SUNNE IN SPLENDOUR BOOK GIVEAWAY

When Pan-Macmillan, my British publisher, recently ran a book giveaway for Sunne on their website to coincide with Richard’s remarkable re-interment in Leicester, some of my readers felt left-out since it was open only to my British readers.   I promised that I would hold one of my own for everyone as soon as I got the chance.   It took a while, thanks to the antics of the Deadline Dragon and to my dealings with the Grim Reaper—I had to kill a character and since we do not know his fatal disease, I had to choose one and then run it past several good-natured doctor friends of mine.    This happens surprisingly often, unless a character was thoughtful enough to die on the battlefield or in childbirth.  Occasionally, a chronicler will actually know what illness killed someone and wins the hearts of historical novelists by writing it down.  For example, we know that Henry II’s son, Hal, AKA the Young King, died of dehydration caused by dysentery.  Henry II most likely died of septicemia.  The Lionheart died of gangrene and I’ve always thought that Edward IV caught a fatal case of pneumonia, which was a deadly disease in the MA—and still is in many areas of the world today.   The Black Prince seems to have died of cancer, as did Llywelyn Fawr’s son, Davydd.   I usually attempt to choose a disease that was a common cause of medieval deaths; for example, peritonitis for Joanna’s husband, the King of Sicily, typhus for John the Scot, Earl of Chester, and pneumonia for Llywelyn’s Joanna.   This latest Grim Reaper brought typhoid into my last chapter, which was known as hectic fever back then.
I did not mean to go off on such a morbid tangent—sorry.   I am still marveling at the events in Leicester, turning a controversial medieval king into a media rock star; who could ever have predicted that?   So I am giving away a signed hardcover copy of Sunne, brought out by Macmillan in September, 2013 to commemorate the 30th anniversary of Sunne’s publication in the UK—and no, I never imagined that Sunne would still be so popular and attracting new readers, some of them not even born when I was working on Sunne.   In order to be eligible, you simply have to post a comment on this blog.  Anyone on the planet can enter, and the winner will get the hardcover edition.  I am offering a consolation prize, too, a copy of the new British paperback edition of Sunne.   I would also have offered a copy of the American paperback of Sunne, but it does not have the new Author’s Note that I wrote about the discovery of Richard’s lost grave or the corrections and minor dialogue changes that I made in the hardcover edition of Sunne.  For that, you must buy the e-book edition, and I haven’t yet figured out a way to sign a Kindle—although I was once asked to autograph a Kindle cover on a book tour!
Speaking of book tours, many writers fear that they are on the endangered species list.  Publishers have been cutting back, focusing more on regional tours if they do book tours at all.  The turmoil in publishing plays a role in this, the Internet even more so.   It is so much easier to reach out to readers than it was even ten years ago, thanks to social media like Facebook, Goodreads, and Twitter, just to name a few.  I admit I have not ventured onto Twitter myself; a woman who writes 800 page books does not take naturally to expressing herself in just 140 characters—and yes, there are actually on-line calculators for that very purpose.  I am curious; how many of you use Twitter?    Do you think writers should use it?   Would you follow your favorite writers on Twitter?
And while we are at it, what do you all think about book tours?   Would you enjoy going to a bookstore to attend a book signing and reading?    I know that some publishers think book tours will eventually become obsolete, believing that there are more efficient means today of promoting a book.   I do not agree, for I would really miss these opportunities to meet my readers, especially those I have been interacting with on Facebook on a daily basis.   But then it is difficult to imagine what changes lie ahead for the publishing industry.  It has certainly been transformed in the thirty-three years that I’ve been a published writer.  Who knows what it will be like in another thirty-three years.  It has even been suggested that books could disappear entirely, at least in their present formats.   If that does ever happen, I hope I’ll be dead by then!
Okay, the book drawing is officially open.
April 21, 20015

SIX WORDS OR LESS—AGAIN
I’d like to thank all of you who participated in the book giveaway for Priscilla Royal’s new mystery, Satan’s Lullaby.  The lucky winner is Anne; if you have not done so already, Anne, you can reach me at sharonkpenman@yahoo.com or Priscilla at tynprior@aol.com
I am doing something unusual for this blog, recycling a past one.   This was In Six Words or Less, which addressed the six word memoirs fad.  As I explained in that blog, when Ernest Hemingway was challenged to write a short story in just six words, he delivered a knockout punch:   “For sale, baby shoes.  Never worn.”        In my blog, I cited some clever or poignant efforts by those inspired by Ernest.    “Came, saw, conquered.  Had second thoughts.”    “Like an angel.  The fallen kind.”   And “Everyone who loved me is dead.”
I then moved on to some of our favorite historical characters and tried my hand at reducing their larger-than-life histories to six words or less.    Here are a few examples that I came up with in that blog.   Henry II:   “Happier if I’d only had daughters.”    Richard I at Chalus: “Damn!  Should have worn my armor.”      Thomas Becket:  “A saint now.  I win, Henry.”   I came up with six word memoirs for almost all of my major characters—the Welsh princes and their wives, Simon de Montfort, and the Yorkists.    And I concluded by challenging my readers to come up with six word memoirs of their own—for themselves, for historical characters, whomever came to mind.   And they really responded, crafting some wonderful responses.  Unfortunately, those stellar efforts won’t show up on this blog.  But for any of you curious to read them, here is the link to that earlier blog.   http://sharonkaypenman.com/blog/?p=356 It was posted over two and a half years ago, in October of 2012, the major reason why I decided to rerun it; I realized that I have so many more Facebook friends now that many of them probably never saw it.    So here is the challenge again.   Read the blog below and then try your own hands at it.   Good luck!
