J. C. Harvey is the fiction pen-name for Jacky Colliss Harvey. Jacky worked in museum publishing before becoming a full-time writer of both fiction and non-fiction. She is the author of the Fiskardo’s War series: The Silver Wolf, The Dead Men and The Wanton Road (out May 2025), as well as the e-book novella Peace and Love. Set against the Thirty Years War in Europe (1618-48) and the First English Civil War (1642-45), her books explore this tumultuous period through the adventures of Jack Fiskardo, a ‘discoverer’, or military scout. Her writing has been described as ‘rich, dark and panoramic,’ and her storytelling praised by Tracy Chevalier as ‘superb’.
Some four miles outside the town of Corby in Northamptonshire, there is an immense Tudor mansion called Kirby Hall. It is astonishingly beautiful. It’s constructed of Barnack stone, which gives it an unfair advantage to begin with, as when you put a little sunlight on Barnack stone, it turns the colour of cinder toffee. Even better, Kirby Hall has one wing that is an exquisite ruin - no floors or roof, just two immense lengths of pedimented golden wall, marching off sadly but proudly across the velvet turf to nowhere. Kirby Hall is also distinguished by a pair of immense bay windows, possibly the first in England. And it boasts a strange but wonderful banister, a deep groove for your hand to follow, carved into the very stone of the staircase wall, as if (as I describe it in The Wanton Road, ‘the house itself would put its hand in yours to guide you.’) Upon my first sight of Kirby Hall, years before I had written a single word of historical fiction, I thought, ‘I’m going to put you in a book.’
Places have always been drivers of my writing. The town of Nördlingen in Germany, which within its medieval walls is still so perfectly preserved that walking through it is like experiencing a time-slip, fired me up to start writing in the first place. Then there is the Dutch town of Breda -- charming in its own right, but also obliging enough to have been under siege back in 1637. It was thus just the setting I needed for my hero, Jack Fiskardo, to encounter my heroine, Pris Holland, in circumstances where the first thing she does in point a musketoon at him and threaten to blow his head off. Above all, when I was researching Walking Pepys’s London, my most recent non-fiction book, I discovered the extraordinary Crossbones graveyard, final resting-place for the whores of Southwark’s many brothels, from at least the 1500s up to 1853, and where The Wanton Road both begins and ends.
When you’re writing historical fiction, the places you use become your second homes. You can play as fast and loose as you like with them, without censure or complaint. In The Silver Wolf, Nördlingen became the town of Grauburg, and I moved it to the Polish border. Kirby Hall, I transplanted to the outskirts of Oxford and renamed Varney; I also had my hero buy it and make it his home. If only the historical figures the poor benighted writer uses were as accommodating.
There’s always much debate (I know you will have seen it) about using real historical figures in historical fiction. Some folks seem to be completely thrown by the whole idea; my agent encountered one editor who told her he wouldn’t know what to do with a work of fiction that included ‘real’ people – this while Wolf Hall was rightfully everywhere, and making a superstar of Thomas Cromwell. I began on this slippery slope quite gently. The Silver Wolf includes Cardinal Richelieu; the mountebank and intriguer at the French court Concino Concini; and the daredevil Christian of Brunswick. By Book II, The Dead Men, I was picking up speed: its roll call includes Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden; the double-agent Quinto del Ponte; the London booksellers Nathaniel Butter and Nicholas Bourne; and William Watts, clergyman and proto-journalist. By the time I began writing The Wanton Road, there was no stopping me: it includes King Charles I; his commanders Sir Jacob Astley and Prince Rupert of the Rhine; his advisor George Digby, 2nd Earl of Bristol; his physician Sir Theodore de Mayerne; and way lower down the social scale Mary Frith, cross-dresser and iconoclast; and Bess Holland, of London’s real-life, 17th-century Holland crime family, who ran ‘Holland’s Leaguer,’ the biggest and most luxurious brothel London had ever seen, and who takes in my heroine as a foundling. There is also a walk-on part for Oliver Cromwell, not to give too much away. Above all there is Carlo Fantom, the villain across all three of my books; Croat ‘hard man and ravisher,’ according to his entry in John Aubrey’s Brief Lives of 1669-96, who pursues my hero and is pursued by him in and out of the Thirty Years War in Germany and then the English Civil War. There have been times in my writing when I would cheerfully have blue-penciled the lot of them.
