The question we asked Nicola Upson, Claude Izner, Joseph Kanon and James Bradley was:

Welcome to the real world. When using real places and real historical figures in your fiction, do the familiar elements make it easier for the reader to focus on the core of the story? How do you stop it becoming a distraction? And do you take liberties to meet the needs of the story?

Nicola Upson

It was Josephine Tey herself who, writing as Gordon Daviot, said that to write fiction about historic fact is ‘very nearly impermissible’ and – for someone who wrote several historical plays and novels – she took a dim view of mixing the two. Ironically, her life is the perfect place to do just that: Tey’s work is known and loved, but she rolled up the carpet of her personal life quite beautifully behind her, leaving those of us who are fascinated by the woman as well as the writer to argue over a few known facts. Her great genius as a novelist was to create stories that could be read on many levels – thought of as products from the Golden Age and remembered with fondness or nostalgia, or recognised as subversive and unsettling, way ahead of their time and the product of a very modern voice; the more I find out about her, the more I realise that she played that trick with her life, too, and just as effectively. Even the name ‘Josephine Tey’ is a fiction, one of two literary personalities which she created to distance her work from her real identity as Elizabeth Mackintosh; the creation of a persona extended into her private life, and who she was at any given moment depended on where she was and whom she was with; her neighbours in Inverness would scarcely have recognised the woman who was sought-after company in London’s West End, and vice versa.

These books unashamedly mix what I know about her life with an invented murder mystery, but, rather than using facts as a signpost into the story, I’m using fictional situations to deconstruct some of the mythologies about her. The plots for the crime story always emerge from her state of mind or particular events in her life; she was a complex, often contradictory woman, easy to fall in love with but sometimes hard to like, and telling her story over a period of time, allowing her to change and develop in response to the people she meets along the way, feels more truthful to me now than the straightforward biography which I originally set out to write.

Joe Kanon: I hope you haven’t given up on this. Her many fans, of whom I’m certainly one, would love to read a good biography and who better than you to do it?

There are several other real figures in the books, but very few real names: they’re detective stories in the classical English sense, and the puzzle is a crucial part of the story. To ask a reader to believe that it might be John Gielgud ‘whodunnit’ at the end of the novel is a leap of faith too far; but to suggest that the culprit may be John Terry, who just happens to share a lot of Gielgud’s characteristics, is another matter altogether. There’s no question that guessing what’s real and what isn’t is part of the attraction for some readers, although the elements which people single out as being my invention are, more often than not, part of a real biographical thread; but if the story is compelling enough, if the characters are believable within the context of that story, they will always be real to the reader – and that’s what matters most.

James Bradley: I think that’s absolutely correct: what matters is that a book work, not whether it’s accurate. Part of the process of working with real characters and real places is managing to find the spaces into which you can insert your story, and making it fit with what really went on, but the really important thing is never to lose sight of the fact that the story and the characters are the thing that really matters

Place is vital to that – the creation of a real environment provides a context for your characters to live and work in, love and hate in, and the more believable the setting, the more true to life the people; in Angel With Two Faces, the characters are all created by the Cornish community in which they were born and – because it’s a real place, and one that’s very special to me, it’s important to reflect it honestly. With the exception of the central murder – it’s a necessary evil of crime novels that you pay tribute to places you love by filling them with violence and death – all of the stories in that book are true; liberties are taken with when and how, because the structure of a novel is artifice – but the essence, I hope, is authentic.

If there’s ever a day of reckoning, and Elizabeth Mackintosh and I get to have that conversation , I’ve no doubt there will be a list of points which she’ll want to discuss with me – but I hope the overall picture for the reader is fair and sympathetic. With Tey herself, there’s only one hard and fast rule that I make myself stick to – and that’s never to make her do or say something which I know in my heart goes against her true character. Except, of course, to involve her in a series of unpleasant murders.