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IN SIX WORDS OR LESS—OCTOBER 21, 2012
Some of you may remember a few years ago when six-word memoirs became the rage.   Supposedly this trend could be traced to an anecdote about Ernest Hemingway.  Challenged to write a short story in just six words, he sat down and scribbled:  “For sale, baby shoes.  Never worn.”    Whether that was true or not, many people were inspired to take a shot at it, and at least one book of their split-second memoirs was published.  I thought it might be fun to try it for historical figures.  But first let me give you some examples from Six-word Memoirs.  They are funny, ironic, wry, poignant, tragic, playful, disillusioned, clever —in other words, they run the gambit of human emotions.
Here are some I found sad:   “I still make coffee for two.”  “I like girls. Girls like boys.”  “I hope to outlive my regrets.”   “Everyone who loved me is dead.”    “Was father. Boys died. Still sad.”   “So devastated.  No babies for me.”    “Coulda, woulda, shoulda.  A regretful life.”
Here are some I thought were clever or amusing or thought-provoking.   “Verbal hemophilia; why can’t I clot?’   “Woman seeks men; high pain threshold.”   “Perpetual work in progress.  Need editor.”  “Memory was my drug of choice.”   “Came, saw, conquered.  Had second thoughts.”  “Always working on the next chapter.”   “Lapsed Catholic.  Failed poet.  Unpublished prayers.”    “Like an angel.  The fallen kind.”   “Giraffe born to a farm family.”  “Tried not believing everything I thought.”    “The militant who became a monk.”
Okay, everyone ready to play?   How about this one for Henry II, a bit trite but true:  “Happier if I’d had only daughters.”    Or Richard, musing on his deathbed at Chalus.  “Damn!  Should have worn my armor.”     Eleanor: “Rebellion?  Probably not a good idea.”      John:  “Why do people not trust me?”    Hal:  “I was king; no one cared.”      Geoffrey:  “I was always the forgotten son.”    Thomas Becket: “A saint now.  I win, Henry.”      The Empress Maude:  “I was cheated of my destiny.”     Eleanor and Henry’s daughter, Leonora: “I couldn’t live without my husband.”    Berengaria: “If only I’d had a child.”     Joanna: “I found love, but too late.”   The French king Philippe: “God rot all those accursed Angevins.”      His unhappy queen, Ingeborg: “Why did I ever leave Denmark?”        King Stephen:  “The crown brought me little happiness.”    Here’s another one for Henry, which probably crossed his mind during his last days at Chinon:  “Betrayed by all whom I loved.”    Rosamund Clifford:  “Loved by Henry, forgiven by God.”     Henry’s illegitimate son Geoff, the Archbishop of York:   “I never wanted to take vows!”     Richard again, “The Lionheart legend lives on, Philippe!”       Eleanor: “A mother shouldn’t outlive her children.”     Geoffrey of Anjou, who died within a month after Bernard of Clairvaux prophesied his death:  “Don’t let Bernard gloat about this.”    Or Maude again, maybe wistfully this time:  “I’d have been a good queen.”      Her brother Robert, barred by illegitimacy from the throne: “I’d have been a better king.”      And I’m going to cheat now and give John the last word, this one from Here Be Dragons: “I always knew I’d die alone.”
Moving on to Llywelyn Fawr:  “Poor Wales, so close to England.”    Joanna:  “I loved him; he forgave me.”      William de Braose, who was hanged by Llywelyn for his infidelity with Joanna:  “Hellfire, no woman is worth this.”    Llywelyn’s son Gruffydd, about to escape from the Tower:  “Now if only the sheet holds.”      Llywelyn’s grandson, Llywelyn ap Gruffydd:   “God help Wales once I’m dead.”   His wife, Ellen de Montfort:  “But we had so little time together.”     Their daughter Gwenllian:  “Tell me, please, where is Wales?”   Davydd ap Gruffydd:  “Could not live with my regrets.”    His wife Elizabeth de Ferrers:  “My crime?  That I loved Davydd.”     Their son Owen, imprisoned from the age of three by Edward:   “Why am I being held here?”
Edward I:  “For me, more was never enough.”    Henry III:  “Westminster Abbey was my true legacy.”   Simon de Montfort:  “I died for a just cause.”    Also, “My brother-in-law was such a fool.”    His wife, Nell: “I’d do it all over again.”      Their son Bran:  “Never enough wine to drown memories.”  Guy de Montfort, who committed suicide in a Sicilian dungeon after Edward I blocked a ransom: “Please God, let me go mad.”
Edward IV:  “Burned my candle at both ends.”      Richard III:  “Please bury me at York Minster.”     Anne Neville: “I wanted Middleham, not Westminster Palace.”     Elizabeth Woodville: “I should have known—damn Edward!”     Edmund, 17 year old Earl of Rutland: “This cannot be happening to me.”   Marguerite d’Anjou:  “My life?  Much grief, few joys.”       Cecily Neville: “My life?  It lasted too long.”    Elizabeth of York:  “My life?  I did my duty.”  Henry Tudor:  “Tudors lay claim to Hollywood next.”    George of Clarence:  “What’s that?  A butt of malmsey?”
Okay, how about everyone else giving it a try?   You can choose any historical character, though Henry VIII and his wives might be too easy.    You can write your own memoirs instead, if you wish.  (You may notice that I cravenly ducked that one.)    Have fun.
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I hope you all agree with me that this was worth redoing.  And here is more information on the book I cited in that blog, which was great fun to read.   Not Quite What I was Planning; six word memoirs, edited by Rachael Fershleiser and Larry Smith.
PS.  How ironic is it that I created this six word memoir for Richard III in that earlier blog:  “Please bury me at York Minster.”
