J D Davies - Historian and Author

The website and blog of naval historian and bestselling author J D Davies

Fiction

Dedicated to the One I … Umm…

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OK, aspiring authors, here’s the thing they don’t tell you.

You won’t learn this on the creative writing courses. You won’t hear this from your agent, or your publisher, or your e-book self-publishing formatter. You won’t learn this from all those earnest blogs with titles like ‘Twenty-Five Things an Author Should Do Before Breakfast’.

No.

There’s one fundamental question which has to be answered by all those who aspire to Author Nirvana.

Now, you might be an aspiring author with the apocryphal ‘one book’ in you. A book that’s struggling to get out, a voice that demands to be heard. But let’s face it, most of us are greedy. We don’t want to write just one book – we want to write many books. Perhaps we hope that they’ll rake in as much money as a JKR or a DB, but actually, that’s not really the point. If we’re true authors, if we’ve really got the bug, there are countless stories bubbling away inside us, just waiting to burst out all over Amazon and the shelves of obscure branches of Waterstones. And that truly is Author Nirvana – to have more than one or two books to our name.

But then we hit one of the most basic problems that authors confront: who on earth do we dedicate all these books to?

This is a question that’s been around for as long as books themselves, and there’s even a very funny blog devoted entirely to the subject of weird and wonderful book dedications.

For many authors, dedicating tomes one and two is easy: ‘significant other’ and parents, either in that order or vice-versa. Ah, but then you sign on the dotted line for number three. If you have children, of course, number three (and potentially four, five, six, etc, too) will be no problem, although it’s highly likely that over the years, not all authors’ dedications to their children have been entirely honest: if they had been, they’d be along the lines of ‘To Poppy, whose quite staggering incontinence kept me awake at night for several years and led me to completely lose the thread of several potentially promising stories’. But if you don’t have enough children, and/or don’t have a ‘significant other’ (or else a sufficiently regular turnover of ‘significant others’), and/or don’t have extant parents, and you’re about to publish (say) book six – well, then you have a problem.

Yes, there’s always Great Aunt Doris. But should she really get a book before Cousin Arthur, who always seemed to be hovering in the background of photos taken in your childhood, for no apparently obvious reason? And if Doris gets one, won’t Vaguely Related Ermintrude be offended?

Ah, you say, surely one can dedicate books to one’s friends. Yes, indeed one can – assuming you have any friends left, for being an author is a sure way to lose them – but will friend X be mortally offended if friend Y gets the dedication in book 7 and s/he only gets the one in book 8?

Fortunately, there’s one eminently sensible solution to this conundrum – simply invent your dedicatees. Who will possibly quibble with ‘To My Beloved Astraea – just one night was better than a lifetime?’ Who can take issue with ‘In Memory of Bernard, taken from us in such tragic and remarkably unhygienic circumstances?’ And can anything possibly trump the seriously enigmatic – ‘For F’ – or the positively surreal, such as Cornell Woolrich’s dedication to his typewriter or Agatha Christie’s ‘to all those who lead monotonous lives’? (I dedicated one of my books to all of my former students, which was essentially the same thing.)

In case you’re wondering, I’ve just published my eighth book – four fiction, four non-fiction – and so far, I’m in no danger of running out of dedicatees, although the delicate question of the ‘batting order’ is another matter. In the meantime, though, this happens to be the one hundredth published post in this blog. I can’t quite believe that statistic – taking my first tentative steps to put the first one online seems like only yesterday! But I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the experience, and continue to do so. Consequently, this post is dedicated to you, my readers, for your loyalty and support, and in many cases for the lively and informative comments you’ve made on some of my posts. Here’s to the next hundred!

The Dai is Cast

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All novelists have a secret fantasy.

Actually, it’s not terribly secret. It’s the cast list.