Claude Izner: The way you write about mixing fiction and reality is very interesting, for that’s exactly what we – Liliane and Laurence – like to do. We’re sorry to kill people in our stories, but, as you point out, it is alas necessary in a crime story! In fact, what we like most is visiting 1900 Paris with our book-seller, Victor Legris, who has to solve a mystery, but who also meets real or imaginary characters living in this wonderful town, (at the time, a patchwork of villages) some very poor, some very rich, some both. We too have a pseudonym, Claude Izner; in “reality” we are two sisters, Liliane and Laurence, so Claude Izner sometimes seems to be a third person, very mysterious to us!

Claude Izner

Our Victor Legris series of murder mysteries is set in late 19th century Paris, and we love to use real historical figures and events. The realistic framework allows us to imagine some very unrealistic situations for our detective, a bookseller who finds himself having to solve murders, every year from 1889 to 1900.

In France we are published by a collection called ‘Grands Détectives’. It is a collection of titles in which an epoch and a country or town is recreated and a detective story introduced into the setting. Readers of the collection are fond of the authors, many of whom are not French, because they know they do their best to be historically accurate but at the same time to invent sleuthing adventures that will carry the reader away on the wings of the past. Fantastic stories provide a nice escape from day-to-day reality. Sometimes people need to forget the present, but of course, even stories set in the past have lessons for the contemporary world.

We do our best to get into the skin of our heroes, and to see the ‘Belle Époque’ through their eyes, without being too didactic about facts or details; we try to integrate real-life events, that might be boring if told factually, naturally into our stories.

James Bradley: It’s fascinating the way we increasingly ask novels and works of fiction to do the work of history (and indeed the way history, particularly television history, is now so infected with the methods of fiction). In a way the novel’s come full circle since it’s beginning: early novels such as Robinson Crusoe were facsimiles of factual narratives (though in Crusoe’s case, it was a facsimile of a brand of factual narrative that was often fake, in a James Frey, Million Little Pieces kind of way). It then mutated over a very long period of time into a creature of the imagination which created a world which so resembled the real we accepted it as real. But here. Yet here we are, at the beginning of the 21st century, and we’re trying to create fictional narratives that resemble reality, not just by incorporating real events and people, and by educating, but – often as not – by pastiching the tone and language fo the period we’re writing about. We don’t just write historical novels, we write historical novels that do their best to look and sound like novels of the period they’re set in. It’s totally fascinating, not just because of the wonderful inventiveness and variouness of books such as Claude’s, but because it seems so much a part of a series of other shifts that are taking place in the way we think about truth and reality and fiction.

We do take some liberties to meet the needs of the story (not many!). For example, we have real writers and painters coming into Victor Legris’s bookshop – Anatole France, Georges Courteline, Jules Renard, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec amongst others). But in the main, we are very precise about the period we have chosen, and we are particularly careful to avoid anachronistic vocabulary, and to introduce our readers to popular nineteenth century expressions and songs.

Joe Kanon: I’m very much interested in the vocabulary question. One has to keep contemporary slang out (I’m sure we all agree) but where do you draw the line about what to use from the past? I find that some slang is so dated that even though it may actually have been used its appearance in the book draws attention to itself, not the narrative. An example: the word “swell” which people really did use but which now sticks out, an obvious attempt at ‘period detail’. How do you decide what to use? A case by case basis?

Nicola Upson: Despite their being period fiction, people often comment – some as a compliment, others as criticism – that there’s a modern feel to the books I write, that the characters’ morality is not of its time – and I’m always pleased to hear that; the books are detective stories but they’re not Golden Age novels, and they’re not meant as a pastiche of that genre – they’re novels written in a modern voice about people who happened to live in the 1930s, 40s and 50s, and one of the most interesting things for me in developing the series has been to write about lives in a more honest and less judgemental way than it was possible for contemporary authors to do. It may mean that attitudes to, say, violence, homosexuality, incest or adultery are differently or more overtly expressed in my books than they would have been in crime novels of the time – but that’s not to say that the attitudes themselves are at odds with what really went on. It’s easy to be patronising about period fiction, to look at people through a glass screen as if they never swore or had sex or understood what it meant to cross a moral line, but you only have to read the letters and diaries of women from that period to know that the public image was very different from the private reality. As far as language goes, I probably do use the odd anachronism in speech, but it’s important for me that the characters feel real to a modern reader; they need to sound to us as they would have sounded to each other, and that means removing the barriers which would be created by a more formal, artificial style.

