue Shaped My Novel

Ellen Notbohm

How much research is enough? Writers of historical fiction know the dilemma well. We fall in love with our characters and want to know them as intimately as we can. What did their environment look like, smell like, feel like? What did they eat, wear, have in their homes? What were the tools of their trade, how did they conduct business, spend leisure time, celebrate holidays, doctor themselves and their families?

Researching my historical novel The River by Starlight involved six cross-country trips. Close to 100 books and numerous notebooks bulging with documents and newspaper clippings cram a seven-foot bookcase in my office. But as delightful karma would have it, the book I consulted more than any other, the one I dog-eared with use, cost me all of $1.50.

I found the 1902 Sears Catalogue on a lonely back table at a used book sale. As much an anthropology lesson as any textbook, author Cleveland Amory called it “a view of the American scene at the turn of the century with an excitement and accuracy that would defy the most eminent historian.”

“THE REAL VALUE OF THIS BOOK IS PLAINLY SHOWN IN EVERY PRICE QUOTATION” blares the front cover. From the Sears catalogue I learned what everything from thimbles to pianos cost, what they looked like, how many choices there were. What men, women and children wore in every imaginable situation, what size range was available (“Fat men usually experience much difficulty getting a shirt in the right shape.”). How credit worked. How it all reflected the larger economic picture of the country.

Details from the catalogue colored my descriptions of home furnishings, tools and weapons, toiletries and potions. Stoves and washing machines, hay loaders and hobby horses, paint and fabric colors. I acquired some rusty artifacts of homestead life and was able to see what they looked originally.

I wrote a frisky scene giving an intimate look at the layers of societally-required undergarments my female lead, Annie, dares to forego on a sweltering summer day. There’s a charged scene wherein you can all but smell the “overpowering cloud of Le Muguet” enveloping the town’s queen busybody. A gorgeous tortoise shell hair comb becomes an heirloom and a pair of “ugly cloth-top lace-ups” leads to disaster. We see and feel the fabrics used in a prostitute’s costume, a child’s nightgown, a wedding quilt, a funeral shroud, the garish handkerchief of the queen snoop’s informant.

It was exhilarating to slather on such details throughout the story. But how much is enough? Alas, much was lost to the delete button, “cool research,” as more than one editor called it, that didn’t move the story forward. An example: the reader knows Annie and her sister Jenny shared glasses of lemonade out on Jenny’s porch. But they don’t get to see the original version of the scene: Annie sticking a pinkie through a door screen (“handsomer than the cut shows”), opening Jenny’s refrigerator (nope, Sears didn’t call it an icebox) and pouring the lemonade into ruby-stained tumblers while Jenny finishes up her work with a white cedar dash butter churn (“peculiarly adapted for milk and butter purposes”) and puts the butter into brass-locked molds (“securing the utmost possible rigidity”).

But writing those kinds of details helped me experience the world in which my characters lived, and empathize with its beauties and challenges. Even when deleted, the details remained embedded in the story by virtue of how they influenced the thoughts, dialogue and deeds of the characters.

A battered old cast-off catalogue—$1.50. Creating a richly faceted portrait of another time—priceless.

~

Ellen Notbohm
(credit: Andie Petkus Photography)

An internationally renowned author, Ellen Notbohm’s work has informed and delighted millions in more than twenty languages. Writing from her experiences raising children with autism and ADHD, her perennially popular Ten Things Every Child with Autism Wishes You Knew has been an autism bestseller since 2005. In addition to her four award-winning books on autism, Ellen’s articles, columns and posts on such diverse subjects as history, genealogy, baseball, writing, and community affairs have appeared in major publications and captured audiences on every continent. Her article collection for Ancestry magazine (2005 – 2010) related stories both poignant and uplifting gathered during extensive research for her long-awaited debut novel, The River by Starlight, published in May 2018. A lifelong resident of Oregon, Ellen is an avid genealogist, knitter, reader, beachcomber, and thrift store hound who has never knowingly walked by a used bookstore without going in and dropping coin.

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