Yes, admit it, my fellow authors, you know what I’m talking about. That cast list. The one for the film of your book – the lavish Hollywood spectacular or BBC mini-series based on our purple prose, the prize that we all dream about. The films and series that will never, ever, get made, unless our names are… Well, you know who I’m talking about, although I should emphasise that this post was in no way inspired by the arrival on our TV screens of yet another historical epic – cum – soap opera, a veritable Dallas with codpieces, namely the BBC’s adaptation of Philippa Gregory’s The White Queen. By coincidence, I provided a checklist for assessing such offerings a few weeks ago, so let’s see how this measures up –

  • Impossibly attractive people with unfeasibly perfect teeth – check
  • People in the past having truly phenomenal amounts of vigorous sex – check
  • People in the past thinking and talking exactly like we do – check
  • All past events accompanied by an incessant orchestral soundtrack. – Actually, The White Queen isn’t too bad on this count; instead, it’s most noticeable quirk is that it was filmed in Belgium, principally in nice but oddly unsuitable Belgian buildings that have rather too many obviously modern windows. (Downton Abbey anachronism pedants, eat your hearts out.)
  • Battles usually fought by about the same numbers of people who can be found brawling outside an average British pub on a Saturday night. – The White Queen seems to have got round this by not having any battles, or at least, not in the first episode, which is all I’ve seen so far. Now you can call me a reactionary old fuddy-duddy, but having a major series about the Wars of the Roses, one of the bloodiest civil wars in British history, without any fighting in it at all, does seem to be taking revisionism just a little too far.

But to return to my original point. Like everybody else, I’ve sometimes speculated idly on who might be cast to play my characters if the books ever got filmed. This is dangerous territory, because every reader will have their own image of each character in their mind’s eye, and, no doubt, each reader will have their own opinion about who should be cast in which part. (I’d love to hear your suggestions!) But I hope I won’t shatter too many people’s perceptions of the characters by putting forward a few of my own ideas. Matthew Quinton would have to be young and tall – although let’s face it, if the vertically challenged Tom Cruise can be cast as seven-foot-something Jack Reacher, anything’s possible. (Similarly, before Master and Commander was made, I doubt if Russell Crowe would have featured on many Patrick O’Brian afficionados’ wish lists of actors suitable to play Jack Aubrey.) Purely on grounds of nepotism, I’d be tempted to cast Jeremy Irvine of War Horse fame; I taught him, albeit only briefly, but then again, I also taught the guy who discovered Coldplay (it was that sort of a school). Whoever plays Francis Gale would have to convey a mixture of pathos, piety and ferocity, so maybe the likes of Hugh Jackman, while Phineas Musk would need to be of fairly indeterminate middle age, bald, and capable of random violence, so perhaps Timothy Spall or Ray Winstone.

And then, of course, we’d come to the 64,000 dollar question in every film set in the Restoration period – who could play Charles II? The king’s face is so firmly imprinted in many people’s consciousness that one can’t take too many liberties with physical appearance (sorry this time, then, Tom Cruise), but the part also requires an actor good enough to convey the many enigmatic sides to the king’s personality. In the last twenty years or so, there have been some triumphant castings – notably Sam Neill in Restoration and Rufus Sewell in the BBC’s The Power and the Passion – and the odd disaster (i.e. John Malkovich in The Libertine, which was a very odd disaster indeed). But the fact is that at the time when Gentleman Captain is set, Charles II was thirty-two years old, so ideally he should be played by an actor much younger than those normally cast in the part. Tall, distinctive features, thirtysomething…hmm, maybe Matt Smith will need something to do after he steps down as Dr Who?

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When this post goes ‘live’, we’ll be hacking up the A1 for a well-earned break in Northumberland (well, OK, Wendy will be having the well-earned break…). There’ll be some walking, some heritage sites, plenty of reading in the evenings*, and in my case, hopefully some serious thinking about both new and Quinton-related ideas. One thing there won’t be where we’re staying, though, is broadband, so tweets etc are likely to be few and far between, and there won’t be a new post here next week, when we’ll be hacking back down the A1!

(* In my case, Melvyn Bragg’s Credo, which is set in the area in the seventh century; it’s some 750 pages long, so I might be quite some time on this one!)

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Finally, in case anybody was wondering, the title of today’s post is the punchline of an old Welsh joke… ‘Notice on theatre door – “The part of the Welshman has been filled. The Dai is cast.’