March 11, 2015

I am delighted to be able to interview my friend and fellow historical novelist, Priscilla Royal, whose newest mystery, Satan’s Lullaby, is now available for sale on-line and in brick and mortar bookstores, assuming you can find one; you can buy it in hardcover or paperback and it will be out as an e-book, too, very soon.    This is the eleventh novel in Priscilla’s series set in 13th century England, so for any of you who have not yet read one of her books, you have a book-lover’s blessing awaiting you; what is more fun than finding a new, wonderful author and then discovering that they have an extensive backlist waiting patiently for you?   I have been reading Priscilla’s books since the first one, Wine of Violence, but I remember how excited I was when I read the fifth book in Bernard Cornwell’s Saxon series, Death of Kings, and then realized I could read the first four books without having to endure those interminable delays between books.
One of the joys of a historical series is that we get to escape into a fictional world that is both familiar and foreign.  We have come to care about Prioress Eleanor, highborn and high principled, Brother Thomas, the kind-hearted, conflicted monk, Sister Anne the healer, the prickly crowner, Ralf, and his new wife, Gytha, the cocky Arthur, the feline king of the convent.    But there is much about the thirteenth century that is alien to us; we never forget for a moment that these are men and women of another age, and better than any other author I know, Priscilla is able to demonstrate how important religion was to medieval people, how closely their faith was integrated into their daily lives—even the sinners, and every mystery has sinners.
I am also pleased to announce that Priscilla has generously agreed to donate a signed copy of Satan’s Lullaby to one fortunate reader.  As with past book drawings, anyone who posts a comment on this blog is eligible to win.  Good luck!
But it is always better to let authors speak for themselves.   And so here is Priscilla Royal, a kindred spirit who shares our fascination with the past.
Tell us about your newest book.
Satan’s Lullaby was born of a discussion I had with another reader at an author’s tea at the Poisoned Pen Bookstore in Scottsdale AZ. She asked if I had ever read the 13th century Archbishop Eudes Rigaud of Rouen. He recorded his tours of monastic houses in Normandy where he examined the state of their infrastructure as well as their obedience to vows and rules. I knew I had to put Prioress Eleanor through this wonderfully annoying investigative review. She has won great repute, not only as a solver of crimes, but also as a successful priory business manager. This was bound to make someone jealous enough to want to damage her reputation. In addition, she always traveled with Brother Thomas. The question might be asked: was she sleeping with him? Oh, joy, I thought, she will be so miserable and have to solve murders too! There was a difference between most Orders and the Order of Fontevraud, however. Fontevraud was under the authority of Rome so no local archbishop would do this investigation. The Abbess was allowed to arrange them herself, which meant, if the few surviving records are correct, not many were done. This fact made it even more troubling when Abbess Isabeau sends her own brother, soon to be a bishop, to do the review. I also threw in that Crowner Ralf and his wife, Gytha, are expecting the imminent birth of their first child; Gracia is settling into her role as maid to the prioress; and Eleanor’s nemesis, Sub-Prioress Ruth, is suffering from gout. If anyone wants to kill in this book, it should be the latter, but I promise she doesn’t.
You have written eleven books in your series. Some authors begin to get bored with their characters. I hope you aren’t.
None of my characters, major or minor, have begun to bore me. But authors are always concerned that the characters are starting to bore readers. Long series can remain fresh. I don’t think anyone ever found Brother Cadfael boring, and Peter Robinson’s Inspector Banks is as exciting today as he was 23 books ago. But I have read series books where the main character has become a talking shell. Successfully or not, I try to make sure my characters change with their experiences and as they get older. That may bother some readers, for example, who liked Prioress Eleanor as a 20 year old, falling passionately in love with Brother Thomas, but don’t like how she is learning to deal with this love. Others enjoy the evolution. But no one stays exactly the same, and, if the person is a dear friend, we love them just as much (if not more) at 60 than we did at 20. So I have chosen to replicate real life in the series and hope there are others who find the evolution just as much fun as I do.
Have you considered where you might end the series?
I am trying to come up with a contract arrangement with some attorney, specializing in afterlife rights, so I can continue these books after my death. If I am successful, I would like to take Prioress Eleanor and Brother Thomas into, perhaps just through, the reign of Edward II. They would be in their late 70s at that time, but monastics often lived longer than seculars and in pretty good health. But I suspect both would want to retire from murder and mayhem after that! In the meantime, I have many more ideas on what to put my two beloved sleuths through.
You often include medical issues in your books. In Forsaken Soul you have an older woman with osteoporosis. In The Killing Season, it was leprosy. Sanctity of Hate has a description of a difficult childbirth. Now you talk about gout. Is there a reason?
I love medicine. At one point in my naïve youth, I considered becoming a doctor or a medical researcher, then realized in high school that I would never pass the classes required for any of that. So now I devour books by such authors as Professor Carole Rawcliffe. It is fun debunking some of the assumptions about medieval medicine, although I do show how people suffered without the treatments available today to those who can afford care. Medieval medicine was often barbaric and they knew nothing about sterilizing or bacteria, but careful observation produced some surprising results. The accurate diagnosis rate by physicians for leprosy surprised me. There was a remedy for gout, although it was dangerous to use. Battlefield physicians learned a lot about wound treatment, and Christian doctors gained much from the Muslims during the crusades. Were it not for curious medieval men and, yes, women who bucked entrenched ignorance and rampant prohibitions to seek facts, we would not be benefiting now from our greater knowledge of illness.
What are you working on next?
This new book, Land of Shadows, takes place in early 1279 and involves a generational change. Until now, Eleanor and her eldest brother, Hugh, have been defined as the children of Baron Adam, who was a close friend and advisor to Henry III. But Edward I has been king for seven years. It is time for Hugh to take on his own hereditary responsibility, a change that will also increase Eleanor’s influence as a baron’s sister, not his child. My other sub-plot is the coin-clipping pogrom against the Jewish community. For a king called “the lawyer king” or “the English Justinian”, this episode points out the flaws of such marketing. When it came to hanging members of the Jewish community, Edward showed little interest in fair trials or the likelihood of false accusations. Needless to say, other murders happen in this story and at the worst possible time for my prioress. She is beginning to hate me…
How can readers contact you?
