Q&A with Aly Monroe discussion

First, I've put Mystery and Thrillers as the category for this Q&A, but the Peter Cotton series is probably better described as historical espionage. The Maze of Cadiz is set in 1944 in Spain, and Washington Shadow is set in 1945, shortly after the end of the war.
You can take a look at my website (www.alymonroe.com)for more information, so I won't go into that here.

I propose to lead this discussion by posing a number of issues for you to respond to - and, of course, I do hope you will pose others yourself. You are all readers and I am interested to hear what you think. It doesn't matter whether you have read The Maze of Cadiz or not. (Washington Shadow is not yet out)The discussion can relate to my novels, but also - I hope - to wider issues.
So let's begin. When writing a novel set in another time,any writer has to decide how to handle the history with the story. For example, how do you handle the characters who really existed with those that are purely fictional? The choices you make determine the nature and feel of the novel.
Any views or questions on this?

I don't like finding real people cropping up in fiction. If a writer wants to write about Churchill, for example, there is plenty of scope within biography to handle nearly anything about him a writer would wish to do. Likewise, history books are more satisfying for me than historical fiction which includes real people for "authenticity" or "atmosphere." You have to handle all sorts of problems of opportunity and access - would your character and the real person have met? Does the recorded personality of the real person chime with what you have to write in order to get the encounter to work as part of your narrative? The pedants among us - and they are many - would allow their suspension of disbelief to falter at the first mistake and that would ruin a big part of their enjoyment of the book.

It's interesting to hear you say that, Richard. I feel the same. My books are novels - not biographies or histories. Each one tells a fictional story of what Cotton experiences in a politically/historically pivotal place and time, which I endeavour to portray as accurately as possible. So obviously, in both books, there is mention of people and events that existed. In the second book, set in Washington, there are quite a few real people mentioned - Donald MacLean, J. Edgar Hoover - even Roald Dahl (though not by name)and others. But they are always off stage, or brefly glimpsed out of the corner of your eye. All the speaking parts are purely fictional. It's something that I did instinctively.It became policy when it was pointed out to me! For me,and the books I am writing, to put words into real people's mouths makes them seem false. The characters feel real when they are completely fictional. They are the true protagonists of the books. And by the way, I'm in favour of pedants! I hope I'm one myself if it means being accurate.

There are some limits to what I've already said. I like Tom Holt's books set in the classical Greece and Rome partly because he turns views of historical people on their heads in some ways but the times he is dealing with are so remote, any historical reconstruction is going to be mostly work of the fictive imagination anyway.

It's different when one is reading or writing about more recent times where there is much more source material available. Once you have material which attests to the character of one of the people you are writing about, you have to take account of it and it may compromise what you want to do narratively. Now that's fine if you are happy to accept those strictures, but I don't think it helps much. Even when you include the briefest of encounters you have to ensure that the encounter would have been possible given then known historical framework or be prepared to justify its lack of historical accuracy. I for one never quite trust a narrative which has to include in a preface or afterword the phrase 'some historical events may have been changed for the sake of the narrative' or its like.

What do you think of this year's Booker shortlist which included many books which in another time may have been considered period pieces?

Richard-- Loosen up, mon ami. Sip something bracing with one of those historic thrillers/novels, in a nice rocking chair, and enjoy the invented story for fun with the added historic kicker-- you'll get a rough, loose taste for the times, if the writer has done his or her job well. You'll get some feel for the geography, culture and, yes, "atmosphere." Really entertaining historic thrillers/novels that have a feel of authenticity to them include "End of War," by David Robbins (full disclosure, he's a friend)... "Winter in Madrid" by C.J. Samson (sp?)...."Killing Che" by Chuck Farrar..."The Company of Strangers" by Robert Wilson and "Lisbon Crossing" by Tom Gabbay. Try any one of them, then another... you will like! If the fictive treatment of the events interests you, then go to the author's source material and read the history books. It's working for me and beats the pants off of reading most of the popular stuff out there on the front shelves of B&N today. Mark

The problem is that historical material is often poorly handled. It can distract fromthe narrative itself either through inaccuracy or through a desire on the part of the author to show their workings. I tend to read fiction set in periods and places I already know about and incongruities jar.

I should hasten to add that neither problem arises in Aly's work.

Points well made-- and, yes, authors of readable historic fiction had best put few if any fictional words into the mouths of 'real-life' figures appearing in their tales, lest readers of even moderate historic literacy lose their suspension of disbelief.

A bit of a gap in replying to your comments - it's been a busy week.

You're absolutely right, Mark. The circumstances of the time and the place provide the environment, but the invented characters and story (which of course are products of that environment!) are what the enjoyment is all about.

