with Patricia Wynn
We are delighted to welcome author Patricia Wynn back to Omnimystery News.
Last week we spoke with Patricia about her Blue Satan and Mrs. Kean series, the most recent book of which is titled Acts of Faith (Pemberley Press; October 2014 hardcover). We asked her if she'd tell us more about how she goes about writing historical mysteries, which is the subject of her guest post for us today.
— ♦ —
Photo provided courtesy of
Patricia Wynn
There are actually different ways to go about writing historical mysteries. Some authors create static characters, like Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot, and plop them into a historical setting. Generally, the history is limited to period details and perhaps a few mentions of historical events or figures to bring the period into sharper focus, but the mysteries themselves are rather like contemporary cozies except they take place in the past.
Nowadays, it's popular (especially with publishers, who use name recognition as a marketing tool) to use a historical figure as detective. Peter Lovesey wrote his Bertie series with Victoria's son, Edward Prince of Wales (Bertie to his family and friends) in an amusing set in which Bertie bumbles his way through detection. Stephanie Barron bases a series on Jane Austen, and there is the late lamented series by Bruce Alexander with Sir John Fielding, the magistrate at Bow Street Magistrate's Court who set up the first quasi-police department in England, as detective.
Other authors create fictional detectives who have been shaped by a historical event or phenomenon. Some examples are: Charles Todd's Inspector Rutledge, who suffers from PTSD after World War I; Anne Perry's William Monk series with Hester Latterly, changed forever by her experience nursing in the Crimean War; and Rhys Bowen's Molly Murphy series, in which Irish immigrant Molly survives Ellis Island to master the streets of late 19th century New York.
While these tend to be soft-boiled, neither cozy nor noir, it's really all up to the author. Jeri Westerson invented her own subgenre, Medieval Noir, for her Crispin Guest series, in which "the Tracker" Crispin, who's been stripped of his knighthood for treason, prowls the mean streets of 14th century London, solving crimes in the best American Noir tradition. Rhys Bowen went the opposite direction with the Her Royal Spyness series, in which Lady Georgie, about 36th in line for the throne, goes on madcap adventures in the early 20th century.
All of these make use of their settings to one degree or another. In her Daisy Dalrymple mysteries Carola Dunn makes use not only of the slang and fashion of the Roaring Twenties, but of the social trends, societal problems, and new inventions of the period to inspire her plots.
Then, there are series that are woven through the history, like the Matthew Shardlake mysteries by C. J. Sansom, and my Blue Satan mysteries. Both of these follow a historical timeline, and our characters are affected by and involve themselves in actual historical events.
No matter how intricately the fictional plot is woven through the historical setting, or not, ideally, the plot of a historical mystery should shape a story that could not be set in any other time or any other place. Choosing a historical setting should benefit the author by supplying unique circumstances that give twists to the story that make the resolution of the mystery fresh, and these twists should shape characters, scenes, and motives, too.
The twists come from the characteristics of the era in a particular place. They should not be limited to the clothes the characters wear, their manner, or their speech. They should be fundamental differences between the setting an author chooses and any other setting, like societal norms, laws, religious beliefs, historical movements and events, superstitions, science, and anything else that distinguishes a time and place.
A simple example would be the attitudes and laws concerning divorce. In contemporary American mysteries, the desire to get rid of a spouse is not a sufficient motive for murder since divorce is not only legal, but widely accepted. In earlier periods, though, it might have been legal but so frowned on that it could hurt someone's reputation or career. Earlier still, divorce was only legal under certain highly restrictive conditions, and earlier still, not legal at all. So as we go back in time, I wouldn't be surprised if more spouses did not get murdered for the simple reason that their spouse wanted out.
What about secrets? Today, few people would think of killing someone for exposing them as gay, even politicians, but go back just a few years and those same politicians might lose their elections. A hundred years before and being outed could land someone in jail. Today, of course, no one would want to be outed in Uganda, where being gay could mean death, but there have been times throughout European history when the same was true.
There are other secrets that, depending on the time and place, could have led to prison or death — religion being one. All you have to do is follow the religious timeline of Great Britain in the 16th and 17th centuries to find that it was okay to be Catholic or Anglican or Puritan at certain times, but usually not all three in the same year. If your books are set in one of these centuries, you'd better know which sects were banned that year to motivate your characters properly, not just because the laws were clear but because religious life and religious strife were so essential to this period. Your characters might include a Catholic priest hiding in a priest's hole or a Puritan insisting that someone should be executed for adultery.
These are just a few fairly obvious examples of how morals, customs, and laws can suggest motives for murder. While people have always been people — led to kill by the base impulses of lust, revenge, greed, fear, the usual stuff — the society in which they live does dictate the circumstances under which these impulses might arise and to what degree.
The hardest thing about writing contemporary mysteries must be to come up with a credible motive for murder except in the case of serial killers. I suspect that's one reason so many such thrillers are published. Of course, there are still believable motives. For instance, a man who is running a Ponzi scheme will not want his fraud to be exposed, but the greater the freedom society accepts, the fewer the secrets to be kept, and the more we accept differences in religion, lifestyle, and morals, the fewer conflicts we have to deal with.
The great benefit of writing historical mysteries is the wealth of material to work with. Prejudice, tyranny, ignorance, disease, superstition, intolerance, misguided wars, power struggles — can be a mystery writer's best friends. I like to find a situation in the particular year in which my novel is set in early Georgian England that would not exist in any other time or place and make it the basis for my murder plot. Then usually that situation will suggest the characters I need to make it work. Sometimes these are drawn from actual people I've read about, but usually they're derived from a combination of a societal role — again preferably unique to the period — and my own knowledge of human frailties. It sure helps to know just how badly people could behave. Then I put them somewhere interesting where people actually went and let them misbehave to their heart's content.
And voilà! That's my "How-to" for writing a historical mystery.
— ♦ —
Patricia Wynn was born in Houston, Texas. She has a B.A. in History from Rice University and a Masters from the American Graduate School of International Management (Thunderbird). She lives in Southern California with her husband and a little mutt named Puppet.
For more information about the author, please visit her website at PatriciaWynn.com and her author page on Goodreads, or find her on Facebook.
— ♦ —
Acts of Faith
Patricia Wynn
A Blue Satan and Mrs. Kean Mystery
Convinced that she will never see the outlawed Viscount St. Mars again, and nursing a broken heart, Hester Kean is not sorry when her relatives send her alone into Yorkshire to prepare her cousin Mary for life at the English court. Travelling on the stage, she befriends a reserved young gentleman, returning home after many years, whose mysterious behaviour is due to his fear of being arrested for receiving an illegal Roman Catholic education in France.
When the young man arrives home to learn that his father has been murdered, Hester wants to help, but her efforts are stymied by the secrets the young man and his family are forced to keep. Encountering degrees of prejudice against "papists" on all sides, Hester cannot blame them for their clandestine lives, but was it that very secrecy that led to the murder?
Hester has an affair of her own to keep private, for Gideon has tracked her north in disguise, determined to win her. Elated to know at last that he loves her, she still has to discover whether he wants her for a mistress or a wife. Somehow, they must hide their intimacy from Hester's cousins, while stealing the moments alone they need to resolve their future together.
0 comments:
Post a Comment