Joseph Kanon

Place is important to me – I’ve even used endpaper maps in my books. Getting the streets right, the buildings, the distances. anchors the narrative, gives it that first layer of plausibility. This is especially useful if you write in period, when the look of a place also positions you in time.

Of course, in the end the settings are still imaginary reconstructions, particularly if the place has changed a great deal. Both Los Alamos and Berlin (The Good German) have been completely rebuilt since 1945 so photographs become the key source. Stardust presented a different challenge. Los Angeles is virtually the poster city for impermanence, but in fact a lot of 1945 Hollywood survives. Almost every setting in the book still exists (see the video about this on my website). What’s changed is the sprawling scale of the city itself. In 1945 there were no freeways. Orange groves still covered most of the valley. People rode streetcars. So the streets, even the buildings, may be the same, but they exist in a different world.

My usual location scouting for a book is simply walking the city (or, in L.A., driving it), getting a feel for it on the ground. By the time you’re ready to write, you should know where your characters live, what they eat, everything that will make them real to the reader. But this can sometimes produce disconcerting results. I went to Berlin to film a promotional TV interview for The Good German and the director (a fan of the book) would say, “Let’s shoot this in front of Lena’s flat,” and I’d answer, “Well, it would have been on this stretch of Pariserstrasse, probably a building like that.” “Yes, but which flat? Which is her window?” “But you understand she’s a character. She didn’t really live anywhere. I made her up.” At which point, he would look at me skeptically, a little disappointed, as if I were holding out on him. I suppose I should have been flattered. Lena had become ‘real’ for him, what we always hope fiction will do—until you have to supply an actual address.

James Bradley: I’m always interested by the way imaginary versions of cities overlay the real ones, and by the desire of readers to pin the imaginary versions to the real ones. In a way I suppose it’s part of the same desire to make the experience of a book concrete you see in the desire to make pilgrimages to authors’ homes. But it’s not quite the same thing. There’s a whole society of people who spend their time poring over Conan Doyle’s stories, trying to pin down where precisely 221B Baker Street is, but somehow missing the point that there isn’t a 221B Baker Street because Conan Doyle made it up. What is it they’re looking for? The experience of the books to continue? To make the books real, in some more concrete sense? Or just a sort of cultural completism, sort of a literary train-spotting? Whichever it is, it’s a strange desire, and not one I suspect, that’s really able to be satisfied.

Yet at the same time, our ideas of cities and places is inextricably connected to fictional representations of them. It’s almost impossible to imagine early to mid-19th century London without it being the London of Dickens’ imagination, or late 19th century London without it being the London of Conan Doyle, all gaslight and fog and murder in alleys. These fictional representations sit alongside the real, and alter it, shaping our cultural memory.

Using real places is crucial, but using real people is another matter. The problem here is that the reader inevitably brings his own idea of the character to the page, and yours often doesn’t mesh with the character already in his head. At best this is a distraction, at worst, an argument with the reader that interrupts the narrative. (Of course, writers may do this deliberately, to challenge preconceptions.)

But sometimes using real figures is unavoidable. In Los Alamos, only the head of the Manhattan Project could have authorized the investigation at the heart of the story. I had mixed feelings about using Oppenheimer and planned a quick scene just to just past this plot point, but the moment he appeared—one of those writing clichés that is sometimes true—he took over the book and I realized that for me he was the story, that he embodied all the contradictions and moral ambiguities about the Project that had drawn me to the subject in the first place.