Should anyone have questions about my books, they can reach me through my website at www.priscillaroyal.com. It has just been redone, and I am delighted with it. I am also one of several mystery writers blogging on The Lady Killers at www.theladykillers.typepad.com.
Thank you so much, Sharon, for so generously inviting me to post on your blog. Had it not been for your beautifully written and well-researched books, I would not have been inspired to try historical fiction.
Thank you, Priscilla, for agreeing to this interview and for giving so many of us so many hours of reading pleasure.   The Book Giveaway is now officially open.    And for those who want to read Satan’s Lullaby straightaway, here is a link to Amazon.
http://www.amazon.com/Satans-Lullaby-Medieval-Mystery-Mysteries/dp/1464203563/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1423250285&sr=1-1&keywords=priscilla+royal+medieval+mysteries
February 6, 2015

My Facebook readers and friends know that in the last few years, I have been sharing my home with a deadline dragon, who has any number of annoying habits; he sheds scales all over the house, scorches the furniture with his fiery breath, and never lets me forget that ticking clock, by his very presence reminding me that time was running out for Lionheart, A King’s Ransom, and now for Outremer.   Sadly, this is the way of publishing nowadays; writers are expected to write faster than the proverbial speeding bullet, even writers whose books require extensive research.    Because of this sort of pressure, I’ve all but given up reading for pleasure, a painful sacrifice for someone who loves to read as much as I do.   The result is that my To Be Read List is as long as any of my own novels; I figure that to read all of the books on that list, I’ll need to live to be 150 or so.    One of the books on that list is Edward II, The Unconventional King, by Kathryn Warner.   After you read our interview, I am sure that large numbers of you will want to add her book to your own TBR lists.
Edward II was as controversial as he was unconventional, but much of what people think they know about him is often wildly inaccurate for he was also one of the most maligned of the English kings.   That is what makes Kathryn’s biography of such value, and Edward was very fortunate to have attracted the attention of this dedicated historian.    She candidly admits that he was a failure as king, while arguing persuasively that Edward the man was as interesting and multi-dimensional as any of the Plantagenets.    Many of you are already familiar with her blog about Edward and his times, which I consider one of the best historical blogs on the Internet.   So I am very pleased that she has agreed to do this interview.
Can you introduce us to Edward II?
He was the son of Longshanks, but please don’t hold that against him.  🙂  Edward II was a very different man to his father.  He was born in Caernarfon, North Wales on 25 April 1284  – six and a half months after his father had Dafydd ap Gruffydd executed – as the youngest child of Edward I and his first Spanish queen, Eleanor of Castile.  He was at least their fourteenth child, perhaps even fifteenth or sixteenth, though only he and five older sisters (Eleanor, Joan of Acre, Margaret, Mary and Elizabeth of Rhuddlan) survived childhood.  Edward was only six when his mother Queen Eleanor died in November 1290, and he succeeded his father as king of England in July 1307, when the sixty-eight-year-old Longshanks died at Burgh-by-Sands near Carlisle on his way to a military campaign against Robert Bruce in Scotland.  Via his mother Eleanor, Edward II was the grandson of Fernando III, king of Castile and Leon, who was canonised as San Fernando in 1671.
What’s your background, and how long have you been studying Edward II?
I studied medieval history and literature at the University of Manchester in the north of England, where I gained a BA and an MA with Distinction. I wrote an essay about Edward II in my second year of university, but only started studying him and his reign in earnest some years later in 2004, and began a website about him in 2005. In 2011, I had an article about him published in the prestigious English Historical Review, and around the same time began researching and writing my biography.  In June 2014, I appeared in the BBC documentary The Quest for Bannockburn as an expert on Edward. I first became passionately interested in him when I read a novel in 2004 which mentioned his great-uncle Richard of Cornwall (Henry III’s brother), and started looking up and reading all about Richard and his family.  It somehow struck me, seeing Edward II on the family tree, how little I felt I knew about him (despite my university essay about him), and I resolved to put that right, and started reading whatever I could find about him. Within days, I was lost. It was as though I’d found what I was meant to be doing in life, and my interest – obsession! – has continued ever since.
What is it about Edward that you like so much more than any other character in history? What is the most surprising or unusual thing you have found out about him?
He was so utterly unconventional for the time he lived in, and this fascinates me, though it exasperated his contemporaries! He liked ‘rustic pursuits’ such as hedging, digging ditches, thatching roofs and shoeing horses, and was enormously strong, healthy and fit. Edward enjoyed or preferred the company of his low-born subjects: in 1315 he went rowing and swimming in the Fens with a ‘great company of common people’, according to a distinctly unimpressed chronicler, and there are numerous references in his household accounts to his spending time with the low-born, such as his giving a pound to a woman he drank with in Newcastle in 1310, watching a group of men fishing near Doncaster in 1322, passing the time at a wedding in 1326 with a servant who ‘made the king laugh very greatly’, and inviting a group of shipwrights to come and visit him at Kenilworth Castle the same year. There are numerous other examples in the records of his chatting with fishermen, blacksmiths, carpenters, sailors, ditchers and so on. In August 1326, he himself joined a group of men hired to make hedges and a ditch in the park of Kenilworth Castle in Warwickshire (which had once belonged to his great-uncle Simon de Montfort, earl of Leicester), and gave money to the one of the men working with him in the ditch, so that he could buy himself new shoes.
