Susanne Alleyn

[Did you miss Part 1 of this essay? Scroll down...]


So perhaps some commandments for historical novelists should be:

I. Thou shalt not change significant/universally-known historical events and facts. Every reasonably well-read reader of thy story will throw thy book against the wall and instantly label thee an ignoramus who couldn’t be bothered to do even minimal research.

Pretty basic. You can’t get away with saying Marie-Antoinette escaped the guillotine or that some other European explorer got to America first (and lived to tell about it and bring stuff back with him that other people eat in your novel) without plunging straight into the realm of alternate history, and you’d better darn well TELL us it’s alternate history. On the first page.

I should probably use the word “manuscript” rather than “book” here, because it is highly unlikely that a story this sloppily researched will be published--editors know these facts, too. (At least some editors do. Scenes of medieval Europeans eating potatoes have insinuated their horrid way into published novels before now.)


II. Thou shalt not change rather obscure, or even moderately well-known, historical events and facts, while assuming that no one will catch thy messing about with lesser-known history, because every historical period has its fans who know a huge amount about it and who WILL catch thee out when thou fiddlest with the known facts.

Obscure or moderately well-known: that basically means history that isn’t ancient Rome, Tudor England, the U.S. Civil War, and the other particularly beloved periods of historical novelists. There’s lots of other history out there to plumb, but its lower popularity allows some writers to feel they can get away with a lot.

Even if you (more…)

At the end of May, I went to the Bloody Words mystery conference in Toronto, where I met some wonderful people and (I hope) acquired one or two new readers. As part of the BW programming, I was a member of the author panel discussing the topic “Rewriting History: How much can and do historical mystery writers play with historical facts & people—should facts take a back seat to story?”

Sylvia Warsh, our moderator, started things off with the following quote:

“We must never become slaves to the history; we must be prepared to jettison, rearrange, conflate, to play as fast and loose with the facts as we need to to create good fiction.”

OK, I’m a complete, self-described history geek, as both a writer and a reader, and to me, that quote (by Sarah Bower, a former UK editor of The Historical Novels Review, no less) felt like fingernails scraping across a blackboard.

Our panel agreed that writers of historical fiction (HF) really do have a duty to get the facts right. Is working your tail off to do the research and get the historical facts correct, for a period mystery, any different from getting police procedure right in a contemporary mystery? If you get the procedure wrong in (more…)

I never, ever claim to have a good command of spoken French, but I couldn't resist this multilingual pun. "Blague" means "joke" in French, and the thought of myself (formerly the teenager who could never abide the thought of writing endless self-involved musings in a diary) trying to write the high-tech equivalent of a journal is something of a jest. However...

Bienvenue/welcome! Here I'll be nattering on about historical fiction, the French Revolution in particular, writing historical mysteries, publishing, and any related matters that come to mind. I'll try to post at least once every other week, and also will host some guests from time to time. Please visit frequently, leave a comment if you wish, and stay tuned...