Battening Down The Hatches

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Last week’s post attracted the most traffic ever to this blog, and certainly generated the biggest response in terms of comments, feedback on Twitter, etc. The moral of the story seems to be that saying vaguely rude things about David Starkey and/or Michael Gove strikes a big chord with perusers of this particular dark recess of the Interweb, and it would have been easy for me to carry on in the same vein this week, just as many of the numbers in Saturday’s Eurovision song contest were basically clones of the previous year’s winner. (As ever, far and away the best music of the night was Charpentier’s Prelude to a Te Deum, aka the Eurovision theme. Maybe next year the UK should enter Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending? Let’s face it, it couldn’t do much worse than Bonnie Tyler, Engelbert Humperdinck or the Romanian castrato vampire…)

So, for example, this week I could have chosen to major on the fact that thanks to the intrepid Freedom of Information requests put in by a retired teacher, some of Mr Gove’s more sweeping assertions about schoolchildren’s alleged ignorance of History are based on rigorous in-depth research by such authoritative organisations as, umm, Premier Inn. But I don’t want to flog a career-dead politician, so then I thought of commenting on the appearance last week of the new seminal literary work by master wordsmith Dan Brown – but Michael Deacon’s brilliant send-up renders superfluous all further comment about said renowned author.

No – this week marks a battening down of the hatches. In the last couple of months, I’ve lost a huge amount of writing time to meetings, trips, filming, transporting elderly mother from Wales to Bedfordshire and entertaining her for a week (she particularly likes my stand-up routine and my rendition of the greatest hits of Max Bygraves), transporting her back again, etc. So it’s time to shut myself away for five or six weeks, during which time I hope to finish off ‘Quinton 5’, The Battle of All The Ages, and work on various other projects too. Embarking on such an intensive period of writing means I need to be fully prepared for all the potential pitfalls lying in the way, which from past experience are:

  • People – They phone you up; some of them even have the audacity not to offer you vast amounts of money for mis-sold PPI. They come to the door wanting you to sign for a package from Amazon that you ordered in advance six months ago and had totally forgotten about. They suggest it’s about time you went for a drink with them in the pub. One of them even lives with you. Solution: Hide. The only viable alternative, namely carrying out limited genocide among your circle of contacts, is not recommended.
  • Grass – It grows. Constantly. From time to time, the person who lives with you will suggest that it’s time you went out and lost an hour’s writing by mowing it. Solution: Let it grow. By the end of the summer you’ll have a small jungle, aka a wild habitat which is much better for the environment.
  • Shopping – In the beginning was the list. And the list had one item on it, and all was good. Then, suddenly, the list expanded until it contained the entire inventory of a small United Nations relief convoy. And the person who lives with you will suggest that it’s time you went out and lost an hour’s writing by getting every item. Solution: Unfortunately, there isn’t one, unless you can survive a six-week writing blitz on one tin of corned beef, a packet of cornflakes and a tea bag. (NB going out shopping also involves the author in contact with People; see above. Generally, such encounters do not end well. You’ll either end up at the checkout manned by the trainee who doesn’t know how to input the discount on Chilean Merlot, or else you’ll be behind the granny who insists on paying for her unfeasible number of tins of cat food with several dozen money-off coupons and a purse full of small denomination coins that were legal tender in the reign of William IV.)
  • The Internet – Get thee behind me, Twitter, for you are far too interesting and I would much rather spend ages staring at you to learn that all my fellow authors and historians are being distracted from their writing by doing exactly the same thing. Then there are everybody else’s blogs and all those hilarious animal videos on YouTube, not to mention the fun that can be had from the reader comment forums on the Guardian and Telegraph websites (oh to lock both sets of contributors in one large room and watch the consequences). Solution: Remember that you are a relic of the PI (= Pre-Internet) era; thus you are one of those fortunate souls who will know just what to do when the whole thing crashes, as it surely will one day, and all the young people start bumping into each other like headless chickens, screaming that they can’t live without their iPhone apps and Angry Birds. When that glorious day dawns, you will smile knowingly, for you will remember how to use a manual typewriter and carbon paper; you will be one of the few who will know how to write a letter longhand – yes, and how to post it too; above all, you will know how to look up information, not on Wikipedia, but in books in libraries. So deploy your secret weapon, ageing author, and disconnect from your wi-fi network. You can do it. You know you can. You really, really can.  
  • The British Summer – Endless sunny days when you can’t concentrate on writing because of all the distractions – the chance to sit in the garden and work on the tan, the opportunity to go out for nice walks, the wall-to-wall Test Match cricket… Solution: This summer? This very marginally warmer reboot of winter? We’re still switching on the central heating in the evenings, for heaven’s sake. Absolutely perfect writing weather. Sorted.

