Deciphering a puzzle or following stepping stones--What kind of mystery do YOU prefer?

A librarian recently posed to me that question I suppose every writer must address at some point: "Plotter or pantser?" Having been exposed to this great debate now, I can say for the record that I wrote A Murder at Rosamund's Gate by the seat of my pants, while for From the Charred Remains, I've taken the more methodical "plotter" approach. 

Is the mystery presented as a puzzle from the outset?

However, I think the more interesting question is how mystery writers approach the central crime and the investigative process from the outset.  

Does the author present the story literally as a puzzle for the crime solver (and by extension, the reader) to decipher, or does the author evoke a puzzle throughout the narrative--asking the investigator (and the reader) to comb through motives and motivations in a systematic way? Does the author have the investigator leap from clue to clue, as one might step logically from stone to stone to cross a stream? In such cases, the reader can try to look two jumps ahead in the investigation and anticipate twists and turns. (Of course, when done well, the reader won't figure out the precise rocks in the path!)

Or does the investigation reveal the puzzle?

You could argue that some mystery genres favor one approach over the other. For example, in a police procedural, a detective might take a more direct approach to finding a criminal, while in a cozy mystery,  an amateur sleuth is likely to have stumbled on an interesting puzzle or been brought into the investigation because he or she possessed peculiar knowledge crucial to solving the puzzle.

Certainly, any combination of these approaches can work when crafting a mystery. Sometimes, however, the reader is left unsatisfied by the great reveal, or worse, insulted by the obviousness of the solution.  

The problem, I think, is when the author has not decided where the element of mystery--the heart of the puzzle--lies.  Simply identifying the criminal or murderer is not enough.  Is the puzzle in the crime itself? For example, consider the locked room mysteries, such as Poe's Murders in Rue Morgue or Christie's And Then There Were None.  Here, the goal is to understand how the killings occurred, as well as to discover the murderer.  Or, is the puzzle found in exploring different characters' motives for murder? (Kellerman's psychologist Alex Delaware, maybe?) Perhaps the puzzle lays in the investigation itself, such as in Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, or in Cornwell's investigations featuring Kay Scarpetta.


Pantser or plotter--it doesn't matter to me.  I do believe though, when writing a mystery, that it's necessary to decide on the nature of the puzzle....the story will follow!  But what do you think?

All three of our books are now on sale!

Okay, it's not exactly the aligning of the planets, but you can now pre-order all three of our books. (Granted Nancy's has been out for a while, but now you can order it in paperback.)

Links below:

Nancy Bilyeau, The Crown (paperback)
Susanna Calkins, A Murder at Rosamund's Gate
Sam Thomas, The Midwife's Tale: A Mystery

Enjoy!

A Bloody Good Interview: Christopher Gortner on "The Queen's Vow"

By Nancy Bilyeau

I’m thrilled to share with you my interview with Christopher Gortner. I loved Chris’s historical mystery, A Tudor Secret, for the inventive uses he made of the last days of the reign of Edward VI. But Chris is also well known for his historical novels of famous women of the Renaissance: Juana of Castile and Catherine de Medici. His brand new novel is The Queen’s Vow: A Novel of Isabella of Castile.

I had a rather fixed view of Queen Isabella: warrior queen, devoted wife to King Ferdinand, sponsor of Christopher Columbus, and, because I particularly love the Tudor period, the mother of Katherine of Aragon, first wife of Henry VIII. Chris’s book revealed another Isabella to me, and I highly recommend his book so that you can discover her too.

And now, my conversation with this amazing author!

Nancy Bilyeau: You’ve written about Juana of Castile and Catherine de Medici and now Isabella of Castile—all three of them are, in their different ways, controversial. You could even argue that they were in need of redemptive storytelling. Do you think that’s what drew you to them?

Christopher Gortner: Absolutely. I’m attracted to controversial women. It’s partly because I grew up in Spain during the last years of Franco’s regime and was taught censored history in regards to women; since then, I’ve discovered that most popular history is, in fact, censored. Historical women are often relegated to clichés: Juana is the mad victim, Catherine de Medici the evil witch, Isabella the devout fanatic. Yet these women were complex human beings. Like all of us, their contradictions define them. The women I’ve written about defied the odds and became far more than anyone expected. I admire their fortitude, their courage; I think they deserve to be re-accessed in light of their times and their accomplishments.

