Readers often ask where characters come from.\u00a0 For me the answer is that some arise from what I can find out from the records and others are invented.\u00a0 As I’m interested in shadowing real historical events I set my fictional characters in as well-researched a context as I can.\u00a0 A murder mystery is a useful genre to frame the facts.\u00a0 Many writers these days see nothing wrong with changing what we know about some historical figure to fit some fancied notion about their period but for me this is a real sin.\u00a0 We don’t have the right to play fast and loose with the lives of real people. To me that’s the worst kind of lying.\u00a0 We know so little about the past and what we do know comes to us in fragments from documents and records of major and minor events.\u00a0 The exciting thing is to discover what really happened as far as we are able.<\/p>\n
Do readers care one way or the other?\u00a0 I like to think that the people who choose my books care about the truth.\u00a0 I want them to trust me not to fob them off with a lot of nonsense.\u00a0 The fictional element, Hildegard’s involvement in a series of murder mysteries, should be obvious, but it takes place against an authentic background when real events impinge on the lives of historical and fictional characters alike.<\/p>\n
Example:\u00a0 in The Butcher of Avignon the context is the palace where th anti-pope Clement VII has his court.\u00a0 His character is mentioned in many sources so we can be fairly sure about what he was like.\u00a0 The cardinal, too, who plays a large part in the plot, did in fact exist.\u00a0 I was about to invent someone like him when I came across a footnote about a Cardinal Grizac.\u00a0 What made it such a gift is that the facts fit in so neatly with the story.\u00a0 He really was a Dean at the Song School in York and died, we don’t know how, at the time the story ends.\u00a0\u00a0 Thomas Woodstock is real, of course, although\u00a0 he will be more familiar under his later title bestowed by his nephew King Richard II.\u00a0 As the Duke of Gloucester he was by no means the ‘hoary duke’ of Shakespeare’s invention.\u00a0 In fact he was only forty when he died at Calais and not at all the benign elder statesman of the play but a virulent enemy of his young nephew, the king.<\/p>\n
This mixing of fact and fiction is what to me gives historical fiction its buzz.\u00a0 But only if the facts as far as we can know them are honoured.\u00a0 Hildegard and Hubert are fictional enough for me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Readers often ask where characters come from.\u00a0 For me the answer is that some arise from what I can find out from the records and others are invented.\u00a0 As I’m interested in shadowing real historical events I set my fictional characters in as well-researched a context as I can.\u00a0 A murder mystery is a useful genre to frame the facts.\u00a0 Many writers these days see nothing wrong with changing what we know about some historical figure to fit some fancied notion about their period but for me this is a real sin.\u00a0 We don’t have the right to play fast<\/p>\n[Read More...]<\/a>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-492","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cassandraclark.co.uk\/casscb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/492","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cassandraclark.co.uk\/casscb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cassandraclark.co.uk\/casscb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cassandraclark.co.uk\/casscb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cassandraclark.co.uk\/casscb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=492"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.cassandraclark.co.uk\/casscb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/492\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":496,"href":"https:\/\/www.cassandraclark.co.uk\/casscb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/492\/revisions\/496"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cassandraclark.co.uk\/casscb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=492"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cassandraclark.co.uk\/casscb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=492"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cassandraclark.co.uk\/casscb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=492"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}