So as part of my focus on writing, I’ll be scaling back the amount of time I put into this blog for the next few weeks, for example by taking the opportunity to publish material that takes a bit less creative thought, namely some pictures and documents of naval and/or seventeenth century and/or general interest. But if the likes of Messrs Starkey or Gove stick their heads above the parapet again, be sure that I’ll return to the fray and will have a trusty demi-culverin or two primed, loaded, and ready to point in their directions.

Mr Stark and Mr Staring

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Just when you’re starting to think ‘what shall I blog about this week?’, along comes good old David Starkey and solves the problem. (Actually, in true London bus fashion his intellectual soulmate Michael Gove, the Secretary of State for Eton – sorry, Education – then came along too, but more of him anon.) For those who don’t know Dr Starkey, and presumably some of my overseas readers don’t, he’s a self-proclaimed ‘Tudor historian’ (see below) who regularly fronts TV programmes about, yes, the Tudors (and, increasingly, anything else too, such as his recent effort comparing John and Winston Churchill). He frequently comes out with controversial, if not downright inflammatory, right-wing remarks, so if you’re American, just imagine Rush Limbaugh with a doctorate in History. Anyway, this week Dr Starkey has come out and savaged the entirety of historical novelists, claiming that it’s ludicrous to suggest they can possess any authority whatsoever about the Tudor period. Of course, it’s possible that part of his outburst is due to the fact that Hilary Mantel’s and Philippa Gregory’s appearances as ‘talking heads’ in a new series about the Tudors presumably reduced the amount of air time devoted to the talking head of Dr Starkey himself, but let’s leave to one side both that possibility and any thought that he might be secretly jealous of the sales figures enjoyed by Hil and Phil compared to those for his own tomes, all of which, of course, have been written for the disinterested pursuit of academic truth rather than for such sordid commercial considerations as selling absolutely shedloads of copies.

(Before moving on, by the way, could I just say how nice it is to see yet another expensive new BBC series about the Tudors coming our way? After all, they get so little coverage on TV compared to the likes of, say, Chinese history, the eighteenth century, or the history of women; just like the equally neglected Nazis, in fact.)

To return to Dr Starkey and his condemnation of historical novelists. Now, I, too, am a mere scribbler of what a friend of mine describes as ‘pretending books’, and thus have no authority whatsoever when it comes to talking about the past; unlike David Starkey, of course, I don’t have to my name a doctorate in History from Oxbridge and several weighty, critically acclaimed non-fiction history books based on rigorous research and published with full academic apparatus.

Oh, wait I minute, I do, actually.

And there’s perhaps the most important of all the many flaws in Dr Starkey’s analysis: the underlying, intellectually arrogant, assumption that only ‘qualified historians’ should pontificate on the past. This ignores the fact that an increasing number of historical novelists have credentials as academic historians that are every bit as sound as Dr Starkey’s, and many others research their novels with a thoroughness that would not disgrace a PhD candidate. Conversely, I know many ‘qualified historians’ whose grasp of the past is actually remarkably weak, often because they can’t see the trees of past lives for the wood of the sources they work on. Perhaps the most revealing of all Dr Starkey’s comments is ‘they [historical novelists] have no authority when it comes to the handling of historical sources’. Au contraire: they probably have pretty much exactly the same level of authority as a ‘Tudor historian’ commenting on, say, the marriage of William and Kate, Scottish independence, the 2011 riots, or, umm, the Churchills.