NB: I was surprised by how uncertain and difficult Isabella’s childhood was. What was it that surprised you most about her life in your research?

CG: That surprised me, too. I knew about her youth—that she’d been raised far from court in rural Arévalo— but I didn’t know until I researched her for this book how truly isolated her youth was. I also had no idea that she’d had such a basic education, not at all what you’d expect for a princess, let alone a future queen. But then, no one expected her to rule. She was slated to be someone’s consort, to live out her days in comfortable obscurity. What most surprised me was her tenacity; here was this young woman with almost zero preparation, who defied the odds and rose to become of history’s most famous queens, uniting her country under one rule—something no monarch of Spain before her had achieved.  

NB: After all your research and contemplation, do you feel that you understand the marriage of Isabella and Ferdinand?

CG: Yes, as much as anyone can, given the extreme separation of years and dependency on documents. They appeared ideally matched: their temperaments complimented one another, with Fernando’s daring offsetting Isabella’s more measured approach. It wasn’t a perfect marriage by any means; what marriage is? They had their difficulties and he was very much a man of his time, with a roving eye. But there is no question that he loved her more than anyone else, or that she both loved and understood him to his core. The proof is in the way they lived and, perhaps most telling, the way he transformed after her death. He became a different man. Some say that Fernando of Aragón, not Cesare Borgia, was the model for Machiavelli’s The Prince; given how he acted following Isabella’s passing, it would not surprise me. Isabella brought out the best in him. While he lived for years after her, he was never the same. Something inside him, the part that was so admirable, died with her.

NB: Do you think most people today assume Isabella was a strong woman without much vulnerability?

CG: Oh, yes! I must admit, I’ve been taken aback by a few reactions to the novel. Some people apparently are determined to see her as this ruthless fanatic without redeeming qualities. I even got an e-mail recently from someone accusing me of glorifying a mass murderer. They blame her for things she had no control over, such as the rapine of the Americas. However, if you read her testament, you’ll see that she never wanted the New World destroyed as it was; that occurred under her grandson, Charles V, and his son, Philip II. She was human and extremely fallible; I do not seek to excuse her mistakes, which were grave and caused much suffering, but to assume she was a monster because of them is simply misguided. Her outer strength concealed inner conflict; anyone who researches her in depth will see that while she could be obdurate, she was not innately cruel. I think she hid her vulnerability because she was a woman, ruling a kingdom; and that she privately worried over some of her more controversial deeds. Her hesitation of years in authorizing the Inquisition indicates as much. But Isabella wasn’t prone to displays of emotion; she comes across, especially in her later years— the years we’re most familiar with—as remote, extremely pious, cold. She suffered the losses of her children, of her health, and the fear of her leaving her kingdom without a capable ruler with stoicism; you never hear her complain. This paints a picture of someone detached, when in fact she was deeply engaged.

NB: How much did Isabella’s mother remind you of Isabella’s daughter, Juana? They both were believed to have psychological issues. Do you think those issues are exaggerated in other books?

CG: I think they may have shared a familial tendency for manic depression. Research also indicates manic depression can be triggered by extreme stress, which in Juana’s case makes perfect sense. There is no question that Isabella’s mother slid into a depressive state that made her a psychological invalid; in those days, no one would have know how to treat her, and what treatments existed for mental illness were barbaric in the extreme. Isabella has been called callous for confining her mother in Arévalo—Juana herself accuses her of it in The Last Queen—but in fact, Isabella may have actually been protecting her mother from being subjected to interventions that would have done her no good. How much of Juana’s own derangement was exaggerated? It’s hard to say, though I suspect a great deal, especially at the height of her struggles. I personally do not think she was mad when she first went into Tordesillas. She had odd proclivities but her years of suffering were doubtlessly to blame for how she ended up. When you read custodial accounts of Juana’s later years, you find chilling similarities to reports about her grandmother. Isolated, each haunted by their pasts, denied access to what they loved most, it’s not surprising.