Edward had a great sense of humour, as well as the typical Plantagenet vile temper, and his vivid and flawed personality comes right out of the pages of history at me 700 years later. His surviving chamber accounts of the 1320s are far and away my favourite source for his reign, full of the most delightful little snippets of information about him, such as giving generous sums of money to numerous people who had brought him gifts of fish, chickens and ale as he sailed along the Thames and his staff having to buy a key for a chest of money to replace one ‘which the king himself lost’. It’s true that Edward was a disastrous ruler and war leader, so much so that he was the first king of England forced to abdicate his throne, but he was a fascinating man, and there is so much more to him than the one-dimensional and crude stereotype we still see today in Braveheart and in much historical fiction – and even non-fiction.
Edward has been considerably maligned over the centuries. What is the worst thing you have found that anyone has ever said about him?
I would never deny that Edward was an incompetent king, but some of the things said about him are totally unfair and unreasonable. One seventeenth-century writer, for example, said he was ‘worthy never to have been born’. What perhaps upsets me most is the modern notion, popularised by Braveheart, that he wasn’t the real father of his son Edward III. Several novelists have also written this nonsense into their stories (not a shred of contemporary evidence exists for the notion, and it wasn’t invented until 1982, in one of Paul Doherty’s novels). It amazes me that in the twenty-first century there is still so much contempt for Edward’s non-heterosexuality – I’ve lost count of how many prejudiced, bigoted and unkind statements I’ve seen about him in this respect. I once had the misfortune to read a romance novel featuring Edward as a character, and the hatred and revulsion the author showed for him literally made me feel ill – he was a flabby, effeminate and repulsive worm of a man, everyone including his own lover loathed him and he made people shudder with disgust, he didn’t care about his children and refused to pay their expenses, and he was called ‘perverted’ and ‘unnatural’ because of his sexuality frequently throughout the novel, in a way which made it obvious that the author was expecting her readers to share this opinion rather than expressing the prejudices of the early fourteenth century. The way the writer gloated in her author’s note over the ‘red-hot poker’ story of Edward’s murder in 1327 (which she presented as fact, although it most certainly isn’t) and called it ‘ingenious’ was just the final straw.
Certain modern novelists and even non-fiction writers, apparently in the belief that Edward II just hasn’t been maligned enough for the last 700 years, seem to be falling over themselves to invent new slurs to hurl at him that are based on no evidence at all. In recent years, he’s been said to have committed ‘atrocities’ in Wales (nope, never; he wasn’t his father), to have had Jewish people who set foot in England murdered (definitely not), to have allowed his ‘favourite’ Hugh Despenser to rape his queen (not a shred of evidence), to have been ‘extraordinarily stupid’ (he may not have been a Mensa candidate, but he founded colleges at both Oxford and Cambridge, borrowed books from a monks’ library in Canterbury and was a cultured man who enjoyed music and plays), and to have not cared about his children to the extent that he could barely remember their names (the evidence strongly suggests he was actually a loving, caring father). And there are at least four novels I can think of where another man is put forward as the real father of his children, although he and Isabella were certainly together at the right time to conceive all four of them and there is absolutely no reason at all to think that he might not have been their father (see this post here): http://edwardthesecond.blogspot.co.uk/2011/02/edward-ii-and-his-children-and-why.html
I find this extremely disrespectful, both to Edward and to Isabella.
Was he really murdered with a red-hot poker?
Definitely not.  This is the number one thing many people think they know about Edward II, and it’s 99.9% sure to be an absolute myth.  It’s not even certain that he was murdered at Berkeley Castle on 21 September 1327 at all – plenty of influential people at the time, including the archbishop of York, the bishop and mayor of London and several earls, believed he was still alive years later and acted on this belief – and if he was, it’s far more likely to have been suffocation than this sadistic method.  Fourteenth-century chroniclers gave a wide variety of causes of death, from natural causes to illness to grief to a fall to suffocation, and more.  Many admitted they didn’t know how he had died.  The red-hot poker is just one of the stories, but probably because it’s so lurid and horrifying, it’s become the standard accepted version of Edward II’s death over the centuries, and was popularised in the late sixteenth century by the playwright Christopher Marlowe.
On your blog and in your new book, you sift through all the negative tales about Edward and put them into context. How do readers react?
I try not to whitewash Edward, but to present him as honestly as possible.  I would never say that he was a good king or military leader – no king ends his reign the way he did, or suffers as many military setbacks, without making a long series of horrible mistakes.  But there’s far more to him and his reign than a one-dimensional disaster sandwiched between the much longer and much more successful reigns of his father Edward I and son Edward III.  I’ve been delighted with the overwhelmingly positive response from my readers – I’d say that 99% of all the feedback I get is supportive and interested, and yes, many people are surprised to learn that there’s a lot more to his character and reign than they’d thought.  Although there will always be people for whom Edward II will never be anything more than the effete gay prince who loses at Bannockburn and gets a poker up the behind, I’d like to think my blog and Facebook page have gone some small way to presenting a more rounded and positive view of him. And I’m so delighted that my book has now come out to set the record straight still further.
Can you recommend any really good Edward II books?
My The Unconventional King, of course! 🙂  Professor Seymour Phillips published a magnificent biography of Edward in 2010, in the Yale English Monarchs series, which I can’t recommend highly enough.  Professor Roy Martin Haines also wrote a very good biography of Edward in 2003, though it’s perhaps a little too academic for a general audience, and as far as popular histories go, Caroline Bingham’s 1973 work on Edward is excellent and gorgeously illustrated (though necessarily dated now, of course).  The only novels about Edward that I would unhesitatingly recommend are Susan Higginbotham’s The Traitor’s Wife and Brenda Honeyman’s The King’s Minions and The Queen and Mortimer.  Sadly, the latter two are very hard to find these days.  There are a few other novels about Edward and Isabella which aren’t bad either, such as Margaret Campbell Barnes’ Isabel the Fair, Pamela Bennetts’ The She-Wolf and Hilda Lewis’s Harlot Queen.