I mean, we do our research. For most of us hist-fic writers, most of the time, love of doing the research is the other thing that drives us forward. For me, fitting my story in and around the real events of history has the sort of satisfaction I would associate with crafting a piece of marquetry. History is our backdrop, the setting for the characters we move across our painstakingly constructed stage. Only when our characters are ‘real’, far too often, they refuse to cooperate. They will not budge, when we need them to. Or they go off somewhere else altogether. I had a scene (one of those miracles that arrives in your head readymade) with Richelieu in Paris, after the assassination of Concino Concini, only by the time it would have taken place, Richelieu had already been exiled from Paris in deep disgrace. Cue hours of re-writing. I mourn that scene still.
Quinto del Ponte made his brief appearance in the pages of history, then disappeared – that’s not so bad, I could construct a reappearance for him however I wished, I decided, yet still found myself waking in a cold sweat at the idea that there was some obvious source for his later life that I had somehow missed. There is artistic license, and then there are simply errors. You can be anachronistic and not care, as in Gladiator II, or you can be gleefully so, as in The Lion in Winter, with its impossibly self-aware, self-reflexive dialogue (‘Of course he has a knife. It’s 1183 and we’re barbarians!’), but you cannot get away with disguising carelessness as simple brio.
Your research may be your springboard, but it’s still unavoidably there: Carlo Fantom may have had his contemporaries believing he was bullet-proof, a ‘hard man’, but that wasn’t enough to save him from the hangman’s noose after this hideous specimen of humankind was finally found guilty of rape in Oxford in December 1643. I, however, needed him around for longer than that. For weeks, I tied myself and my plot up in knots trying to work around this inconvenient fact, until I had the all-too obvious but blinding revelation that I was writing fiction, that I could invent a way around this, one perfectly in keeping with the ‘real’ Carlo, as I imagined him, but which left the facts of recorded history intact. I won’t give it away here. I’ll wait until my readers tell me if they think it works – or not.
On the other hand, the real women in The Wanton Road, Bess Holland and Mary Frith, behaved beautifully – they gave me just enough to reconstruct them, then retired gracefully from sight and let my versions of them, their avatars, if you like, take over.
There’s another aspect to this. Each chapter of my books starts with a ‘real’ quote from some document of the times. In part, this is to set the scene; but it is also an attempt to give voice to those other ‘real’ people in history who have been left with no voice of their own. There are the multitudes who died at Magdeburg, for example, when in 1632 the city was razed to the ground in a day. I found it very difficult to write those scenes for The Dead Men, particularly with all the horrors happening in our real world at present, and in the end went the route of almost not writing them. The streets of Magdeburg would have filled with smoke as the city burned, so Jack and his companions do not so much see as hear what might be taking place around them: I left it to the reader’s imagination to be its own springboard here, supplying what in the smoke could not be witnessed.
In The Wanton Road there is the hovering presence of the wives and camp-followers, most likely Welshwomen, savagely and vindictively mutilated by Parliament’s troops at the Battle of Naseby in 1645 in the belief (or so it was said) that they were Irish. And there are all the women lying under the ground of Crossbones itself, whose names and stories we will never know, but who were once as real as you or I. We writers of historical fiction should not be the slaves of history - but we still need to give it our genuine respect.
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Blog Host, Helena P. Schrader, is the author of
the Bridge to Tomorrow Trilogy.
The first two volumes are available now, the third Volume will be released later this year.
The first battle of the Cold War is about to begin....
Berlin 1948. In the ruins of
Hitler’s capital, former RAF officers, a woman pilot, and the victim of Russian
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Berlin is under siege. More than two million civilians must be supplied by air -- or surrender to Stalin's oppression.
USAF Captain J.B. Baronowsky and RAF Flight
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