We asked three historical novelists this question:

”How do you balance the needs of the story with the historical milieu in which you have chosen to set it – not just in terms of historical events and characters, but issues of period detail such as language and naming?”

Here’s what they said…

Margaret Elphinstone

The story grows directly out of the historical setting, so it’s not really a matter of balancing opposites. Sometimes, as in The Sea Road, the story comes ready-made: my novel is a re-telling of the tenth century Norse woman Gudrid’s story, bringing together the versions of her life found in Greenland Saga and Eirik’s Saga, but also giving Gudrid, in a fictional first person narrative, my own interpretation of her story. I had to be more pro-active with the plots of the other novels, but all of them were worked out in response to a historical situation which interested me.

Fiction allows one to explore characters from the inside; one is imagining all the time what it is like to be them. Of course it’s speculation – the real people from the past are dead; we can only reconstruct their inner worlds from the external evidence that they have left behind them. That’s where the research comes in, and I hope that none of my fictional characters think, say or do anything that a person of that time couldn’t have thought, said or done. As a novelist, not a historian or archaeologist, I’m free to explore the spaces between the evidence – the unrecorded thoughts and dreams of past people – but I think fiction, in its own way, can be just as true to the evidence as any other kind of narrative. The Gathering Night is set in Scotland in 6000 BC, so of course there are no records at all. The spaces between the archaeological evidence are huge, but I’ve done my best to find ways to reconstruct what people did think about, say and do. I did this mainly through ethnographic parallels: looking at recent or contemporary hunter-gatherer cultures and extrapolating from them what our own past hunter-gatherer society might have been like.

Decisions about language and names are important. Naturally I write in C21 English. My Norse characters would have spoken Old Norse; we have no idea what kind of language my Mesolithic characters spoke. I had to find a satisfactory way of naming them, when we have no names. In the end I used Basque names, because Basque is the only extant pre-Indo-European language on the Atlantic seaboard. Of course they didn’t speak basque in Mesolithic Scotland, but that’s as near as I could get. An archaeologist who reviewed The Gathering Night was struck by the fact that of course I had to call my characters something, just as I had to made definite decisions about what they wore, ate, spoke, believed etc. A novelist can’t just say ‘there’s no evidence so I don’t know’. She was kind enough to say that my guess was as good as anyone’s – but that was only because I’d immersed myself in the historical milieu as much as I possibly could.

Andrea Japp: I agree with Margaret. The story grows out of the historical setting and we need to be as accurate as possible with the facts, no matter where the fiction takes us.

Rory Clements: In some ways, it sounds as if The Gathering Night must have offered Margaret a great deal more freedom as a writer than stories set in the past thousand years, where so much is documented. She did not have to worry which parts of the Low Countries were controlled by the Spanish and which by the Dutch in a certain month of a certain year, or when starched ruffs became fashionable and then fell out of fashion. But in other ways I would think her job was much more difficult: she did not have the clues to the daily lives and struggles of her characters that we do in more recent history. In the end, though, she had to do what all historical novelists do: create a world constrained by what we know and imagine to be the lives of our ancestors. Much of this comes, of course, from examining our own thoughts and emotions and realising that Mesolithic man and woman must have worried about feeding and protecting their families every bit as much as 14th century man, 16th century woman or 21st century author. In the history of life and earth, 6,000 years is a very short time.

Rory Clements

My book Martyr is set in 1587. I started from the premise that the late Elizabethans thought of themselves as the most modern people who ever existed – just as we do today.

To convey that up-to-the-minute feeling to the reader, I determined that language, actions and emotions must not seem quaint or old-fashioned. I immediately dispensed with ye, thee, thy, thou and verily. Likewise, no sword fights of the Errol Flynn variety (wheel-lock pistols were the big thing then) and no swooning maidens (English women were noted for being independent-minded and, let’s face it, Queen Elizabeth was no push-over).

Language had to be comprehensible to a 21st century audience without seeming anachronistic. I happily used words like wanton, lewd, bawdy and trugging-house because while they might not be common currency in 2009, most people know them or get the gist. I tended to give metaphors and similies a timeless agricultural tang. My aim, always, was to add flavour and texture without slowing the flow. I used my wife and my editor as sounding-boards. If either of them said something seemed too modern or too difficult, I changed it.

Margaret Elphinstone: Trugging-house is a great word; now I’m waiting for an opportunity to drop it into a conversation. I find the hardest words to get the balance right are to do with swearing or sex. Our taboo words are mostly about sex or excretion. Our ancestors were a lot more robust, and would have used four-letter words literally without the discomfort that we evidently feel – in print, anyway. In my Norse novels I’ve had my characters swear more by deities than body parts, but that can sound awfully stilted. I think I get round it by not having characters swear much at all.