Kathryn, thank you so much for this enlightening interview.  It definitely inspired me to cheat a bit and move your biography of Edward  much higher on my TBR list.
Kathryn’s Edward II blog can be found at: http://edwardthesecond.blogspot.co.uk/
Her book Edward II: The Unconventional King, with a foreword by Ian Mortimer, can be bought from Amazon, Book Depository or directly from Amberley, the publisher: http://www.amberleybooks.com/shop/article_9781445641201/Edward-II%3CBR%3EThe-Unconventional-King.html
January 22, 2015

It is well known that I am one of Bernard Cornwell’s most devoted fans, so it is with great pleasure that I am able to post this interview with BC upon the publication of his latest book in his Saxon series, The Empty Throne.   I’d always assumed that his Sharpe series would remain my all-time favorite, but then I encountered the war lord, Uhtred, in The Death of Kings.  I am not sure how I had not yet read any of the Saxon books, but after I chose The Death of Kings for an article I was doing for NPR about the Best Historical Fiction of 2011, I fell completely under Uhtred’s spell.   Needless to say, real life screeched to a halt while I scrambled to get the first five books in the series and then happily immersed myself in 9th century England with Uhtred as my guide.
He is a marvelous character—clever, courageous, stubborn, sardonic, and reckless.  He is a man of honor, loyal to the oath he swore to the Lady of Mercia, Athelflaed, his long-time lover.   He is also so very human;  often in the books, he is faced with the temptation to do something rash, like braining an annoying priest.  He knows very well that he shouldn’t do it, that it will cause him no end of trouble, but more often than not, he goes ahead and does it anyway.  Like Richard the Lionheart, he is all but invincible in battle, but none of us can defeat time and he has begun to feel his years.  As difficult as this is for Uhtred, it is a challenge for his creator, too, and BC deals with this inevitable aging by letting Uhtred’s now-grown children spend some time on center stage with him.   The Empty Throne is a splendid book, Bernard Cornwell at his best, which is very good, indeed.   And so, without further delay, I give you the best historical novelist writing today.
Q.: You have now written eight books in the Saxon Tales series. How many more are planned?  What is next in store for the characters?
I wish I knew!  I can’t plan a book, let alone a series, so every new tale is an adventure. I’ve always thought the joy of reading a book is ‘to see what happens’, and that’s also the pleasure of writing one. I usually have no idea what will happen in the next chapter, and the only way to find out is to write it! That said, there are one or two obvious pointers in the books so far – Uhtred will regain Bebbanburg and a new country, called England, will emerge from the long wars. Essentially the Saxon series is about that; the creation of a nation. Americans have a precise birthdate, July 4th 1776, but the English have no such luxury and are strangely ignorant about how their nation was formed.
When you start out writing a history-based series, do you know where the chronicle will go, or does each novel take shape as you write it?
I wish I could plan a novel; it would probably make life a lot easier. It seems to me there are two basic methods of novel writing; those who plan their books meticulously and have this wonderful outline to flesh out, and those like me who just start and stagger on till the story is told. I think it was E.L. Doctorow who said that writing a novel is like driving at night down an unfamiliar country road and you can only see as far ahead as your rather dim headlights allow. That’s me. Dim. I reached the last chapter of The Empty Throne and genuinely had no idea what would happen, but was delighted when I found out!
Q.: Unlike in your Sharpe or Starbuck series, here you are writing about a historical period that is much less documented. How do you conduct your research?
Read, read, read, then read some more.  Research takes a lifetime of reading. I suppose you soak yourself in a period until it exists in the imagination.
Q.: Is this lack of historical data a handicap or does it free you as a writer of fiction?
It’s wonderfully liberating! I love the shadowed parts of history that have no explanations because that gives me the freedom to fill in the gaps. For instance we know that someone called Uhtred was the lord of Bebbanburg in the 9th Century, and we know he was Saxon even though all the land about him was ruled by the Danes, but beyond that nothing! So how did he keep his land? The true answer, probably, is that he collaborated, but that’s dull so I can invent other explanations.
Q.: One of the seminal questions at the heart of THE EMPTY THRONE is will Athelflaed, sister to King Edward of Wessex, widow of Æthelred, become Queen? Do you think history would have been different if she had been Queen?
She was effectually the Queen of Mercia, so no, I don’t think history would have been different.  She ruled Mercia very successfully, but always in concert with her brother who was the King of Wessex. History might have been different if she had started a dynasty, but her only child was a daughter who appears to have inherited none of her mother’s abilities. I think the sad thing about Æthelflaed is that she’s been forgotten. She took a crucial lead in the creation of England and deserves to be remembered for that.
Q.: One of the themes in the early books was Uhtred of Bebbanburg’s resistance of Alfred’s Christianity. Now that Alfred is dead, does religion still play a role in this new book?
Probably! The wars that ravaged Britain in the ninth and tenth centuries were not just about land and who should rule, but were also religious. The Danes and the Norsemen were, by and large, pagan, the Saxons (and Angles) were Christian, and the Christians undoubtedly saw their struggle as a crusade. They were doing God’s work! In the end, of course, Christianity prevailed and that did not stop the wars, but they were not to know that. And Uhtred, stubborn as he is, will not abandon his paganism so yes, the religious themes will continue!
Q.: The Saxon Tales, like most of your fifty-plus books – from the Sharpe books and the Nathaniel Starbuck Chronicles to your stand-alone novels – are centered on war and set on the battlefield. What attracts you to viewing history through the lens of war?
War is a wonderful background for any adventure story, mainly because history provides you with a ready-made background of mayhem and conflict. What interests me more is the character’s reaction to war. Every society has a moral basis, and almost all condemn murder and manslaughter (‘Thou shalt not kill’), but those moral constraints are lifted by wartime and men (mostly men) are encouraged to flout this basic rule. So how do they react? Some misuse the freedom it offers, other have a more nuanced reaction, and that offers enormous scope for storytelling.
