Promo: Shire's Union Trilogy by Richard Buxton
Today, I'm delighted to welcome author Richard Buxton to Ruins & Reading. He's sharing a fascinating guest post about his research into his Shire's Union Trilogy. Some great insights here. Have a look!
The Shire's Union Trilogy is currently on blog tour with The Coffee Pot Book Club. Make sure to check out all the other interesting posts HERE!
Read, Imagine, Go, Repeat
I’ve delivered a number of talks about historical fiction writers and their relationship with the truth, which is closely related to how and why I research. When you begin to write historical fiction, you will have to use your own judgement on how you handle the history. I use the term history rather than the past. The past is set, in the can, done and dusted; it’s just that the vast majority of it is lost to us and we are left with only history, our often-contested understanding of the past. This is good news for historical fiction writers, as our justification for introducing fiction alongside the history, is that by combining the historical record and a large dollop of imagination, we give our readers a fair shot at getting as immersed as possible in how we think the past might have looked and felt.
When I consider research, I’m primarily after three things: a solid understanding of the history, inspiration, and believable detail. The interplay between these three makes research a hugely enjoyable part of the process, where you can expand the depth and complexity of your plot as well as add some original colour to your scenes.
When it comes to understanding the history, I have a reasonable head start. I was interested in the US Civil War a long time before I started writing. The war is incredibly well covered, both at a general level but also for specific campaigns, battles and personalities. Often the dilemma tends to be which historical interpretation you run with. Theories of what actually happened and who was responsible have been revised again and again, the older and often romanticized accounts being replaced by more thorough, factual and even forensic based research. Recently I watched a lecture given by a modern police crime scene team who had taken an 1864 battle and, using a state-of-the-art forensic approach, drawn new conclusions based on the angle of the bullet marks still present in the buildings. So history is far from static.
For the first book in Shire’s Union, Whirligig, I used Peter Cozzens’ wonderful historical account for the battles around Chattanooga, but when I was there myself, the local state ranger didn’t agree with Cozzens’ interpretation of the decisive event of the battle. I thought Cozzens’ account was well substantiated and incorporated it into my plot. It’s not a trivial point. You are choosing who to blame or credit, and although they fought the battle a century and a half ago, you’re still dealing with someone’s legacy. Similarly, for my latest novel, Tigers in Blue, there’s a lot of recent revisionist thinking concerning General Hood, commander of the Army of Tennessee. Some modern historians want to move him from a wounded, bitter leader whose laudanum habit adversely affected his often-reckless decision making, to a man with constrained choices late in the war and who at least created a last chance for the South. It’s hard to set your motives as a fiction writer aside, when one interpretation plays more strongly for your story.
When it comes to looking for inspiration, though you can go looking in any number of ways, it can strike at any time. My hero, Shire, needs to begin his odyssey to reach Clara by finding passage to America from Liverpool. I booked time in the archives of the Liverpool Maritime Museum so I could select an appropriate ship from the time. I found the ship, the Scotia, but while working through a pile of books suggested by the archivist, I also found George Trenholm. Trenholm owned a shipping company, but as I read on, I became intrigued. He was a South Carolinian businessman. In fact, he was really a multi-national businessman with offices both sides of the Atlantic. His fleet of ships ran the blockade, the Union’s attempt to strangle the Confederacy. A spy network was centred at his office in Liverpool and his employees secretly commissioned fighting ships for the South. Later in the war he became a cabinet member for the Confederacy. I began to see that by winding Trenholm into my plot, it would add a whole other dimension to the novel. He would give me access to the halls of power in the South. Trenholm and his youngest son Frank came to play a significant role in all three novels, all from that one piece of inspiration brought on by researching the best ship for Shire.
The last research objective I listed, believable detail, is, I think, the key to transporting readers to another time and place. The best way to acquire it is to travel to the places that matter. I’ve made five road trips to the States specifically to support the trilogy, having made any number of crossings before then out of personal interest. For the novels, I go for at least two weeks and usually after the first draft of the novel; that way I know where I want to go, but the novel is still malleable if I discover something that makes me want to vary the plot. That invariably will happen, but I guess that’s me edging back toward inspiration. For believable detail there’s a wealth of sites to visit.
