You can’t write about crime without a taste for the dark side. And you can’t write about history without being a nerd for the subject yourself. Somewhere between those two truths lies the sweet spot for authors of historical crime – where research overlaps with good, old fashioned storytelling.
Historical fiction is at its most riveting when the worldbuilding is so vivid that you can almost forget that you haven’t really been there. But it’s a fine balance – the reader has to be utterly convinced by the truth of what they’re reading, but too much research on the page can kill a good story dead.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m an absolute sucker for detail. Hungry for it. Give me the sights, the smells, the sounds. I want to know how the food tasted, the songs that were sung, the clothes that were worn, and how the streets grew rutted in the summer. I want it all. But for God’s sake keep the plot moving while you tell me.
The key, I think, is not to think too hard about the fact you’re writing history in the first place. You must do all the research you can – fill notebooks with a barrage of facts, and immerse yourself in whatever you can find to help you really understand the period and how its people lived. Then put it all away and just write the damn book.
Your characters don’t actually live in the past, after all. They live in the present. It’s just not the same present as yours.
My debut novel, The Lost Diary of Samuel Pepys, imagines what the famous diarist did after he put down his pen in 1669. In my version of history, Pepys becomes a reluctant investigator, sent on a mission to discover the truth behind the brutal killing of a king’s man. The adventure that unfolds throws Pepys into a world of crime in more ways than one. But not all those the law deems criminals are necessarily bad. Among their ranks may stand the desperate and the dispossessed; the seditious and the idealistic. It would be a trap in any era to view good and bad as moral absolutes, but when writing about crime in the 17th century it is especially so. After all, who makes the law? Who does it serve? And what becomes of the people to whom it offers no protection?
Of course, writing this book allowed me to indulge a lot of plain old morbid curiosity too. From the brothels of Southwark to the smuggling dens of Portsmouth, the seedy underbelly of 1660s England was enormous fun to write about. Then, just as now, all the best stories lay beyond the fringes of polite society. But people are people, and human nature hasn’t changed. The inhabitants of 17th century England felt all the same emotions that we do. The same hopes and desires. The same passions and fears. The same reasons to kill.
All the rest, as they say, is history.
The Lost Diary of Samuel Pepys is published by Moonflower