Proverbs and metaphors – especially dead ones – are a minefield. I remember removing ‘not by a long chalk’ from my 1812 novel at the final proof stage. It comes from billiards, and is first recorded in the 1840s. That was a narrow escape…

As to the naming of characters, that was great fun. I found them in churchyards and history books and I tried to make them fit their characteristics and be memorable. Hence Boltfoot Cooper has a deformed left foot and is a cooper by trade.

In using real-life characters, I was careful to keep them as close to the original as possible. I portrayed Drake as a bombastic, bold, devious, money-grubbing hero – because that, as far as I can tell, is what he was.

Balancing the needs of the story with the historical milieu is right at the heart of what I do. Early 1587 was perfect for my purposes. No one knew that February what the reaction would be if/when Mary Queen of Scots lost her head. Would English Catholics rise up? Would Spain invade? It was a time as tense as 1940. It also just happened to be a time when Drake was exceptionally vulnerable, because he was in London fitting out the fleet. However, we already knew that Drake survived to raid Cadiz and fight the Armada, so the main tension in my story had to come from elsewhere. That’s where the invented characters and their storylines came in; they, more than the fate of Drake, should hold the interest. It was a similar scenario to The Day Of The Jackal; we knew de Gaulle survived, so it was the story of the assassin and other characters that intrigued us. Achieving that balance, I would say, is the historical novelist’s craft.

Margaret Elphinstone: This is spot-on. It’s about taking the reader back to what it was like not knowing the future, even though that future is our past. I’ve thought about this in relation to my own parents and family in the Second World War. It wasn’t until I started writing fiction about the past that I realised properly that in 1940 they didn’t know that Hitler wouldn’t invade Britain. They didn’t know the Allies would win. That was when it finally dawned on me how terrifying it must have been. It’s that feeling of not knowing that really takes the reader back into the past.

Andrea Japp: Unlike Rory, I used a lot of words that are now totally forgotten in France, giving their definition in notes that the reader was free to overlook or I used them in their ancient meaning, which is often opposite to the modern one. I had the feeling that the reader would like to know how things were called. Indeed, such was the case for many of them.

Andrea Japp

That’s a difficult question and I’m sure the answers will vary according to the historical periods chosen by the authors.

My answer deals with the fourteenth century, my chosen period. I really don’t think that it is possible to create a historical crime novel without FIRST taking into account the wider context. Authors of contemporary crime novels cannot ignore modern technology, but that is not constricting; on the contrary, technological advances can form the basis of the novel. But with a story set in the Middle Ages the complete absence of technology poses two problems that cannot be ignored. The first is the difficulty of transmitting information. You either used a messenger on horseback or a carrier pigeon, both very slow. The second difficulty is the slowness of medieval transport. These problems mean that the writer must, if they are to maintain a swift and taut narrative, construct a story within a restricted geographical area. An additional consideration is the difference in the way people thought. Although human nature with all its foibles does not evolve in the way that technology does, it is nevertheless difficult to conceive of a story set in the Middle Ages that does not relate in some way to faith and religion both of which were so intertwined with daily life. Even if there were some (cautious) voices raised against religion in the fourteenth century, faith of some sort was universal. It was the linchpin of society and of politics and so cannot be ignored.

Margaret Elphinstone: I’m very interested in what you say about religion and magic. The characters in The Gathering Night have a shamanistic spirituality which I’ve borrowed from accounts of shamanistic practice in hunter-gatherer societies ranging from South America to Siberia, from Greenland to the Kalahari. It’s amazing how similar some of the ideas are in widely dispersed societies. I had to think my way into a very different view of things – as close as I could get, given my own C21 post-industrial background. But I find I have to try to think as if I were one of my characters, and then I can follow where they take me. My Norse Viking novels are about people inhabiting a borderland between pagan and Christian religions. I’m very drawn to those kinds of borderlands. I get very involved, and find myself starting to think in ways that surprise me.

I also relate to what you say about slow journeys, slow communication. It’s hard to communicate that and yet hold the attention of readers from a much speedier world. One of the reasons I like Victorian novels is that there seems to be so much time to explore everything. As a reader you can dwell in that world a long time. But I can see that slow crime must be harder to sell than slow food.