It’s interesting, too, to see that Dr Starkey claims he can’t read Mantel’s Cromwell novels (and presumably other books set in the same period, like C J Sansom’s Shardlake series), ‘but that’s because I’m a Tudor historian’. And of course, Tudor historians (actually ‘historians of the Tudor age’, Dr S; ‘Tudor historians’ were people alive at the time) would be intellectually consistent in such matters, and would therefore never sully themselves by, say, watching Bette Davis and Errol Flynn hamming it up in The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, or going to the theatre to see Shakespeare’s Richard III, that shamefully inaccurate portrayal of the beginning of the Tudor age by a populist hack author of the sixteenth-century equivalent of Mills and Boon. I’m a ‘Stuart historian’, as Dr S would put it, but I have no problem reading novels set in the Stuart period. Indeed, I have no problem writing them, either. It’s called ‘suspension of disbelief’, Dr Starkey: being able to distinguish fiction and history by flicking a mental switch and moving contentedly from one to the other, treating each on its own merits.

Another digression to conclude: it’s a sign of how far knowledge of history has declined in the population at large that, these days, it would be simply impossible to make a film called The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex. Audiences would probably assume it was some sort of smutty sex-laden epic about a girl called Liz encountering the entire population of the nation’s favourite county.

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And so to Michael Gove. The Secretary of State is clearly quite a jolly chap – witness his participation in The Guardian‘s splendid April Fools spoof this year – but his proposed new national curriculum for history continues to stir up a hornet’s nest, and this week he responded in vigorous fashion. The headline came from his assault on teachers who got GCSE students to compare the Nazi leadership to Mr Men characters; or so it was reported, despite the fact that as Gove tacitly admitted, this was simply a resource that had been produced, with no evidence that it had actually been used in a classroom. (Having taught GCSE students ever since the examination began, I would never, ever have contemplated trivialising the Nazi regime in such a way, and I know no History teacher who would dream of doing so.)

Inevitably, Gove’s comments led to both satirical counter-attacks and spirited defences of materials that get students interested in history, no matter how left-field they might seem to be. For what it’s worth, I’m on the side of the spirited defenders. I once started teaching the Spanish Inquisition by showing my students the scene from History of the World, Part 1, with Mel Brooks as Torquemada (and, yes, a bit later on we had Monty Python too – ‘nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!’). I often introduced sixth formers to the perils of historiographical debate by showing them some of the Newman and Baddiel ‘History Today’ sketches, which were painfully true to some of the older historians that I knew. Such strategies aren’t trivialisation, Mr Gove; they are ways of engaging students’ interest, from which one can proceed to the rigorous teaching of hard facts that you evidently crave so much. In fact, this is pretty much exactly the same principle as those snappy little videos that political party conferences play to get the audience quiet and attentive before, say, the Secretary of State for Education comes on to speak to it. And if you don’t believe that such strategies are needed with, say, a bunch of unengaged fifteen-year-olds on a wet Friday afternoon, a look at David Starkey’s catastrophic classroom performance in the series Jamie’s Dream School should disabuse you.

Ultimately, the crucial fact that the likes of both Michael Gove and David Starkey entirely ignore is that history can no longer simply be handed down to the ignorant masses from an Olympian height by enlightened pedagogues, whose words said masses should absorb immediately, silently and gratefully. So please, let’s stop obsessing about and rubbishing some of the means by which children, students and readers develop an interest in history; let’s just rejoice in the fact that many still do somehow manage to acquire such an interest, despite all the obstacles that politicians, ‘professional’ historians and, yes, many teachers too, place in their way. And if it takes Disney’s Robin Hood, Mel Brooks or Wolf Hall to get someone to that goal, then so be it.

It’s History, Jim, But Not As We Know It

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Something of a light digression this week, prompted by watching the first episode of the latest glitzy quasi-historical sword ‘n’ sex epic Da Vinci’s Demons, which appears to be from very much the same mould as the likes of Spartacus, Merlin, The Tudors, The Borgias etc. I’d expected it to be pretty risible, and in that sense it didn’t disappoint, but my main reason for watching it was to see how they’d managed to get my old stamping grounds around Swansea, where it was filmed, to pass for fifteenth century Italy. (‘Ooh look, it’s Margam Park pretending to be a Roman temple! Clever how they avoided getting the steelworks in the shot!’) Actually, of course, CGI means you can transform anywhere into pretty well anywhere else these days, and said stamping grounds are fast becoming the go-to locations for film-makers in the UK; even the cemetery where my grandparents are buried turned up in Dr Who as, of all things, the New York burial ground where the Doctor says goodbye to the Ponds (but if you pause the playback at just the right spot, you can see that the inscriptions on the headstones behind them are in Welsh).

