I am very excited to be hosting a guest blog from the talented and multi-award nominated Matt Hughes:

In an email exchange with Liz the other day, she let drop the news that she was a reader of historical fiction.

Me, too, I said.

Why don’t you come over and blog about it? she said.

So here we go.

In my working-poor childhood, we didn’t have many books around, and a lot of my time was spent in rented farm houses in the Kitchener-Waterloo area, out where the bookmobile did not run. So although I could read from the age of four, it was pretty well all comic books until I was old enough to go high school in town, where they had a decent school library.

I would read books that my elder siblings brought home from school: science fiction, in my brother’s case; and in my sister’s a historical novel called Cue For Treason, by Geoffrey Trease, which was part of the Grade Nine English curriculum in 1950s Ontario. It was about a couple of English teenagers who become apprenticed to Shakespeare and foil a plot to assassinate Elizabeth I.

I gobbled it up, and then when I finally got to high school, I started to read similar books—of which, I was delighted to find, there were quite a few. I vacuumed up juvenile historical and science fiction novels by Trease (also Henry Treece and Alfred Duggan) until I’d read out the school’s library and then the young folks’ section of the public library in Burnaby, BC, to where we’d fled after my father was unable to pay what he owed to some loan sharks.

By the time I was fifteen, I was working my way through the adult stacks and finding plenty more grist to mill. At sixteen, I started to write one of my own, based on a snippet of historical fact I’d come across: after conquering the known world and establishing his imperial capital at Babylon, Alexander the Great ordered one of his Greeks to captain a Phoenician ship and sail it west beyond the Pillars of Hercules, then south and keep on going until he circumnavigated Africa and arrived at the top of the Red Sea. The ship apparently went, but whether it ever came back again is unknown. Shortly after he ordered the expedition, Alexander died of malaria, and his empire was divided up by his feuding generals.

I only wrote one chapter. My home life was too chaotic to allow for a precocious literary career. The work did come in handy, though. In Grade Twelve at Burnaby South high school, I arrived back in English class after one of my frequent absences to find that we’d been assigned to write the first chapter of a novel. I had my Alexandrian adventure in my notebook, so I turned it in.

The teacher, the brilliant Ruth Eldredge, formerly a colonel in the US Army, gave me a ten out of ten. That was significant because she’d told us at the beginning of the year that the highest mark she would give out would be a nine. Nothing we wrote, she said, would be good enough to merit a ten.

I can pretty well date the time when I decided I would be a writer to that afternoon.

I kept on reading historical fiction throughout my teens and twenties. By the time I hit my thirties, the genre was being submerged under the spreading morass of historical romance—bodice-rippers, they were called. Fewer and fewer authors were writing real historicals; they’d largely gone the way of the western.

There were still some good authors writing great books. Chief among them I would place Cecelia Holland, who is still writing today, although she has had to slide slightly sideways into historicals with a touch of fantasy. Still, I will argue that she is the finest author of historical fiction writing in English today. If you haven’t read her, and you like histfic, you have a treat in store—in fact, treat after treat, since she has been turning out exceptional historical novels since the mid-1960s.

And now that we have the long tail to choose from, I can recommend a few other great practitioners of the art without consigning you to haunt the dusty back reaches of second-hand book stores. Here are some names with which to conjure the past:

Robert Graves, an English poet who wrote historicals for the money, and didn’t think very highly of them. But his I, Claudius and Claudius the God are brilliant, and he produced several more, all of them far better than he thought they were.

Zoe Oldenbourg, a Frenchwoman who made herself a self-taught expert on the Crusades, and whose Cities of the Flesh is the best account I’ve ever read of the brutal stamping-out of the Cathar heresy.

Henry Treece, best known for his juvenile historicals, but whose brilliant retellings of Greek myths—Jason, Electra, King Oedipus—are definitely for adults.

Lionel Sprague de Camp, well known as a fantasy author, but who romped through some wonderful historical adventures such as An Elephant for Aristotle and The Dragon of the Ishtar Gate. It was de Camp who inspired me to write the voyage around Africa.

Mika Waltari, a Finn, whose best known work is The Egyptian, about the strange religious revolution staged by the Pharaoh Akhenaten, but who also wrote several others, including The Etruscan.

Gore Vidal, of whose work I most enjoyed Creation, the tale of a fifth-century BC Persian envoy whose wanderings bring him into contact with Zarathustra, the Buddha, Socrates, Lao Tsu, and Confucius.

Dorothy Dunnett, especially her seven-volume saga of Niccolo, a Flemish/Scottish bastard who rises to become a merchant prince of fifteenth-century Europe.

In more recent times, Bernard Cornwell and, of course, Patrick O’Brian, whom everybody knows these days. Cornwell’s are well told adventure tales, and more power to him; O’Brian’s works are so good, they’re simply astonishing.

I sometimes think I should go back and revisit that trip around Africa. But it takes a lot of research, and I find it’s so much easier being a science fantasy writer: I can just make stuff up.

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You can find out more about Matt and his work here: Website