Modern crime novels often rely on medical facts and the intricacies of the law, but neither of these is much use to the writer of thrillers set in the Middle Ages. Medicine was in its infancy in the fourteenth century and for religious reasons there were practically never autopsies (except in the case of suicides or for those condemned to death). On the other hand magic and the supernatural do have to be alluded to – they were an integral part of medieval society. Because our scientific knowledge has made us sceptical about such things, they have to be introduced to the story in a way that’s plausible and not ridiculous to today’s reader, and that is not easy to do. This is partly why I always create a ‘pseudo-scientific’ character (usually an apothecary or a doctor) who is able to put the innumerable superstitions of the era into perspective and who acts as a sort of intermediary between us and the Middle Ages.

My contention is therefore that the writer’s inventiveness is more restricted when creating an historical thriller than a contemporary one, but that if the writer embraces this, it can actually increase the pleasure of writing. The writer must accept the challenge of producing an intriguing, fascinating and diverting mystery, whilst working within the constraints and difficulties the period imposes.

I feel that the writer owes a duty of care to the reader to make sure that the historical detail is accurate, even though the story itself is completely invented. That poses another difficulty and demands rigorous research.

Margaret Elphinstone: I totally agree about the duty of care. Today, more and more people learn their history through fiction. It’s a big responsibility for the fiction writer; when I learned history at school, rightly or wrongly, reading historical fiction was regarded as light relief. Now I’m aware that for many readers my interpretation may be their first or only introduction to the period. Since I wrote The Gathering Night in particular, I’ve been astonished to find how little idea readers have of their prehistoric past. I owe it to readers to be as accurate as possible.

As for the question of language, fourteenth century medieval French is hard to understand. It is like another language altogether and is hard to translate without a good working knowledge of Latin. There were also significant regional variations with the ‘langue d’Oc’ being used in the south and the ‘langue d’Oy’ in the north, and of course there were many different local patois. So the language I use is invented and is closer to the French spoken at the end of the Renaissance than in the Middle Ages. It’s a language using a syntax, which is often the inverse of modern French syntax, and is sprinkled with words of the period, which I explained in the notes to the French editions of my books. The meaning of certain words has evolved out of all recognition since the era. So for example ‘coquin’ which is now used to describe a mischievous child was in those days a serious insult meaning a thug or a coward. ‘Manant’, merely meaning someone who lived on a manor in the fourteenth century, went the other way and became an insult meaning someone uncouth. Others words, mainly for objects now not used, have been lost and I have had to search for them. It has been an exhilarating search.

Rory Clements: I faced exactly the same problems as Andrea and I am delighted to see that she used similar methods to solve them. She says she ‘invented’ a language and I agree, there is no other way. A historical novel is, by its very nature, an anachronism. If you wrote in early 14th century French or late 16th century English, your reader would struggle to get past the first paragraph. By the same token, if you wrote purely in the language of the 21st century, you would lose the joy of time-travelling to another century. Andrea also brought up the problem of the slowness of communication and I agree that this is a constant struggle for the historical novelist. Her solution is to restrict the area of the narrative. I do that up to a point, but I also compress time and distance, a trick of film-makers down the ages which, I think, is acceptable so long as it is done with care.

The science is another matter and I would not want to take issue with someone I know to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of forensics, but I do believe we sometimes underestimate our forebears. My feeling is that they would have been as keen to get to the truth of a crime as our modern forensic scientists. I am sure that experience and common sense observation – of the sort used by Sherlock Holmes – would have been put to good use and that a searcher of the dead who had seen hundreds of bodies would very quickly have spotted the wound or signs of poisoning that the murderer wished to keep hidden.

The panellists

Rory Clements is a former national newspaper journalist. He now writes full-time in Norfolk, England. Martyr is his first novel (you can read an extract on Bookhugger), and his second, Revenger, following the adventures of John Shakespeare, will be published by John Murray in 2010.

Margaret Elphinstone is the author of nine novels, including The Incomer (1987), A Sparrow’s Flight (1989), Islanders (1994), The Sea Road (2000), Hy Brasil (2002), Voyageurs (2003), Gato (2005), Light (2006) and The Gathering Night (published by Canongate in 2009). She has also had published short stories, poetry and two books on organic gardening. She is an Emeritus Professor in the Department of English Studies at the University of Strathclyde and lives in Galloway. Photo: Billy Ridges

Andrea Japp is one of the grandes dames of French crime writing with over twenty novels published. She is a forensic scientist by profession and weaves this knowledge into her books, giving them particular authenticity. She is the author of The Season of the Beast, The Breath of the Rose, and The Divine Blood (read an extract), published in English by Gallic Books.

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