Q.: It was recently announced that the Saxon Tales will be adapted for television by BBC America. How far into the series will the adaptation go?
I have no idea! I guess I depends how successful the first series is.
Q.: Are you involved in the adaptation and filming?
Not even slightly, nor do I want to be. I worked in television for a decade, as a producer of News and Current Affairs, and I learned that I know nothing about producing television drama, so I stay well away. Leave it to the experts!  If they want me to be a cheerleader for them then I’ll happily get out the pom-poms, but other than that? Nothing.
Q.: You are soon publishing your first non-fiction book, Waterloo. Did you find it different writing history as non-fiction rather than fiction?  How so?
The biggest difference was not having to devise a plot!  Plot drives a novel and the hardest thing about writing a novel is discovering that plot, but that burden is entirely taken away. The book still needed shaping, but the story of Waterloo is so compelling that essentially it shapes itself – it all takes place in a very short time (the campaign is just four days), and in a very small space (the battlefield was very restricted) and it has compelling major characters; Napoleon and the Duke of Wellington who were acknowledged as the two greatest soldiers of the age, but who had never fought against each other.  The story of Waterloo has everything, even an amazing cliff-hanging ending. So the ‘plot’ was handed to me on a plate by history, so the hard work was to discover memoirs, diaries and letters that conveyed the real horror of that dreadful day, and I wanted those eye-witness accounts to come from all sides, French, Prussian, Dutch and British, so there was an enormous amount of research and editing to do. I love the book, but am not sure I want to write any more non-fiction!
Bernard, thank you so much for agreeing to do this interview.  It is very reassuring to know that we can look forward to more Uhtred adventures.
January 7, 2015

Its history goes back almost to the dawn of time and it has been known by different names down through the ages.  It was called the Land of Israel in the biblical era.   The Babylonians knew it as the Kingdom of Judah. The ancient Greeks called it Palestine.  As a Roman province, it was Syria Palaestina.  It has been called Canaan, the Levant, the Promised Land.   Since 1948, it has been the State of Israel.  But in the twelfth century, it was known throughout Christendom as the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the Holy Land, and Outremer, a Norman-French term that translates as “The land beyond the sea.”
I’d always been fortunate enough to visit the places I write about.  While it might not have been absolutely necessary, especially in the age of the Internet, I think I benefited by walking the peaceful pastures that had once been bloody battlefields, by exploring the haunting ruins of once- powerful medieval castles, and by following in the footsteps of Welsh princes, Yorkist kings, and a remarkable Duchess of Aquitaine.  It helped, of course, that these trips were tax-deductible for me!
Lionheart was the first book in which this pattern was broken.  I managed to visualize the places I was writing about, thanks to videos and YouTube.  For example, while looking for information about Arsuf, I was delighted to discover that paragliding is a favorite sport in the area, and there were quite a few videos that offered excellent views of the cliffs of Arsuf.  But I still felt cheated at being denied the opportunity to see these cliffs, cities, and castles for myself, and vowed that I would find a way to do on-site research for my novel about the Kingdom of Jerusalem.
The trip seemed snake-bit from the first, though, for the timing was not good.   This past spring, I did a book tour for A King’s Ransom, and while it was great fun, it was also exhausting.  My heart does not even start beating before nine AM on most days, so you can imagine how much I enjoyed having to get up in the middle of the night to catch a dawn flight.   Sleep is always in short supply on book tours and by the time I got home, I was ready to hibernate till the summer.  Instead, I came down with pneumonia, most likely a souvenir from one of my ten flights during the tour; ever since I caught whooping cough, of all ailments, on a flight from London last year, I’ve begun to view planes as flying petri dishes.   The pneumonia flattened me for more than seven weeks and after my doctor told me that it would be foolish to attempt another strenuous, demanding trip in the span of five months, I reluctantly cancelled our second Richard III tour scheduled for September.  That was quite disappointing, but I eventually realized that I should still be able to make the trip to Israel, for I would be able to set the pace, to avoid any obscenely early mornings, and to go back to my hotel to rest if need be, none of which I could do on book or travel tours.
I’d planned to make the trip to Israel with a Colorado friend, Enda Junkins, and when we learned that our Australian friend, Paula Mildenhall, would be in the US in October, I invited her to join us.   For the first time, it began to look as if the trip would really happen—and then war broke out.   We could only wait and watch and hope for a cease fire—not just for us but for all of the Israelis and Palestinians caught up in this maelstrom.  When a cease-fire finally held, we decided to make the trip even though the US State Department was still advising against all non-essential travel.  Since so many people expressed concern about our trip, I want to stress that we felt perfectly safe the entire time we were there, although after we returned home, there was another tragic outbreak of the violence that so often stalks this part of the world.
We arrived at Ben Gurion Airport in late afternoon on October 8th, and reached Jerusalem as twilight was settling over this ancient city, sacred to three of the world’s major religions.   On our first evening, we discovered the café that would become a favorite for the rest of our stay. The Etz Café is non-profit, run by a Jerusalem charity, Voice of Many Waters.  The food was excellent, their lemonanas were great thirst-quenchers, the staff was young and enthusiastic, and the weather was warm enough to eat at one of their outside tables; Jerusalem has as many outdoor cafes as Paris!   Here is the Facebook page for the Etz Café for any of you planning a trip to Jerusalem or simply curious about a non-profit restaurant.  https://www.facebook.com/EtzCafeJerusalem/photos_stream
The café also had what we at first took to be a mascot, a friendly, skinny little cat who greeted us as if he were the host; he kept jumping up on empty seats only to be gently shooed off  by one of the staff, but he’d hop right back as soon as the waiter went inside again.   It turned out that this confident little guy was a stray, one of dozens that we saw during our stay in the city.  They were remarkably friendly for strays, not at all skittish or wary, probably because many Israelis put out food for them, and they were everywhere—even in the courtyard of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre!