I also used some real figures in Stardust—it seemed impossible to write about Hollywood without using any boldface names—but I deliberately chose people who had been real stars in 1945 but would be less well known now. Paulette Goddard, for instance, has a speaking part and at a party we see Ann Sheridan, Alexis Smith, et al. The idea was that movie buffs would have fun spotting the celebrities, but that the line between the real stars and the fictional ones would be blurred (making the fictional ones more real). But this backfired slightly: younger readers hadn’t heard of any of these people and so assumed that everyone in the book was fictional. So I succeeded in blurring the line, but at the expense of making me feel a lot older.

Claude Izner: Yes, place is very important. In our novels, Paris is the real first character. To help us to recreate this vanished 1900 town, we like to walk a lot together, to notice every small details, to take notes and photos, and to invent the past behind the present. We also look at people in Paris today and try to change them into characters that could fit into our stories. We think that, whatever book you write, it is full of what you are, what you like, read, saw, heard, your desires, your fears. And, as we are two, all this is multiplied by two! We also use old Paris pictures and maps, to set a more realistic scenery. And famous people do appear from time to time. But it is true that, for young readers, all this means little. Once again, the challenge is always the same: to invent a good story and characters that are like no others. That is the core of all books, historical or not.

James Bradley

I think it’s fascinating how agitated we’ve all become about the whole question of how fiction draws upon the “real”, and about what’s legitimate and what’s not. In my darker moments I think that agitation is about a loss of faith in the idea of fiction itself, an anxiety about what it is, and what it does (certainly it’s not accidental the first question you get asked about a book these days is always about research, not about the writing, or the aesthetics), but it’s equally related to the way our culture is being reshaped from the ground up by media technology, and the increasingly blurry line between what’s real and what’s not.

Joe Kanon: I couldn’t agree with you more. The research question has come up so often over the past few years that I came up with the following theory: the more we’ve come to accept spin and fantasy in our public life (Iraq, anyone?) the more we’re demanding authenticity in our fiction. This is a joke (sort of) but it does lead to the larger question you raise: what do we expect fiction to do? And it’s a special kind of authenticity that seems required. People are invariably disappointed when I answer that all my research was taken from print or photographic sources (memoirs, letters, histories, etc.). What they want to hear is that I interviewed people who might actually have been in the story (e.g., a scientist at Los Alamos), that only this sort of direct testimony is ‘real’. When I point out that, faulty memories being what they are, print sources (especially a variety of them) are more reliable, they seem unconvinced. Hard to say why this is so but it somehow shades into the current mania for memoirs—and the subsequent outrage when it’s discovered the memoirs aren’t actually ‘true’ but (let’s be generous here) shaped by literary considerations. It’s as if our popular culture is moving away from what literature can do—the re-ordering of experience to reveal a larger truth—and opting for a Facebook kind of authenticity, supposedly intimate but no more reliable or truthful than a personal ad.

All of that said, as a writer I’ve always been a bit wary of over-emphasisng the role of research. At some deep level it seems to me that as a writer your responsibility is to the story, and to the way you’re telling it, and everything else is subservient to that. Indeed often too much research can be a trap, because you begin to feel constrained by it, as if you have a responsibility to what really happened.

Nicola Upson: That’s very true and I certainly feel a responsibility to Tey, perhaps because I like and respect what I know about her and the way she chose to live her life, or perhaps because she’s so well-loved by her readers. But as the series goes on, I find I’m much less self-conscious about that – and, ironically, the less I worry about making the character an accurate portrayal of the real woman, the more authentic she becomes. Readers who come to the series looking for clues about her life will probably find more facts in An Expert in Murder – but more truth about her personality in Angel With Two Faces and Two for Sorrow.