However, all of this got me reflecting on the ways in which writers of screenplays seem to alter history in ways that would be anathema to most of the historical fiction writers I know, who take great pains over their research and attempt to create as authentic a picture of their chosen period as possible. Given the much greater reach of such series, one also wonders about the effect they’re having on popular perceptions of the past: the first couple of series of The Tudors were on when I was still teaching, and the extent to which allegedly intelligent sixth formers in a top independent school were willing to assume that it was a pretty accurate portrayal of Henry VIII’s reign was both alarming and not a little depressing. So with that in mind, here are…

Five things a visiting alien would learn about human history from watching ‘historical’ films and TV:

1/ People in the past were impossibly attractive (apart from the obligatory character played by Derek Jacobi). The historical reality can be summed up in one word. Teeth.

2/ People in the past had truly phenomenal amounts of vigorous sex (except, obviously, in Downton Abbey). OK, maybe they did. Sometimes. Charles II – yes, goes without saying. But Leonardo da Vinci? Please.

3/ People in the past thought and talked exactly like we do. Actually, this gets us on to one of those perennial issues over which historical novelists have duels at dawn, i.e. can we and should we try to be as true as possible to the mindsets and speech patterns of past ages? Realistically, of course, the answer is – mindset, yes, within reason (the risk being that rather a lot of your male characters ought really to be misogynist religious fanatics who are perfectly ok with slavery and burning witches), speech patterns, no. Unless you want to attempt a faithful pastiche of, say, The Canterbury Tales, which will undoubtedly get you a readership of precisely zero, you might just as well have your characters speaking modern estuary English, like, innit. So you want to have a Cesare Borgia who talks and behaves like a Premiership footballer? Bring it on.

4/ All past events were accompanied by an incessant orchestral soundtrack. Historical documentary? Cue soaring strings. TV drama? Wall of sound. Major historical biopic? Hire the LSO or the Chicago Symphony and get ’em to play for the whole damn duration. Take Lincoln. Now, I love John Williams’ music. Star Wars and Superman were part of the soundtrack to my youth. But let’s face it, John, somebody really needs to take you to one side and tell you that you don’t need to write an earnest minor key theme to accompany every single line of the script. When it comes to incessant music, though, an honourable exception has to be made for the fine recent film about the 1832 Paris Rising, which accurately reflected the fact that one of the principal causes of discontent was a draconian law forcing all French citizens to sing everything they wanted to say. In English. Even when they were dying of broken hearts, gunshot wounds, or horrible wasting diseases that somehow failed to prevent them belting out resounding power ballads.

5/ Battles were usually fought by about the same numbers of people who can be found brawling outside an average British pub on a Saturday night. Yes, I know, there are exceptions, thanks mainly to CGI, but otherwise, battle scenes in many TV shows and quite a few films are rather too obviously constrained by budgets. Take the recent BBC production of Henry V – worthy, well acted, but you might as well have got the English and French rugby teams to recreate Agincourt, because that was roughly the number on either side. (‘Once more unto the lineout, dear friends, once more!’)  One dreads to think how the Beeb will fare with their forthcoming production of War and Peace; but then, no-one could compete with the famous Sergei Bondarchuk version, which was able to call on a large chunk of the Soviet army to recreate the Battle of Borodino. Now that’s what I call authenticity.

At the end of the day, the success of series like Da Vinci’s Demons might suggest that we historical novelists worry too much about ‘accuracy’ and ‘authenticity’. What readers/viewers want above all is a good story, well told – or even a bad story dreadfully told, as long as it has lots of sex, violence and attractive people with unfeasibly perfect teeth. I once suggested tongue in cheek in this blog that I was contemplating ‘a plot that involves teenage wizards battling teenage vampires before engaging in torrid bondage sex with the gladiators who guard the Holy Grail’. Maybe I’ll revisit that and pitch it to TV: Fifty Shades of Da Vinci’s Tudor Vampires surely has ‘hit’ stamped all over it.   