NB: One of the things I love most about The Queen’s Vow is how suspenseful it is. Do you need to work hard to make these women’s narratives so gripping or do the stories tell themselves?

CG: It’s a combination of both. I have to work hard to recreate events that have been calcified by the passage of time; facts can be dry as bone, so as a writer I have to clothe them in sensation again, in the tension and immediacy of life. But the history is there: none of the events in my novels are invented. Isabella had an intensely tumultuous youth; she was always on the brink of danger. And her early reign was fraught with drama. Again, it’s a testament to her fortitude that she survived.

NB: Was it hard to write about the sexual preferences of Isabella’s father and half-brother, knowing that those times were so different than ours when it comes to understanding and tolerance?

CG: Yes and no. I went into this novel with the understanding that 15^th century people are not going to see a gay man in the same way we do. Actually, all I needed to do was examine what certain religious groups today say about homosexuality to recreate the mind-set. But I hope I gave these men dignity; though we see Isabella’s half-brother, in particular, through her eyes—and she wouldn’t have understood his preferences—I strived to portray him as an individual. I hold deep respect for Enrique’s dilemma, for he was an innately gentle man and ill-equipped to be a king; he would have been much happier as an ordinary man, as he himself declared.

NB: I think that one of the hardest things for 21^st century people to grasp is the religious mindset of the 15^th and 16^th centuries. Did you ever struggle to convey Isabella’s religious fervor?

CG: Again, yes and no. It may seem strange, because I’m both a very liberal person and not a religious man. But I was raised Catholic, in Spain during the final years of Franco’s regime; I was also educated by Jesuits. I studied for my first communion and participated as a child in Passion Week during Easter; to this day, despite my lack of affiliation with organized faith, I find myself entranced by the ritualistic displays of the Church. There were also women I grew up with, who’d been through Spain’s civil war and lost loved ones, and had turned for solace and comfort to religion; I drew on them to find Isabella’s fervor. I also have spent years studying the role of faith in the medieval and Renaissance world; these were people who believed in a retributive god, who believed in purgatory and heaven and hell; salvation of the soul was paramount to them. Their intolerance, their persecutions, are driven by the fear that God will strike at them personally for harboring heresy in their midst. It seems utterly bizarre but again, all we need do is turn on the television on Sunday morning and listen to some of the more extreme preachers, like I did for months while researching this book. You’ll find that same intolerance, the same fear, in a 21^st century mind-set. As much as things change, sadly much remains the same.

NB: What about the anti-Semitism of the era? Was that hard to grapple with?

CG: Yes, of course. It terrifies me. But I understand where it came from, how it simmered, poisoned and corrupted; anti-Semitism was fueled by medieval society itself. I did find it hard to contend with; indeed, the most difficult chapters in the novel for me to write deal with Isabella’s deeds and thoughts concerning the Jews. I also had to move past the specter of 20^th century atrocities to explore her particular anti-Semitism, which is connected to the era. Isabella grew up in a melting-pot culture where Jews, Christians and Muslims had lived together for centuries, but the golden medieval age of co-existence had ended in Spain by the time she arrives on the scene. Still, she had loyal attendants who were descendants of Jews. Fernando himself may have had Jewish blood. She was not consumed by hatred for the Jews. Nevertheless, she believed Catholicism was the only true faith and that unless a Jew converted, his or her immortal soul would burn in everlasting hell. I believe she hoped for mass conversion of her Jewish subjects when she issued the Alhambra Decree of 1492, because to her way of thinking, it would have been incomprehensible that anyone willingly forfeited the promise of heaven. It goes back to the previous question about her mind-set; like so many of her contemporaries, Isabella feared a vengeful god and thus acted in righteous ardor through her divinely-anointed role to safeguard her realm from heresy.

NB: Do you think the lives of 16^th century English royals have been told enough in historical fiction? Is that one of the reasons you write about women of France and Spain?