I’ve had at least one novel fall over because I let the research overwhelm me, so generally I try to learn enough to write the story and then fill in around it. You need to know enough to feel comfortable in the world you’re writing about, but ultimately it’s imagination that will make a story breathe, the sense that the writing and the characters are alive.

That doesn’t make everybody happy. When The Resurrectionist was first published in Australia, a historian who’d written a book about the body trade took the novel to task in a major newspaper for reducing real figures such as Sir Astley Cooper to mere essences, and for its supposed haziness about the specifics of how surgeons were trained in the period I was writing about. It was a curious moment, not least because I could understand where she was coming from: if I was a historian and some upstart novelist came along and published a book which played it fast and loose with the facts I’d be irritated too. But I was almost more than a little bemused: in fact I wasn’t hazy about the specifics of medical education in the period, it was just that they were complicated, and boring, and trying to represent them accurately made the book more convoluted than it needed to be, so at some point I’d taken a decision readers weren’t going to care about them, and I’d just streamline them to make the story work better. I was writing a novel, after all, not a thesis, and what mattered was that it live as fiction, not that it be accurate in every respect.

In Australia the situation is doubly problematic because our history is so vexed. There’s been an ongoing debate here about the rights and wrongs of Australian novelists trying to talk about the past, and in particular the history of first contact and colonisation through the prism of fiction. This debate has been part of a much larger ideological struggle over what sense we’re to make of our past (and indeed what that past actually was) but it also seems to me to come back to our increasing anxiety about what fiction is, and does, and a failure to adequately respect the sorts of ecstatic truths fiction aspires to.

Claude Izner: It’s true that research can be a problem! When we began the Legris books, we had never written historical novels, and we were frantic about the documentation. We had to learn to resist the temptation to write a thesis, as you say, and remember that we were writing a novel. The most important thing for us is to create a good detective story, and it is also, for us, the hardest. The history has to seem natural, we have to give the right details at the right time, so that the result is not too didactic.

The panellists

James Bradley was born in 1967. He has twice been named as one of the Sydney Morning Herald‘s Best Young Australian Novelists and has won the Fellowship of Australian Writers Literature Award, the Kathleen Mitchell Literary Award and has been shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award. He is the author of a collection of poetry called Paper Nautilus and the novels Wrack, The Deep Field and The Resurrectionist. In 2008 The Resurrectionist was chosen as a Richard and Judy Summer Read, becoming a massive bestseller. James lives in Sydney.

Claude Izner is the pen-name of two sisters, Liliane Korb and Laurence Lefèvre. Both booksellers on the banks of the Seine, they are experts on nineteenth-century Paris. They have co-written Murder on the Eiffel Tower, The Père-Lachaise Mystery and The Montmartre Investigation. The fourth Victor Legris Mystery The Marais Assassin was published in March 2009. The Predator of Batignolles, the 5th Victor Legris title, will be published in April 2010.

Joseph Kanon was  born in Pennsylvania and was educated at Harvard and Trinity College, Cambridge.  While still an undergraduate at Harvard, he began a career in publishing. In 1995, on a visit to the Southwest, he visited Los Alamos and conceived the ideal for a novel about the Manhattan Project.  Los Alamos, published in 1997 was a best-seller, translated into 20 languages, and won the Edgar Award for best first novel.  Now a full-time writer, he followed it with The Prodigal Spy , The Good German, Alibi, and Stardust.

Nicola Upson was born in Suffolk and read English at Downing College, Cambridge. She has worked in theatre and as a freelance journalist, and is the author of two non-fiction works and the recipient of an Escalator Award from the Arts Council England. She lives with her partner in Cambridge, and spends much of her time in Cornwall.

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1. Welcome to the real world « city of tongues Says:
   March 18th, 2010 at 2:10 am

   [...] very pleased (and a bit flattered) to have been asked to contribute to their newest instalment, Welcome to the real world, which focusses on the use of real life characters and settings in fiction (something I did quite a [...]

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