The
larger battlefields will typically be in a state park with rangers who will
spend hours and hours with you, especially when they discover an Englishman
interested in American history. There are countless museums dedicated to local,
state or American history. There are period houses to visit, preserved or
restored to be as they were in the 1860s. There are scaled battle
re-enactments, living history exhibits, period trains to ride on, rail tunnels
to walk through, paddle-steamers to float on, armouries, ironworks, state
capitols to visit. And each and every one will throw up believable detail not
only of artifacts, uniforms or weapons, but also in terms of experience.
Nashville Fortified Bridge
I remember riding a paddle-steamer on the Cumberland River. It was a hot day and I wasn’t feeling that well. All the other passengers were inside with the music and the buffet so I had the outside deck to myself. In Whirligig, Shire travels with his regiment on a crowded paddle-steamer down the Ohio, so I went to sit uncomfortably with my back to the balustrade as he did, then took myself to stand close to the paddlewheels writing, ‘they moved off into the current as if powered by a pair of waterfalls.’ I spotted snapping turtles hauled out on the mud, and herons, flying so low that ‘Shire expected to see wet lines drawn by the wingtips.’ Being on the lookout for believable detail made me more aware and observant than I’d ever been. I guess it’s akin to mindfulness. You are looking for different things than the tourists. I recall a time at the Belle Meade mansion in Tennessee when the tour guide was gripping the visitors with a ghost story, but I’d hung back to photograph an ink holder fashioned from a horse’s hoof.
In practice my three elements for research – reading the history, finding inspiration and believable detail – are not isolated. They all feed on each other. One of the reasons I chose the 125th Ohio as Shire’s regiment was that there were so many letters and journals written by soldiers in the regiment. One such was by Ralsa C Rice, who eventually headed Company C (Shire’s company) and became a captain. He wrote newspaper articles on his experiences in the war and they were eventually collected together in ‘Yankee Tigers’. There’s certainly some hyperbole in Rice’s accounts, but many of his experiences found a home in Tigers in Blue.
When retreating before Hood’s Southern army, Rice was sent on a mission to Nashville to visit the hospitals and bring back any shirkers or people in his brigade that had simply been forgotten by the war. It piqued my interest and I found a wealth of written material concerning the mood of the city during the Union ‘occupation.’ Loyalties were mixed, Union or Confederate, but heavily tilted to the latter. Those favouring the South did their best to smuggle medicines and materials to the distant Rebel army. The Union military police had spies everywhere. Nashville was not a comfortable place to be. I found a more recently compiled map of all the hospitals of the time, variously convents, churches or private homes. I became deeply interested in the idea of so many people from the army becoming lost and marooned in this city, having recovered from wounds but unable or unwilling to return to the front. It was a sort of netherworld; neither home nor the front.
I decided Shire and his closest friend Tuck could accompany Rice in my version. Tuck’s mounting personal crisis could reach a climax there, brought to a head by the damaged people he encounters. I made Nashville my first stop on my next trip. I followed a self-managed walking tour that allowed me to ensure the choreography of my scenes was right. I discovered I’d made an error regarding a key setting, a railway bridge that was burned down two years before Rice’s visit and replaced with a much more interesting fortified bridge. I visited the Tennessee Capitol and listened to modern day civil servants in its echoing halls and imagined it was just the same during the war. ‘Conversations carried all the way from the other end of the hall but only in tone and energy, the words hopelessly blurred as they bounced and rolled from the cold stone. Someone dropped a book flat to the floor and the report made Tuck jump into a crouch.’ The historical research unearthed inspiration which had led me stateside to find believable detail, as well as more history and inspiration! Controlling and moulding all this into a narrative is the art of historical fiction.
I’ve
had so many experiences like this based on going to the places that matter. It’s
led me to friendships, to private archives, to re-enacting in the West Virginia
hills, to short stories that have opened other doors. So if I have a research
method, it’s to determine the places that will matter to your book, and go
there.
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