CG: I think as long as fresh perspectives can be brought to bear, there are still stories to be found among 16^th century English royals. I myself write the “Elizabeth I Spymaster Chronicles”, which are set in later Tudor England. I choose to write about other countries and characters because that’s what I’m most drawn to at the moment.

NB: What do you think is Isabella’s most lasting achievement?

CG: That she united Spain and set the stage for a world-empire that lasted well into the 17^th century. Without her leadership, Spain may have had a very different historical outcome as far as a global presence is concerned. To this day, Latin America bears the stamp of Isabella’s decision to send Columbus on his historic voyage, and the legal codes that she and Fernando revised and implemented are the cornerstone of Spain’s current system. She modernized her nation, through education, art and literature, and her dynastic ambitions. Both for better and for worse, she left an undeniable legacy.

NB: Would you enjoy having Sunday brunch with Isabella of Castile?

CG: Yes, sure. I’d enjoy having brunch with any of my characters, as long as we don’t discuss religion J

Thank you for inviting me. To learn more about me and my work, please visit me at www.cwgortner.com

The Bloody Vintner--or, a Pretty Botched 17th Century Romance

Wing (2nd ed.) / K625A

When I first encountered murder in the archives as a graduate student, I was intrigued by the way seventeenth-century English communities policed themselves and sought to regain order and find justice after a crime had occurred.  I was also fascinated by the accounts of these crimes which emerged in popular press, and what readers might be able to reconstruct about the nature of these “bloody acts.”

Take, for example, the story of The Bloody Vintner, subtitled Cruelty Rewarded with Justice, from 1684.  This is the “true account” (note the legitimacy conveyed by the term) of Edward (alias) Edmund Kirk, a Vintner, who “privately married” a serving maid, and then turned around and killed her only eight days later.  He was sentenced to death, and was duly executed by hanging within six weeks. (Check out Sam Thomas’ post on a botched execution). 

Edward Kirk’s story got some attention at the time, written up three times in the popular press in both ballad and broadside forms. While three other men were executed July 11, 1684 at Tyburn, certainly Edward’s murder of his secret wife was far more lurid and interesting than the two men who had broken into the house of the Duke of Ormand, or the man who had stolen a horse.  Those men's names are likely recorded in the sessions records of the Old Bailey, and perhaps their birth, marriage, and property information could be found in their local church records, but little else of their stories seems to remain.

What’s interesting to me is how so much, relatively speaking, is known of Edward Kirk, while so little is known of Joan Greene, the servant who came to such a pitiful end. Referred to mainly as “Mrs. Kirk,” what can be pieced together from Joan’s life are just shadowy glimpses.  In his “last dying speech,” Edward goes on at length about his birth and early years in Fetcham and Mucklam (both in Surry), his failed attempt to become a watch-maker like his brother, his desire to enter the vinter’s trade and his subsequent service at a few taverns, and his ambition to one day keep his own “vitualling house.”
  

What we know of Joan Greene is scant, and all our knowledge has been filtered through Edward’s moralistic, somewhat chagrined, slightly defensive narrative (which may be hard to distinguish from the perspective of the penny authors who “faithfully” recorded his “dying words”). The two met at The Leg Tavern where she worked and he used to go with friends—“Often going thither I observed this woman, and took the opportunity to being acquainted with her; my frequent visits having now made me familiar with her.”  That Edward had some amorous feelings towards her, at least initially, is clear: “I began to feel in myself a more particular respect and affection for her…she accepted my Love, whereupon I made her a promise to marry her, which she very soon and willingly embraced.”

Something changed, however, in their relationship soon after.  As Edward tells it, Joan began “haunting” his place of employment, a tavern called the Miter, and his employers were not too happy. They allegedly warned him that her continued presence at their tavern would prove “prejudicial to him” if he did not forsake her company. 

At this point, the narrative of their relationship takes a tragic turn. In some seventeenth-century hands, these events would have been written as a merry farce; here, the events are chronicled written matter-of-factly, and their nondescript quality is all the more poignant if you read between the lines.  