As a reader, if the invented characters and story don't work, no amount of historical accuracy can compensate for that.

As a writer, I am interested in how the circumstances to be found in a particular place at a particular time affect individuals and the society they live in, because this is the starting point for my characters and stories.

Your rocking chair sounds wonderful. I'm sure it has a great literary history.

Richard: I agree that the Booker short list is interesting in that almost all of the books are historical - which would have been impossible not too many years ago. I don't feel qualified to draw conclusions about this - I have been busy writing and have as yet not read Hilary Mantel's winning book, Wolf Hall, or indeed any of the other books on the list. It may be that readers' tastes are changing - or that publishers perceive books with a historical setting as more commercial in today's market and therefore publish more of them. I don't know. What do you think?

The last Booker shortlisted books I read and enjoyed were some time in the middle of the Nineties - Knowledge of Angels and Paddy Clark Ha Ha Ha were among the last if my memory is correct. I found that I was learning too much about the authors and that knowledge was filtering in to my reading of the books. Genre fiction, where the authors tend not to be media personalities, doesn't have the same problem. It tends to be more character- or plot-driven and generally doesn't bother itself with 'ideas' or 'themes' so that I can get on with enjoying the book.

Maybe I'm taking the discussion off on a silly tangent. Maybe we shouldn't worry so much about genre. There are good books and bad books or books we enjoy and those we don't. The genre element creeps in when trying to sell a book. Buyers buy what they know, more or less. I'm often asked by publishers to comment on jacket design and for the sake of brevity, I'll say that the jackets look like a crime novel, or a history textbook, or a coffee-table book about food when the book might be about feminist politics in Italy (or whatever).

Plugging a book into a genre will help it sell and the the cynical bookseller in me says that once it's left the shop, it's no longer my problem. The book itself might not actually belong to any particular genre and the only good book is one which has gone through the till.

I don't think readers' tastes are changing except that we have a stronger need for psychological truth in the characters. We need to understand their motivations and find them rounded and believable. To that extent, it doesn't matter what the setting for the novel is. I don't even think that plot is important as long as the characters behave in a psychologically consistent manner. I blame Freud. For this and so many other things.

Richard: I had forgotten that you are in the book selling business!
Packaging a writer's work in a particular genre,the choice of book jackets, tag lines and so on, is all to do with the publishers and book sellers, not the writers.
I would also like to point out that most writers of any kind are far from beiong media personalities.
Psychological truth in characters? Surely that has always been essential.

I'm obviously letting the bee in my bonnet go about its business unimpeded...

It's true that packaging and marketing a book is down to the publisher, but the writer surely has to consider who the book is written for. Some writers write for themselves, in that they write the books they would like to read or more rarely, write as a form of catharsis or self-exploration. Some write to make a particular point. They're usually political points and seldom worth reading for the beauty of the writing or the insight they possess into the human condition. Another group of writers write for a particular market and some of them do it very well. They're the ones who are probably most commercially-minded and the best of them produce the books which satisfy both bookseller and reader.

We *love* them. :)

I'll agree with you that most writers are very far from having any sort of media profile. I find that sad. We're more familiar with the lives and work of mediocre sportsmen than excellent authors. I'd like to see more writers get the attention that falls on a few people round the time the Booker winner is announced.

I'm not sure that psychological truth has been essential for all that long. Plot is the thing that has always driven storytelling. You want to know what happens next in the story. That's what children have asked at every break in every bedtime story and I think it's still what drives us as adult readers. It's only in the past few decades that we as readers have felt the need to identify with the characters and some kind of psychological verisimilitude is required for that to happen. We're more inclined to read on if the characters are rounded and believable but there has to be something happening for us to engage with the book at all. I'll use Agatha Christie as an example of a very successful writer who gave nary a thought to the inner lives of her characters. The plot and the puzzle were the thing for her and her readers. She still has hundreds of thousands of readers because the puzzles were so satisfying.

Agatha Christie was, as you say, writing puzzle novels. Character was not her point. I'm sure you have heard the line that she hypnotised readers with about eight threads in her stories. The readers become engrossed in following the individual threads and fail to see the solution. An ingenious sleight of hand. And, as you say, very successful.

But I am going further back, and wider, than Agatha Christie. Psychological truth has always been there in great fiction. It is not new. There are a lot of examples. Think of Macbeth - or Hamlet (one of the first detectives according to some). And I do believe that plot arises from character. As you will be aware, it is not a new thought!

But perhaps you mean that it has become fashionable recently in crime fiction. That is the problem with thinking in terms of genre.