Finding the Story in the Gaps

My first published books were about information technology, and I wrote for national computer magazines such as PC World. I had never seriously considered writing fiction until I came across Donald McCormick's book about the death of Lord Kitchener.

Some of his claims seemed extraordinary. Initially I was deeply sceptical about the suggestion that the Irish Republican Brotherhood had planned an attempt on Kitchener at Broome in the Orkneys.

Then I went there.

I discovered that the place really was riddled with old tunnels, many associated with eighteenth-century smuggling. Suddenly something I had dismissed as improbable became, at the very least, physically possible.

Other claims troubled me much more.

McCormick maintained that the Admiralty had forbidden the Orkney lifeboat to go to the assistance of survivors from HMS Hampshire, and that officers ashore attempted to prevent local people helping men struggling up the geos — the steep rocky inlets of the Orkney coastline.

I found that extraordinarily difficult to believe. I still do. Such behaviour would have been dishonourable in the extreme, and I find it very hard to accept that the Royal Navy would have sanctioned it.

Journalism and Fiction Are Not the Same Thing

This is where my relationship with sources such as McCormick becomes complicated.

At times investigative journalism does something surprisingly similar to what I do as a novelist. It takes established facts, looks at the spaces between them and constructs a narrative that gives those facts a different cast.

Walter Hines Page, the American Ambassador in London, provides a good example. McCormick used Page in support of his argument surrounding Kitchener's final voyage. Page certainly recorded afterwards that Kitchener had been sent to Russia following considerable political disagreement, and wrote that there had been a hope in some quarters that he might not return until after the war.

That is extraordinary enough.

But the passage I have subsequently examined does not establish that Page knew of Kitchener's voyage before Hampshire sailed. Page himself acknowledged uncertainty about what he had heard.

Nor does his account establish that anyone wanted Kitchener dead, still less that there was a conspiracy which culminated in the loss of Hampshire.

An investigative journalist cannot simply cross those evidential gaps and present the resulting bridge as history.

A novelist can ask:

That is where Hubert and Banfield live.

The Dark Cracks and Tunnels

There are some very knowledgeable readers of historical fiction, and they can be hyper-vigilant about errors of historical truth. That gives me a duty to be as accurate as I reasonably can.

But when a source is questionable, my first question isn't necessarily, Can I prove this?

I ask whether it materially advances the premise of the plot. If it doesn't, does it nevertheless contribute to the reader's enjoyment?

The fixed points remain fixed.

That constraint is important.

When the Characters Refuse to Behave

After perhaps five or six chapters of Blackest of Lies, Hubert and Banfield largely began determining for themselves how they would behave.

Some authors argue, quite persuasively, that characters should never be allowed to determine plot. They have good arguments. But I sometimes think that absolute control makes fictional characters harder to believe.

Very often I simply watch Chris and Anne in my imagination almost as though I were watching them in a film, and allow them to respond naturally.

There is, however, an absolute limit.

I write historical fiction. The factual landscape constrains them just as much as it constrains me.

When History Says: No

I encountered a wonderfully simple example while writing Blackest of Lies.

I didn't want to separate Hubert and Banfield during the latter part of the novel. I had imagined all sorts of Mata Hari-style exploits for Anne aboard HMS Hampshire.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to recognise the obvious problem.

A woman wasn't simply going to accompany Kitchener's party aboard an Admiralty warship in 1916 because it happened to suit my plot.

So history won.

I had to find something else for Anne to do.

And, wonderfully, McCormick came to my rescue.

He mentioned a large trawler reportedly seen in the area, conspicuous because of its radio aerials and flying the flag of neutral Holland. Whatever the truth behind that vessel might have been, it gave me one of those cracks in the historical landscape.

MacDonald hoved into view.

And Anne Banfield, being Anne Banfield, decided that somebody had better get to Orkney — just in case.

When Truth Is Less Believable Than Fiction

Sweet Sorrow produced two discoveries that astonished me.

The first was Black Tom.

To my shame, I had never heard of the 1916 German sabotage attack in New York Harbour until I began researching the novel. Millions of pounds of munitions were destroyed, windows were shattered across New York and New Jersey, and the Statue of Liberty was damaged.

Yet this enormous act of sabotage in neutral America has largely faded from popular memory.