It seems that Joan then quit her job, and managed to get Edward’s employers to hire her on as a house servant (but notably, not to work in their tavern). They lived together there for “three quarters of a year” before she eventually moved to a merchant’s house in Thames Street.  Notably, they’re still not married at this point. Edward stayed on a year at the Miter before finding work at the Swan.  At that point he explains, “I had not been above three days there [before] she followed me, still urging and pressing me to marry her as she had done before, so often that I began to grow weary of her importunities and left that place.” He went to another tavern, where after two weeks she found him again. And so this pattern went on for a while, until he seems to have finally given up, and married her.  

They kept the marriage secret, but Edward does not say why. One can only surmise, though, that he had some immediate regrets, seeing the terrible change of heart that followed only eight days later: “I called upon her at her Master’s house, and desired her to go out and walk with me, and when we came to a field near Paddington I did that bloody act, for which I now deservedly suffer.” As he explains, “It has been with great trouble and affliction of my soul, that should be so barbarous and cruel to her… I first gave her a knock with my cane which beat her back, and falling down I cut her throat with a small knife I had in my pocket, without giving her the liberty of speaking one word of mercy.” (That last admission may have surely done him in with a godly jury, and have been seized upon by the ardent clergy who urged him towards repentance.) 

Why did Edward do it?  We can only surmise from a sole passage. “What was the first chief cause that was the occasion of my disagreement with my wife, was her humor to follow me from place to place, and to hinder my associating my self with Lewd and Debauched company.” (She doesn’t seem to have trusted him, perhaps because he was hanging out with prostitutes, even though they were engaged.).  This “small spark” became a “flame of dissention,” and as the Devil informed him, only her “innocent blood” could provide satisfaction. 

Regardless, after some weeks, her body was discovered. Edward seems to have denied knowing her at first, but as you can imagine that didn’t go to well.  We don’t have too many facts here, but the marriage seems to have come to light fairly quickly. I like to think the exchange with the local constable went something like this:

Edward: “I didn’t know this woman.”

Constable: “Oh really? Weren’t you secretly married to her?”

Edward shuffles his feet. “Well, okay. Yes. But I didn’t kill her.”

Constable: “Isn’t that a bloody knife in your pocket there?”

Edward: “Well, yes, but you can’t prove it.”

 

Okay, maybe it wasn’t quite like that. But we do know Edward confessed to the crime, and was hanged.  Just from the evidence, we’ll never really know what happened, or why. The historian in me sighs over such tantalizing details, and works to construct a plausible narrative where none can be found. But the writer in me loves to speculate and fill in the gaps.  Did Joan make one shrewish comment too many? Was she some sort of deranged stalker? Was Edward a womanizer? Or just suffering a mental break?  This is exactly the kind of case that inspired my novel, The Murder at Rosamund’s Gate, the story of a young servant trying to keep her brother from being wrongly executed for another servant’s death…

It's not easy being hanged...

On a Sunday morning in 1668, a sixteen year-old apprentice named Thomas Savage escaped his master’s watchful eye and ran to one of London’s brothels. When Savage’s money ran out, one of the prostitutes, a woman named Hannah Blay, urged him to rob his master and return. Savage agreed, but was caught in the act by his fellow-servant, whom he beat to death with a hammer. Upon learning of Savage’s crime, Blay (understandably) would have nothing to do with him, and he fled towards Greenwich, where he was arrested and taken by hue and cry.

And that’s when the fun really began, for Savage’s soul and body became a battleground, political and religious leaders fought to impose their agenda on the life and crimes of Thomas Savage. While executions were more common in the past than they are now, a “good” execution was hard to pull off, and  Savage’s case offers an excellent example of what could go wrong when the state tried to make an example of a criminal.

The battle over Savage’s soul began shortly after he had been sentenced to death when a group of puritan ministers visited him in prison, hoping to convert him to a more enthusiastic kind of Protestantism. Many felons received this sort of treatment, for the minister who saved the soul of a notorious could garner a great deal of fame, presumably by word of mouth but also in print. The ministers who converted Savage published a book about their exploits called A Murderer Punished and Pardoned, which remained in print for nearly forty years. (Fun fact: ministers from different religious denominations would compete with each other to save a condemned prisoner’s soul!)

