A Gal out of Time (aka Why Write Historical Crime?)

A few months past, I said on these pages that I would offer a post about writing historical fiction.   

In fact, I wish I had read this post before I started writing historicals!

Now, I had been forewarned.  Several years ago, my friend, the excellent writer of cozies, Vicki Delany, said to me:  "Don't write historical crime.  You narrow your market by doing that."

What she meant was this:  I've heard that only about 20% of the crime reading market read historicals.  Of those potential readers, most have preferences for  a certain time period.  Some read Victorian, and no other.  Some like classical Rome, and no other.  Some like between the wars, like me. Very few historical crime readers read all periods.

So you are reducing your market considerably.

I can attest that this is true, and would speak the same words to aspiring writers today.  But my emphasis for this post is different.

Here's what I have to offer, while writing the third book in the 1928 Merry Widow Murder series:

The trouble with writing historical novels strikes me as a very similar to that of writing comedic novels:  Not only do you have to come up with an original plot, wonderful characters, engaging dialogue, compelling pacing, and believable motivation like every other author, but you have this additional requirement that other authors don't have.  You have to make it funny.  And you don't get paid any more for doing it.

Historical novels - and I write exclusively mystery/crime novels now - are of the same ilk.  You have to include all the traditional elements of a great mystery book, but you also have to do a tremendous amount of research to get the time period right, and I don't just mean setting. Yes, I give great attention to detail of the food and drink of the time (was Chicken a la King served then?  How about a Sidecar?)  Music of the time (When exactly did Mack the Knife become available in sheet music?)  And clothing (the Flapper look wasn't the only look for clothing in the 1920s, and short skirts weren't as short as Halloween costumes now would have you believe.)

Questions like:  When did ocean liners move from coal to bunker C fuel?  (1917ish - after the Titanic)  

What were the mores of the time?  The etiquette?  Could respectable women travel alone on an ocean liner, in first class?  (Yes, with a maid.)  Did the maid have her own cabin, or did she stay in yours?

I nearly go mad with the research I have to do!  Every single page I write, I'm looking something up.  And that brings me to the comparison with comedic writing:

In historical novels, you have to do everything a writer of contemporary fiction has to do, but you also have this extra requirement:  you must research, you must get it right, and - you don't get paid any more for doing it.

I can speak to the importance of getting it right.  My first series was actually fantasy, the Rowena Through the Wall series, which takes place during the dark ages in Great Britain.  

'But even in fantasy, you have to get it right.  In book two of that series, Rowena and the Dark Lord, magic occurs.  Rowena inadvertently brings forth a Roman Legion fighting Bodicea.  Now, I did the usual thing.  Researched Celtic warfare, and researched Roman warfare, so I could get the battle styles right.  I also researched Roman armor and weapons, vs Celt.  It then occurred to me that I needed to dig deeper into what it would mean for a Roman Legion to vanish from battle.  Would they be considered deserters?  (Yes)  Would this affect their families back in Rome (Hell, yes.)  So they would do everything possible to get back to the battlefield, even if it mean imminent death.  And that created a turning point for my plot.

Believe it or not, and to my great surprise, some Roman scholars read the book, because they like to read everything that has anything to do with ancient Rome.  And one professor emailed me to say, "I can see you used Legion number XXX in the book, located at XXX in the month of..."  He enthused about the thrill of reading accuracy in fiction.  (Good thing I was a college professor at the time...)

Now, I know that if I had not done my research, I would have heard about it.  Even though the book is a fantasy!  People love to point out when you get things wrong in a book.  So I breathed a sigh of relief, that this time, I carried it off.

But it's a heck of a lot of work.

I've been lucky to get a two-book contract for books two and three, and an option for the 4th.  In some ways, I'm relieved, because I'm learning this period of time inside out, and it's good to be able to use it for more than one book.

But I have to ask myself:  why do it?  Why write fiction set in historical times?  I ask myself that every day, writing this third book.  And I've come to some sort of conclusion.

