My genre is historical fiction. My good friend John Holland has persuaded me to add audiobooks to the paperbacks and ebooks. Having now hired a producer Simon, I have discovered something interesting. As part of the audiobook production process, Simon asked me to provide a cast list for each book. He needs to know sex, age, nationality, characteristics etc. of all the characters so that he can develop their voices. It’s been an interesting exercise. For my first book in the series, The Sir Anthony Standen Adventures, The Spy who Sank the Armada, there are sixty-four characters who have more than a single sentence to say. Of those only nineteen are my invention. It’s 70% real historical characters. For Fire and Earth that falls to 33% and for The Suggested Assassin it’s 55%. Why am I interested? If I’m writing historical fiction, which I am, I want it to ooze history. History isn’t just dates and battles, it’s people. I’ve tried to get the dates, conflicts and settings right. But what really interests me is the people. I want to know what they thought, what was troubling them, and what they wanted. I want to know who they loved and who they hated, and why.
My favourite resource for deep research is JSTOR. Wikipedia is useful, but for delving deep it has to be JSTOR. I am fortunate to have access to it though the Oxford Alumni website. JSTOR contains over twelve million academic articles, journals, books and images. It helps me to get as good a feel for the people and their time as I am going to get without a time machine. It’s where I find the people that populate my historical fiction.