In most cases such as this, the story is pretty basic. A man commits a crime, is caught, and imprisoned. The ministers convince him of his sinful nature, he repents, and goes happily to his place of execution, where he once again confesses his sins and warns others to take heed of his fate.

And while Savage initially resisted the ministers’ efforts, he soon “dissolved into tears...and admitted the heinousness of his sin.” So far so good, right?

Unfortunately, according to one of the ministers, “the Devil was loath to lose such a prey when he had brought him to the very mouth and gates of hell, to have him snatched out of his hands by the free grace of God.” And so Savage, “was by some former acquaintance (who showed their love to a death-deserving sinner no other way than by calling for drink did twice relapse into that sin of drunkenness.”

Nor was this the end of Savage’s backsliding, for the ministers had to include yet another disclaimer at the end of their account, writing:

Take notice that the report that the reason he was not executed on Monday was that he was drunk is an abominable falsehood. For to our knowledge he did not eat nor drink that morning.

It thus seems that despite his notoriety, Thomas Savage proved an uncertain model for religious conversion, and we can only wonder what readers would have made of his winding path to redemption. Would they wonder if his conversion was genuine? If so, would they go on to question the redemptive power of God’s free grace?

But this was not the end of Thomas’s troubles, for the officials charged with hanging him had strikingly similar problems getting the job done.

After Savage’s conviction, he was escorted to the gallows where he made a suitably contrite speech warning other young men to avoid the path he’d taken, and was turned off the cart without a fight. According to one witness:

He struggled for a while, heaving up his body which a young man (his friend) seeing, to put him out of his pain, struck him with all his might on the breast several times, then no motion was perceived in him.

Such struggles cannot have been uncommon, but they did not speak to the competence of the officials in charge of the hanging – execution was not supposed to involve audience participation! In any event, once it was agreed that Thomas was dead, he was cut down and taken to a local inn for be prepared for burial. And then the trouble began again.

To the astonishment of the beholders, he began to stir and breath and rattle in his throat, and it was evident his life was whole within him. He was carried to a bed, where he breathed more strongly and opened his eyes and mouth and offered to speak, but could not recover the use of his tongue.

Thomas’s undertakers turned caretakers also sent for the sheriff so they could have another go at the hanging. Thomas apparently felt that one hanging was enough, and fought tooth-and-nail all the way to the gallows, “giving a kick to the executioner and one of the bailiffs a blow to the mouth.”

As in the case of his conversion, Thomas’s execution raises as many questions as it answers. And what do we make of a government that cannot successfully hang a sixteen year-old boy?

While Thomas’s execution was meant to simultaneously display God’s mercy and the state’s majesty, it wound up doing neither of these things. In fact, a teenage boy undermined them both.     

"There is Special Providence in the Fall of a Sparrow"

In a post from last week, I wrote about the difficulty (and importance) of avoiding anachronism in historical fiction, not simply in terms of material culture, but the world-view of our characters. Authors have to negotiate a difficult path between the Scylla of making our characters too modern, and the Charybdis of making them so historical that readers cannot identify with them.

Oddly enough, that post was a bit of an unintended tangent. The subject I had intended to write about was divine providence.

Devotees of Shakespeare no doubt recognize Hamlet’s claim that, “There is special providence in / the fall of a sparrow.” (V. ii. 215-6) In this passage, Shakespeare is drawing on an idea found in the book of Matthew, which notes, “Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing, and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father?” (Matt. 10.29)

Shakespeare and Matthew are making two related points here. The first is relatively straightforward: Nothing that happens without God’s permission. If you accept the idea of an omnipotent and omniscient God, this is an obvious (and not terribly interesting) point.

But in the early modern period, there was another rather more foreign concept that went along with this. Not only did God authorize every event, virtually any event, good or bad, could be interpreted as a sign from God.

In other words, the world was a series of coded messages from God, and the believer was obliged to study their lives in search of His hidden meaning.

