History Chat

One of the exciting things about living where I do is that I'm just ten minutes walk from another author, an aged lady with a lifetime of her own stories behind her as well as the ones she's written. We had coffee this morning and talked about the various things we have written/are writing/may write one day. Both of us love writing history. It's a bit of a shock to realise that my childhood is history now, but it means that I can sit back in an armchair, look up at teenagers and say, 'When I was a girl we had no mobile phones, television was a small black and white set and only on for a few hours a day, we walked everywhere and played in the streets, and a sherbet dip was tuppence in old money'.

Prue told me about a book she'd set in 1824, in which somebody was in prison for murder. She did her research and found that 1824 was the year when they changed the procedure for keeping prisoners at Newcastle until the assizes (trials). in fact, they changed it twice, and as records were incomplete she couldn't find out where her murderer would have been held, and had to take a calculated guess at it.

I told her about Hold My Hand And Run, which I set in 1628 in a city based on Durham. I researched to find out who the bishop was at the time. That was the year when Durham had three bishops in quick succession. I worked out that Kazy ran away just between Bish Two and Bish Three.

You might wonder why Prue had to choose 1824 and I had to choose 1628? Because we had to. Because, taking all the elements of a historical novel into account, there is only one time when it could have happened. It's a natural rule of historical fiction, just like getting the details of food, clothing and housing right. On the subject of research, my dear friend Eleanora, who died not so very long ago, was an expert on historical costume, the only person I ever knew who could talk with authority about pattens. If you want to know what pattens are, do some research. That's what writers of historical fiction do, again and again.