I enjoy putting a fictional work into an historical setting. The first reason is because I like history and it gives me an excuse to do research, i.e. pleasure reading. Second, keeping an accurate historical background and timeline forces the narrative to stay between the lines as it drives forward. Sometime the road is wide, sometime narrow. And the narrowing of the road is where I have to get creative to keep the story within actual events.
Several of the books I’ve written have the narrative women into a lot of real-life historical facts. The Ranger Kathy West series from Severed Press is set in our U.S. National Parks, and the history of each park is accurately portrayed in the stories, even if the giant monsters the heroic rangers battle are not.
The novella FARALLON ISLAND from Silver Shamrock Press is set in a 1930s lighthouse on that isolated island. It took a lot of research to get the setting on the island, including specific buildings accurate for that time. Research told me that radio communication was still in its expensive infancy back then, so it would be easier to have to poor residents cut off from calling for help. The main character needed a reason to take his pregnant wife to such a remote location, so I made him a bootlegger since the country was deep into the Prohibition Era at the time.
LAMBS AMONG WOLVES from Silver Shamrock Press has the most history I’ve ever built a story within. The backstory stretches back to the start of the Catholic Church in Rome. The further back in history you look, the less has been recorded and the vaguer that record is. That allowed me to take an actual Catholic saint, St. Pudentiana, and fill in the details of her spotty story. There were also some gaps and inconsistencies in the records of who led the Church and when after the death of founder St. Peter. How better to fill those spaces than with a demonic possession or two?
Plenty of other historical tidbits work their way into the story, such as the king of France building a church to house the purported Crown of Thorns Christ wore on the cross, Roman legionnaires settling southern France, and one of many great fires that burned though first century Rome. Each of them has a place in the plot, and a part in solving the mystery.
So if you enjoy history, you’ll love this book. If you don’t, then pretend all of it is detailed fictional backstory, and give me great credit for being so creative. LAMBS AMONG WOLVES is available everywhere and here is the link on Amazon.
