I have to admit, I never expected to be an historical crime writer. Back when I was 19 or 20 I had visions of writing books that would change the world and bring me the Nobel Prize for Literature. But youth is full of ambition and ideals.
Back then I believed that if it wasn’t art it wasn’t worth a damn.
I truly didn’t understand the power of story.
That came many years later, after I had a pile of unpublished manuscripts around me. I’d seen a few small pieces in print, short stories, and pair of one-act plays staged for no payment. I’d played in bands that went nowhere – music, my other passion. Finally I said the hell with it all and began writing about music. Putting the two things I loved together.
And within 12 months I was making a living as a writer. I stayed busy, extremely busy, for a long time. I loved what I did. That urge for fiction was buried. I was learning in every way. It was an apprenticeship, a great one. So were the quickie biographies I penned. A month to research and write a 50,000 words book – and this in the time before everything was online. I learned how to (maybe) to it right the first time.
It was more than 10 years before I surfaced and looked around. During that period my love of history had reawakened, especially the history of my hometown. I bought and read whatever I could find and accumulated a decent little library of books about the place. I’d taken history A-level so I was familiar with English and European history. I’d spent much of that time living in the US and learning more about the past of the country.
Eventually a book reared up in my head. It wasn’t going to change the world. It wouldn’t win any prizes. It didn’t even get published. But out of that came the first of my published novels, a few years later – and that journey was a tale in itself, one for another time.
I came to understand that I like using the past to refract the present, that there really is nothing new under the sun. And that, at heart, people don’t really change. Our characters are much the same as they were 100, 200, 700 years ago. Good, venal and all the shades in between.
Why crime? I’d read crime novels for years, contemporary and historical. Some I liked, many were rubbish. But crime imposes a moral framework on a story. There’s automatically good and bad in there. And, even better, a chances to explore all those shades of grey (far more than 50 of them) that lie in between.
And historical crime? A period before DNA, often before fingerprints, sometimes before the idea of a police force makes it into a battle of wits. It’s more subtle. Information comes from talk, from intuition, from tracking down clues. It’s very human. In reality it’s great that law and order has all these modern tools. For fiction, though, the chance to reduce it to basics is much more appealing. It’s a chance to take the reader on a journey to another place and time, to make the reading a truly immersive experience. More than that, a chance to show them that the essence of people doesn’t change over the centuries.
Yes, every period requires something different of the writer. But that, too, is a challenge to be relished. More research, which is a pleasure, and more a sense of diving into a time, coming up a few months later dripping with it. And how bad can that be?
Chris Nickson is the author of The Crooked Spire and Dark Briggate Blues. You can read a Q&A with Chris here as he talks about the challenges of writing, from writer's block to social media ...