There's a certain amount of security, in writing and reading a book that takes place in the past.  Why?  It's a simple as this:

The world is still here.  Mankind survived the trials from the time of our book, survived WW1, the depression, WW11.  There's comfort in knowing that the world lives on after the book ends.

But in our world today, who knows?  The future is a blank.

And that's why I love writing about the past.

Melodie Campbell can't resist a classic mystery crackling with humour, and that's why she wrote one herself.  The Merry Widow Murders is her 18th book, and the first of a new series.

The Queen's Poisoner

Queen Christina of Sweden (r. 1632-1654)

 That one got your attention, huh? Kind of a vague term, "the Queen's Poisoner." Does it mean "the person who poisoned the queen?" Or maybe, "The poisoner who worked for the queen, perhaps even filling an official position of "queen's poisoner"? Or it could be the title of a fantasy novel?

For our purposes it's something altogether–uh, okay mostly different. The "poisoner" in question is a professional. The queen is unconventional. And this story has two parts. Today we'll talk about the poisoner and the queen. In two weeks, we'll talk about the indirect impact these two persons had on an entire country–and not the one the poisoner called home (Italy) or the one ruled by the queen (Sweden).

First, the poisoner.

The formidable Olympia Maidalchini

It's easy to sum up the historical record on our poisoner, because said historical record is so slim. His name (we think) was Nicolò Egidi. But he is better remembered by his nom de guerre: "Egidio Exili" ("Egidio the Exile"?). Exili first enters the historical record while serving in the household of Olympia Maidalchini, the influential sister-in-law of the current pope, Innocent X (r. 1644-1655). Exili's position was listed as "poisoner."

It's important at this point to understand that the profession of "poisoner" most often could have been more accurately called "alchemist," which in many ways was a forerunner to what we refer to as a "chemist." Granted, a lot of the experimental research done by these individuals involved coming up with poisons, not least because the only way to prepare an antidote for a particular poison was to experiment with the actual thing. 

How long Exili worked for the powerful (and by all accounts, formidable) Donna Olympia is not recorded. And when next he pops up, it's several hundred miles to the north, at the court of Queen Christina of Sweden.

Which brings us to the queen. 

(We'll get back to Exili in a moment).

Queen Christina dressed as a man

Born in 1626, Christina came to the throne upon the death of her father, King Gustavus Adolphus, in battle. She began to rule in her own right in 1644, and then took two steps guaranteed to ensure her reign was brief: she made public her desire to never marry (and thus never to produce an heir), and eventually made public her conversion from the Lutheranism of her youth (and in service of which her father had died, a casualty of the so-called Thirty Years' War) to Catholicism. 

Neither move was popular with her subjects, who were both A) overwhelmingly chauvinistic by our standards, and B) overwhelmingly Lutheran by any standards. And that's not all. During the ten years before she abdicated in favor of a male cousin, Christina acted in ways very unlike the "conventional" queen of her era.

For starters, she frequently dressed as a man. Coupled with her lack of interest in marriage, it has been speculated that Christina might have been either gay or even transgender. Both are possible, as is the notion that she dressed as a man because she felt men were taken more seriously in the areas which really interested her: the arts and sciences.

While she reigned Christina's court in Stockholm was a hot bed of artistic and scientific inquiry: artists, scholars, scientists (or, as they were known at the time, "natural philosophers") from all over Europe flocked to Sweden hoping for some of the royal patronage with which Christina was so generous that she nearly bankrupted the state treasury.

Exili was among those who went to Sweden looking for a "research grant," and he entered the queen's service and stayed in that position for several years.

Including that time the queen sent him to Paris on royal business, and the French promptly tossed him in the Bastille.

And that's it for now. Come back in two weeks to find out what happened to both this queen and her poisoner, as well as what climactic event they had an indirect impact on. See you in two weeks!

The Bastille surrounded by the eastern part of Paris in 1649.