I hope Sweet Sorrow does something, however small, to remember Thomas Tunney and the men and women involved in combating that campaign.

The second discovery was Anton Dilger.

Dilger was an American-born doctor involved in Germany's biological sabotage programme. What particularly disturbed me was his background. His father, Hubert Dilger, was a German immigrant who served the Union during the American Civil War and received the Medal of Honor for his conduct at Chancellorsville. Anton himself was born in Virginia.

I had read biology at university, and after Blackest of Lies I began wondering whether Germany's wartime experimentation had extended beyond poison gas into biological warfare.

I wasn't expecting to find very much.

Then I encountered the work on Dilger.

How Anne Banfield Came into Existence

Anne began with almost nothing.

McCormick referred to a real but unnamed female Special Branch officer whom he said was, decades later, living in Portugal as “Madame Hubert”, widow of a Swiss hotelier.

I didn't have her Christian name or her maiden name.

But I did have something much more important.

So I called her Anne. I invented Banfield as her maiden name. And “Hubert”, the fragment that history had apparently left me, eventually contributed to Chris Hubert himself.

Anne then began acquiring a history of her own.

Later research brought me an extraordinary story about an alleged pre-war German operation involving tunnels beneath the Bank of England. Whether the story ultimately proves to be history, embellishment or outright legend almost doesn't matter to me as a novelist.

It is a magnificent story.

Unfortunately, I discovered it only after writing the first edition of Blackest of Lies. By then, however, I had already written Anne's hatred of Boissier and an incident involving her being locked inside a vault while a timer counted down.

The new story fitted Anne almost uncannily.

So I added a small reference to the second edition.

Perhaps one day I'll have to write the prequel.

The Advantage of Being Independent

That episode illustrates one of the freedoms I have as an independent publisher.

Research doesn't stop merely because a book has been published.

If I subsequently discover something that strengthens the historical framework of a novel without dishonestly changing its fundamental story, I can incorporate a small amendment into a later edition.

With a conventional publishing arrangement, doing that would be considerably more difficult.

That freedom carries responsibility as well.

An early reviewer of Blackest of Lies pointed out that I had described Gallagher as a member of the IRA. He couldn't have been: at the period in question it was the Irish Republican Brotherhood.

I had got it wrong.

So I corrected it.

When Does the Research Stop?

It doesn't.

Partly that's because I enjoy it.

Once I have a sufficiently firm foundation for the plot, I start writing. But the manuscript remains open to change as new information becomes available.

In fact, the Hubert & Banfield series itself grew that way.

Once I had written Kell's closing line in Blackest of Lies, I was already wondering where Hubert and Banfield might go next. The research that led to Sweet Sorrow opened up neutral America as another clandestine battlefield — and one that I realised contained far more stories than I could possibly fit into a single novel.

There are certainly more stories there. I don't think Hubert and Banfield have finished with Thomas Tunney.

And every new piece of research seems to lead somewhere else.

Real People in Fictional Stories

When the thoughts and actions of a historical figure are matters of public record, I try to remain faithful to them, although inevitably I render their conversations in my own style.

Where the record falls silent, I feel freer to fictionalise.

I would hate the thought of traducing someone's memory simply because they are no longer around to object. But without the freedom to fictionalise aspects of historical lives, writing historical fiction would become very difficult.

What Do I Owe the Reader?

First and foremost, immersion.

I want readers to leave their everyday lives for a while and inhabit another period in another role.

One reviewer of Blackest of Lies offered what I thought was a lovely criticism: the book had finished too quickly. He would have liked to linger in the world of Hubert and Banfield a little longer.

There was nothing I could do about that — the story arcs were complete — but I treasured the comment because it described exactly what I hope historical fiction can achieve.

There is another responsibility, though.

I would feel that I had cheated the reader if I simply invented a major historical event.

Suppose Hampshire had avoided the mines and Kitchener had arrived safely in Russia, stiffened the resolve of the Russian General Staff and subsequently retired because the pressures of office had become too much for him.

It might make an interesting alternative history.

But it would not be the kind of historical fiction I write.

Nor would I invent some secret intervention by Hubert and Banfield which really won the First World War. That would not merely be revisionist history. To my mind, it would fail to honour the people of all nations who gave their lives while doing their duty as best they could.