In some cases, the meaning of events could be quite clear. In 1623, a Jesuit priest named Robert Drury was in the midst of delivering a sermon to some three-hundred hearers when the floor of his makeshift church collapsed, killing Drury and scores of hearers. For Puritan preachers and pamphleteers, such a tragedy was (literally and figuratively) a gift from God. What better proof could you want that God hated Catholicism?

But God was not always so obvious when he spoke, and Englishmen and women (especially the godly) had to listen carefully. Puritan minister Oliver Heywood wrote in his diary of his narrow escape from serious injury when his horse fell and nearly crushed him:

“I reflected upon what I was thinking of when I fell, and I had been thinking of the great company that came to hear me preach the day before…and methought that was a seasonable correction to my pride…blessed be god for his gracious confutation of my pride.”

Here Heywood has found divine reproach for the sin of pride in a relatively common event. It’s not that he was lucky, and it wasn’t chance. In that moment, God known what he was thinking and as a warning against the sin of pride He had knocked Heywood’s horse to the ground.

Nor was this a singular example. Heywood kept a diary dedicated to examples of God’s providence, listing the horrible accidents met by sinners, and the blessings bestowed on saints. What is more, when Heywood grew old, his very survival was an ongoing example of divine providence. How else could he explain his mere existence except that God had made a conscious decision to allow it?

The idea of divine providence is important not just as a reminder that in many ways our characters are not us. At times they may look and act like us, but the mental world in which they live is much, much different. When our characters react to a murder, the death of a monarch, or the outbreak of war, the question some of them will ask is, “What is the meaning of this?”. And when they ask, they are dead serious – they want to know what God intends, and to react accordingly.

The Devil is NOT in the Details - Anacrhonism and historical fiction

When readers and writers discuss historical anachronism, they often focus on stuff. What saddle Anne Boleyn used, the fabric clothes were made of, the food people ate. And it is a good idea for authors to ensure they get the little things right, if for no other reason that some readers react to any anachronism the way Christopher Reeve does at the end of Somewhere in Time. (Spoiler alert.)

There is, however, an important distinction between not getting anything wrong and getting things right, a distinction that in many cases mirrors the line between the physical and mental worlds of the past.

"Help, help, I'm being oppressed!"

If a character goes to a medieval inn and orders a potato frittata and tea, the author has clearly done something wrong, and even an inattentive reader will notice.  But what if the character rides past a castle and, like Monty Python’s Marxist peasants, thinks thoroughly modern thoughts? Now the Pythons clearly went to an extreme here – which is what makes the scene work – but even the best authors of historical fiction make this mistake with far less amusing results.

For example, Adelia Aguilar, the protagonist of Ariana Franklin’s wonderful Mistress of the Art of Death, rejects the conventional wisdom on the causes of malaria and expresses doubts concerning the medical theories of Galen. This decision – or error, if you would prefer– is different than if she’d had Adelia drink bourbon or express a fondness for hot wings. While it is objectively impossible for Adelia to love southern whiskey and fast food, the question of whether it would have been  possible for a physician trained in Salerno to question Galen is far more subjective.

To be clear, yes, it is possible for Adelia to think these thoughts. But finding an educated physician in medieval Europe who questioned Galen is as likely as finding a modern physicist who challenges scientific method. These people might exist, but they are few and far between. (It’s also notable that Franklin’s protagonist keeps her thoughts to herself. If she expressed her doubts publicly, she would lose all credibility.)

 Note that Franklin’s anachronism here is not born of ignorance: There can be no doubt that she understands the medical mindset of medieval Europe. I think it is also clear why Franklin made this decision. She wanted readers to relate to her protagonist, and did not think that they could sympathize with a character whose assumptions about medicine and the human body were – to our modern eyes – obviously wrong. 

And this, I think, is what so disappointed me about the book. It’s not the just the anachronism, though I admit that I was aghast at that. I was more disappointed that Franklin simply did not trust her readers to understand and sympathize with a character who believed that blood-letting might be valid medical technique.

I am not arguing that portraying the interior lives of characters an easy task, and I admit that my own protagonist walks along the same fine line as Adelia, and sometimes she might cross it. But it is nevertheless the case that telling the truth about the past requires both an understanding of the time period and the courage to be honest with your readers.