On Writing Historical Fiction, Strong Emotions.

Louis Shalako

One of the neat things about writing the Inspector Gilles Maintenon Mystery Series is that the author can do anything.

One of Gilles Maintenon’s habits is developing new talent.

Right now he’s got some young gendarme, dragged into the case from what would normally be traffic duties. Due to the nature of crime and investigation, a scene sometimes has to be secured, and with a murder at the Palais Garnier, it’s a big building. Bedard spent his shift guarding a side door. Constable Bedard has some seniority. He’s eligible to write the sergeant’s exam, with a pretty good chance of a posting if he passes. It’s a big department, and if he played his cards right, he could end up anywhere he really wanted. People are saying he has a brain in his head and he’s obviously destined for better things.

Maintenon is having a look at the man, giving him a bit of rope and responsibility. Let’s be honest. Everyone wants to work homicide. This is the top of the heap in policing.

There are times, when what is noir fiction has a bit of warmth. Cops are human beings after all, and Gilles has no children of his own. His wife died not that long ago. The times, the man being what they were, he has no real way to express his love. His only outlet is his work, the job and the people around him.

Maintenon lived through the Great War, which bled France. He was at Verdun, a Holocaust of artillery, machine-gun fire and frontal infantry attacks. That was the whole purpose of some battles—to bleed the enemy until he had no more men to put in front of the guns…

Writing historical fiction can produce some strong emotions, and I like that very much. It keeps it interesting, to read as well as to write. My point is that Maintenon saw all too many kids like Bedard die. He was right beside them when it happened.

That’s just the way it was.

Some people hate cops, and certainly criminals have much to fear from them.

It’s a tough job and you need to be doing it for the right reasons. There’s not a lot of macho bullshit in a Maintenon mystery. Corny as it sounds, the best possible reason to become a cop would be service to one’s fellow man. That’s the sort of thing that a guy like Inspector Gilles Maintenon would take pretty damned seriously. Cops need honour or they become very dangerous.

No one needs that.

To Maintenon, who’s been around the block once or twice, good cops are worth their weight in diamonds. And no one likes to work with the real assholes anyways, as they inevitably drag down to their own level all around them.

So far, Constable Bedard’s been doing all right, to the extent that they’ve got him in plainclothes, he’s driving the boss around and making all kinds of sensible contributions.

The young fellow is learning a lot and getting some experience.

I have every confidence that the team will solve the mystery, the murder of opera singer Largo Banzini, by blowgun-dart, in front of two thousand witnesses at the premier performance of The Golden Dragon. If you’ve been following along, that opera was written by the (fictional) French composer Fosse.

Here’s a link to another book in the series, Speak Softly My Love.

Thank you for reading.

END

An interview with Inspector Gilles Maintenon.


Excerpt # 1.

Excerpt # 2.

Excerpt # 3.

Excerpt # 4.

Writing a Series.

Ah, yes, the old naked dead girl body in the retro kitchen ploy.

Louis Shalako

Writing a series becomes easier to write as you go along, in that you have already invented the core characters.

You’ve become pretty familiar with their environment. When you need a new case, in the mystery series for example, you invent a new character—the killer. You invent their victim, their friends, family, home, their place of employment. Yet the core milieu of the series remains. In the case of The Inspector Gilles Maintenon Mystery series, the milieu (hopefully that’s the right word) is centred on Paris, France, in the period roughly between the end of the Great War, until the mid to late thirties.

With only one novella and four novels written, right now the series goes from about 1924 to 1930. The book I’m working on is set in 1931. Maintenon isn’t at retirement age yet. He could have a career going right up and then into World War Two.

It’s an interesting and turbulent era of history, and yet the detective novel is so rarely political.

Yet even in the pulp novel, the atmosphere, the feel of the thing is important. I want a certain noir flavour to the books. It’s fun to work with the interiors. The fashion, the hairstyles, the music and culture are fascinating. There is the whole feel of the city as it might have been at that time, and much of it still is. Thanks to the technological singularity that is the internet, I can do all kinds of research without ever leaving my home.

So on the one hand, it really does get easier to work in that milieu, with those particular characters. At the same time, as the series progresses, it becomes a lot more complex as a work of art.

By early or mid-May, there will be the original story, which spawned the whole series and five books in the 60,000+ word class.

The thing has structure—each book has its own internal structure, its logic. And the series as a whole has its greater structure. It’s a series of stand-alone books on the same subject, the homicide cases of a detective named Gilles Maintenon at a certain place and time in history.

In this book, Sergeant Andre Levain mentions his wife. I’m pretty sure his wife’s name is Nichol and his daughter—an infant in some other book, is named Maelys. The thing to do is to go and find that other book, use the ‘find’ feature in Word, and make darned sure of their names. Otherwise it’s an error of logic in terms of the series—in the individual book, it’s fine if a reader never reads another Maintenon mystery or if enough time goes by between reading different books in the series.

The internal logic of the series must be true to itself.

In using the newspaper as a prop in a certain scene, I called it Paris Match. Okay, but checking the sources revealed that Paris Match wasn’t around in 1931. Each individual book, as well as the whole series, being historical, must also be true to some external logic—let’s call it history.

In this story I simply said, ‘a prominent Paris daily’ and left it at that. If I was smart, I would go back to the other books and simply search for the term ‘Paris Match.’ If it’s in there, I might want to take that out. In modern digital publishing it’s much easier to do that sort of thing. In the old days people noted little inconsistencies in even their favourite authors’ works. As a critical and fairly professional reader, I see things I question in books all the time. It’s doesn’t mean I’m an expert, it doesn’t mean I have all the answers. I merely have questions.

As an artist, I need to be pretty finicky here. Details are important and our own memory isn’t all that trustworthy.

