Welcome to The Coffee Pot Book Club, Nancy!
Before we begin, please introduce yourself.
I write historical fantasy, several subgenres of romance, and science fiction. I love action, adventure, and things blowing up. I’ve loved comic books and superheroes since childhood.
But I’m also a history geek. When I was growing up, Disney aired a program called When Knighthood Was in Flower, a (I now realize) highly fictionalized account of the romance between Mary Tudor and Charles Brandon. Disney also produced other historical dramas, including The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh and The Fighting Prince of Donegal and others I no longer recall. I vaguely remember a program about Sir Francis Drake, and TV stations regularly showed Errol Flynn costume dramas. Despite Flynn’s problematic personal life, no one ever buckled a better swash than he did.
My undergrad degree is in history, and the best summer of my life was the one I spent studying Tudor and Stuart Britain at The University of Oxford. I was in my twenties when I discovered that Richard III’s reputation was not so cut and dried as my history classes had led me to believe. I became fascinated by the controversy, which inspired the Boar King’s Honor trilogy.
Could you tell us a little about your latest book, and what inspired you to set your story during this period in history?
The King’s Champion is the concluding volume of the Boar King’s Honor trilogy. Each book is set in a different era, and this one uses the Battle of Britain as its backdrop.
The books are a century or more apart in time, so the stories need something other than setting and characters to make them feel like part of a whole. For this trilogy, it’s the Richard III-themed subplot.
In the book’s backstory, a wizard in the retinue of the Duke of Buckingham unwittingly assisted Buckingham’s agents in gaining access to the Tower of London unseen and departing, also unseen, after murdering Edward IV’s sons, Richard III’s nephews, whom we know as the Princes in the Tower. After King Richard died at Bosworth Field and the Tudors besmirched his reputation and blamed him for the boys’ deaths, the wizard was wracked by guilt. But speaking up would’ve cost him his head. So he cursed his entire line so that the heirs wouldn’t rest in life or death until they cleared the king’s name. Their efforts to do so run through all three books.
I needed more than that to sustain a trilogy, though. For each book, I wanted a bigger, more immediate problem for the characters to confront, one with higher stakes. The first book, The Herald of Day, which is set in 1674, deals with a wizard who has changed history so he can seize power. The next one, The Steel Rose, takes place in 1815 during the hundred days between Napoleon’s escape from Elba and the Battle of Waterloo. The characters are trying to stop Napoleon from plunging Europe back into war.
When I set out to write The King’s Champion, which would wrap up the subplot of the family curse, choosing a time period that offered a big problem with a lot on the line was easy. I’ve always been fascinated by the summer of 1940. From the Dunkirk evacuation through the Blitz, with Operation Sealion hovering on the horizon, things could’ve gone differently at any point. If they had, the modern world would be very different. I didn’t need to think very long to see how my characters could fit into the events of that summer.
When researching this era, did you come upon any unexpected surprises?
There were several. I’ll share three.
First, there was (and still is) something phosphorescent in the waters of the English Channel that glowed when ships’ propellers churned it up, turning the wakes into arrows pointing directly at the ships in the dark.
Second, hot bath water was rationed to five inches per person per week, though I was never able to pin down the exact starting date for that.
Third, Churchill was so desperate to stop German bombers that he actually approved a study devoted to the possibility of “firming up” clouds (method not specified) to use as aerodromes. I kid you not. That’s in chapter seven of A Summer Bright and Terrible by David E. Fisher.
What do you think is the most challenging aspect of writing Historical Fantasy?
I think it varies from author to author. I like to stick close the actual events and timeline, so I find it challenging to have the characters do something that makes an important difference within that framework. Someone who changes the timeline a lot would have other choices to make.
Does one of the main characters hold a special place in your heart? If so, why?
They both do. It’s always like that with any book I’m writing. If I have to pick one, though, I’ll pick Sebastian Mainwaring, the hero. I did some pretty awful things to him in backstory and in story “present,” and he just keeps pressing onward.
How did you come up with your setting?
I love this era, as I said, and it offered the perfect set of circumstances for the story.
What are you working on next?
I’m writing the next book of an historical fantasy mystery/suspense series set in the world of the Boar King’s Honor trilogy. It’s called The Merlin Club after the group of wizards who first appear in The Steel Rose. Headquartered in a supposed gentlemen’s club near London’s St. James’s Square, they work covertly to protect Britain. These books are all novellas. There’s some overlap of settings and characters with the trilogy, but primarily as background. Only the first book is a close tie-in.
I published the first book, and Falstaff Books will publish the next four. The current project is the last of those four.
Thank you for your time.
Thank you very much for having me!
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