Enter the Lion

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Cover of the UK edition of The Lion of Midnight
Cover of the UK edition of The Lion of Midnight

A short blog this week, but one that marks a big event – The Lion of Midnight, fourth of the ‘Journals of Matthew Quinton’, is due to be published in the UK on 23 April! You can read the first chapter on my website.

Lion marks a bit of a departure from the previous books in the series, both in its setting and its subject matter. Most of the action takes place in Sweden, or the waters off the Atlantic coast of Sweden, during the early months of 1666. The second Anglo-Dutch war war is at a critical stage – France has declared war on the side of the Dutch, the combined kingdom of Denmark-Norway is about to do so. Meanwhile, a fleet of mast ships lies ice-bound in Gothenburg harbour, waiting for a thaw and an escort so it can bring back its vital cargo; for without fresh supplies of masts, the British fleet’s ability to continue the war will be finite. But what Matthew Quinton expects to be a straightforward piece of convoy escort duty becomes something much darker. What is the true mission of his mysterious passenger, Lord Conisbrough? Why does Matthew become involved in a shadowy power struggle within the Swedish government? Above all, how will he respond to the presence in Gothenburg of one of the most notorious of the regicides, the men who signed the death warrant of King Charles I? As he encounters enemies old and new, together with some unexpected allies, Matthew struggles to carry out his duty while confronting some powerful demons from his and his family’s past.

Carving of King Charles X (1654-60) from the wreck of the Kronan: Lansmuseum, Kalmar

So why this particular setting? For one thing, I’d long been interested in Sweden’s ‘Golden Age’, from roughly 1610 to 1721, when the country was one of the greatest powers in Europe. I actually taught it to A-level students for many years – an eccentric choice, some might say, but most of them loved it, given the fascinating personalities and themes they were dealing with (not to mention the fact that the questions in the final exam were invariably predictable – either ‘why did Sweden rise?’ or ‘why did it decline?’ – and led to a pretty high percentage of each cohort achieving excellent grades).

As I write in the historical note to The Lion of Midnight,

The campaigns of her warrior king Gustavus II Adolphus, der Löwe von Mitternacht to his German enemies, won her vast new territories, despite her tiny population and limited natural resources. Although Gustavus’s intervention in the Thirty Years War was ended abruptly by his death during the battle of Lutzen in 1632, his generals continued to win triumph after triumph in the name of his daughter Christina, who succeeded to the throne at the age of five, and later under her warrior cousin…

Large tracts of territory in Scandinavia and northern Germany were conquered, the new city of Gothenburg was established as a ‘window to the west’, and the country also built up a formidable navy. I’d been to Stockholm several times to see the remarkable Vasa, but to research Lion, in February 2011 I spent a week in Kalmar and Gothenburg (aka Göteborg). The former houses the astonishing range of exhibits recovered from the wreck of the Kronan, which sank in 1676; at the time, she was one of the largest warships in the world, the brainchild of the English shipwright Francis Sheldon. I was also really impressed by the museums in Gothenburg, notably the Maritime Museum and the City Museum; the latter has a vast model of the city as it was at pretty much exactly the time I’ve written about in Lion!

Model of mid-17th century Gothenburg: City Museum
Model of mid-17th century Gothenburg: City Museum

So I hope readers will enjoy The Lion of Midnight, which explores a relatively little known aspect of naval history, visits a fascinating foreign land at the height of its short-lived greatness, and sees the hero face challenges very different to any he has encountered before.

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When this post goes live, I’ll actually be hacking my way down the M5 to Devon for a few days of research fieldwork connected to the next Quinton book and some ongoing non-fiction projects. (Those of you who know the subject of ‘Quinton 5’ from my previous posts and the website might be wondering why on earth a story focusing on the Four Days Battle of 1666 needs fieldwork in Devon, of all places. Watch this space, or better still, read the book in about a year’s time!) So next week, I hope to be blogging about some of the places I’ll have been to.