The mystery genre also follows certain structures, a certain logic. Having thrown a few clues out there and gotten the fifth book started, I really wasn’t that far into it before I sort of got what we call the writer’s willies. (A strong feeling of nervous apprehension and discomfort. – ed.)

It’s a recognized predicament, and hopefully some author far, far more competent than I could ever be, will blog on that subject. Basically, you just work through it, and maybe slow down and think it through. Something will usually come to you. Take out some bad clues and put in some good ones. Search through the book and take out any reference to Darryl, or whatever. Smooth out the transitions and it’s like poor old Darryl never existed.

The way things look now, the ending of this book had better be a doozie. Either that, or it falls a little flat.

Hopefully I will be able to pull it off. Agatha Christie would often resort to wigs and female/male impersonation in order to make a plot work. I’ve often wondered how much of that was planned in her head. Did she know what she was going to do, before she started writing, or was it a desperation ploy, just trying to make something boring or unmanageable work?

So far I have resisted that urge. As for the future, I can’t promise anything, but that might be a fun story to do.

The thing must work on some level or it just peters out into nothing—a really bogus ending that no one likes. The other thing is that the more mystery novels a person does, the more knowledgeable they become. They get some experience, and the best way to learn is by doing anyways. It always has been.

My mother drops off bags of old books sometimes. When I read a mystery, a thriller, a spy novel, you can bet I’m pretty analytical. If you see something you don’t like in someone else’s book, the answer is pretty obvious: don’t do it in your book.

From the point of view of the artist, if you’re not a hundred percent happy with the latest book, there’s always a next time. There will be some variety over the course of a series, as the stories are not all carbon copies of one another. Some of the books may be faster-paced, some of them may be more graphic in the violence, more sexy, or political as time goes on. The stories in this series tend to be fairly funny, with a note of sadness playing softly, the monotonous languor of the violins in the background.

If the writer gets an idea, the basic premise of a book, then it’s just a matter of slotting it in along the time-frame. This book goes here, in 1935, or whatever you decide as an author.

I have to finish this book before I worry too much about the next one.

END

Writing a Series A Challenging Art

"Paris the the whore, perpetually young and yet still captivating."

Louis Shalako

If a book is a work of art, then a series is also a work of art.

It is challenging from the artistic point of view. Assuming you want to write more, that is--you could always break off and abandon it.

It is a work of greater length and complexity. This offers certain opportunities.

In The Maintenon Mystery Series, I have one novella, The Handbag’s Tale, and then the three novels, Redemption: an Inspector GillesMaintenon mystery, The Art of Murder and Blessed Are the Humble.

Since Maintenon is described as low fifties in Redemption, and since Handbag takes place in 1927, he’s a grown man and a complex character. He was in the police in 1914 when WW I broke out and would have had to ask permission to resign and join the French army. He was at Verdun and said so in Redemption (I think.)

His wife is sick in ‘Maintenon4,’ my working title. I have a great title, but I’ll finalize and announce that later.

In the three novels already written, the reader has never met Ann Maintenon. The themes in this book can be pretty dark, for I’ve got something like thirteen victims, all women and girls, and a man awaiting the guillotine when Maintenon is asked to take another look at the case.

In this story, Maintenon isn’t even an Inspector—he’s written the exam, but competition is fierce and not all qualified candidates are taken up in rank. There’s a yearly quota, much like the ‘list’ in Royal Army terms. 

They’re only going to make so many Inspectors in any given year. He’s Detective-Sergeant Maintenon, but he’s solved a couple of high-profile cases and the President himself is asking for him. There is the pressure of internal politics, and there is the pressure of time.

Sergeant Andre Levain, who plays a prominent role in the ‘later’ stories, (which I wrote first) is the new guy and he and Gilles have only worked together on a limited basis, all under the supervision of superior officers. As a writer, and as a work of art, this offers the chance to explore the earlier days of this relationship. We have the chance to explore Gilles’s relationship with his wife and his work, at a different age and level of proficiency. Good cops are made over a long time—they don’t spring, fully formed from the genie’s bottle. But I can slot new stories in almost any year, and one case might span a year and a half—theoretically, he’s off solving new cases, cases made into books, even as that one in particular is still ongoing. It is a fact that homicides have been solved after thirty or more years and cops never forget, essentially.

Then there is the whole challenge of historicity. In 1924, at the time when the story actually takes place, Paris is all wrought up in the summer Olympics. As of June 13 they have a new government, and a President who is perhaps a little more radical than modern voters might be comfortable with, no matter which side of the political spectrum they might be on.

It is a time of worker ferment, bureaucratic corruption, and great art, great music, great culture—and Paris is a great city in the peak of its form in spite of all faults.

Paris is the whore that is perpetually-young, and still captivating in spite of all the warts and blemishes that do peek through.

(That line might even make it into the book. – ed.)

In a series, your work of art acquires greater depth and precision. The more books in the series, the greater the clarity, where incidents in one book support the events in another. Anything is possible because there is no set length. Other characters come and go, but Maintenon remains.

It is inevitable that I must end up studying the world I write about. The really strange thing is that I chose it at random, mostly to avoid modern forensics and the CSI fixation on biochemistry and zooming down through the bores of scanning electron microscopes. I wanted a certain feel, I wanted something French.

I wanted, like Lovejoy, a period piece, no matter how new it actually was.

In terms of building that world, Paris and France from about 1920 until the 1930s, I check my facts, without going nuts on the politics of the day. I have to nail it down in time and place;  and then I try to weave as seamless a tale as I can. Inevitably, it will have its limitations, and there you go. That’s the way it is.

I can always write another one. A really interesting period to write about might be on the eve of WW II, in which we might be looking through the eyes of a very old, very tired, and very jaded man.

That depends on a number of factors, including the question of whether I live long enough.

Right?

END