We hadn’t realized that we’d be arriving at the start of a holiday called Sukkot, a joyful festival that commemorates the forty years wandering in the desert.  We soon noticed small structures in the city, obviously temporary, and were quite curious until our Israeli friends explained that Leviticus states that “all natives of Israel shall dwell in booths,” as their ancestors did in the wilderness.   They said that today it is enough to eat meals in these sukkots; many families erect them in their own backyards, others are set up for apartment dwellers, and the ones we saw were provided for those who did not have access to sukkots of their own.   I found this quite interesting, so I am including a link here for those of my readers who’d like to know more about this festival.  http://www.jewfaq.org/holiday5.htm It did create a few problems for us as some places were closed or had limited hours, but if we hadn’t come during Sukkot, we might not have gotten to see our friend, Koby Itzhak, who is serving in the Israeli army; armies the world over tend to be stingy about giving soldiers much free time.   So it was well worth a few minor inconveniences to be able to meet Koby in Jaffa, Akko/Acre, and Sepphoris.

None of you will be surprised to hear that we spent our entire time in Jerusalem in the Old City.  At the top of my To See List was the Tower of David, also known as the citadel.  It is now a museum and their website shows why it is not to be missed for anyone visiting Jerusalem.
http://www.towerofdavid.org.il/English/General/Tower_of_David-Museum_of_the_History_of_Jerusalem It dates back to the second century BC, is over two thousand years old!   Naturally it changed as it passed into the hands of the various conquerors of the city; the present structure dates primarily from the 14th century. It became known as the Tower of David during the occupation by the Byzantines, who thought it was the site of the palace of King David.  The citadel was briefly a royal residence after the city fell to the Christian crusaders in 1099, but their kings soon built a large palace to the south of the citadel; sadly, no trace of this royal palace remains.
I was especially interested in seeing what is today called Phasael’s Tower; the original had been built by King Herod, who named it after his brother, Phasael.  It was very important during the crusader period, and it appeared on the royal seal of the Kingdom of Jerusalem; it was here that the terrified citizens took refuge when they feared Jerusalem might be attacked by Saladin in 1177.   I’d already set a key scene in my novel, Outremer, here, as the High Court members gathered to elect a new king after the unexpected death of King Amalric in 1174, so you can imagine how gratifying it was to visit the tower for myself.  The view of the Old City from the roof is absolutely spectacular.  We were fortunate enough to attend one of the Light and Sound shows that are performed in the citadel’s courtyard several evenings a week.   It rained briefly, but it was so warm we didn’t mind, and the show was great fun; it looked as if the crusader knights were going to ride their steeds right into the audience!    You can download a free audio guide of the museum to your computers or other devices; just go to the website link above, click onto Audio Guide and follow the instructions.
The following day was the first of our meetings with one of our Facebook friends.  Elke Weiss is a young American who holds dual citizenship; she is currently working for the Israeli government and she generously offered to give us a personal tour of the Old City.   We got to stroll the narrow, crowded streets of the Muslim, Jewish, Christian, and Armenian quarters, some of them covered just as they were in the MA.   These modern souks (markets) evoke atmospheric echoes of their medieval counterparts.  In fact, the Muslim and Christian quarters comprise one large souk, with some of their streets devoted to specific wares: David Street for tourist souvenirs, Christian Quarter Road for more upmarket goods, the Muristan for leather, and the Via Dolorosa for religious items.   And yes, we succumbed to the courteous but persistent entreaties of the vendors and did some shopping.  Paula, in particular, did much to energize the Israeli economy.   I think it is safe to say that our families and friends can expect many Jerusalem-themed gifts for Christmas.
I tend to be laser-focused when I travel and hone in on sites that will surface in my books, which means the modern world gets short shrift.   Although I have probably been in London at least 25 times over the years, I have never watched the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace and am not likely ever to do so.  But I can’t count the number of times I’ve been to the Tower or Westminster Abbey.     So we paid several visits to Jerusalem’s citadel. We admired the magnificent Damascus and Jaffa Gates, erected on the sites of the medieval gates.  We visited the Western Wall, built by King Herod and Judaism’s holiest site, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which is believed to be where Jesus was crucified, buried, and resurrected.
The first basilica dates from the 4th century.  It was rebuilt at various times in the centuries that followed, greatly enlarged by the crusaders in the years between 1114 and 1170, becoming the burial place of the kings of Jerusalem, but it suffered considerable damage in a 1808 fire and an earthquake in 1927. It has always been a holy pilgrimage site for Christians and was very crowded the day that we were there, with people waiting patiently for hours to be able to enter Christ’s Tomb and view the rock upon which Jesus’s body is believed to have been lain.   The church was fought over by various Christian sects until an Ottoman decree in 1852 divided its custody among the Armenians, Greeks, Copts, Roman Catholics, Ethiopians, and Syrians, and today Jerusalem has four patriarchs, those of the Greek Orthodox, Armenian, Greek Catholic, and Latin or Roman Catholic churches.  Remarkably, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is ceremonially unlocked every morning by a Muslim Key Holder, Wajeeh Nuseibeh, whose family has been entrusted with this duty for hundreds of years; one tradition dates it from the 7th century, while another one traces it to 1192, when Salah al-Din (known to the West as Saladin) and Richard Coeur de Lion agreed that Christians would be permitted to worship again in the city.  Here is a link to a fascinating story about the current Key Holder.    http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Muslim-family-holds-key-to-sacred-sepulchre-For-2720014.php

We were not able to see all that was on my list, although we did get to celebrate Paula’s birthday during our stay, having dinner at the Rooftop Restaurant, which gave us a dazzling view of the Old City.  But we had to prioritize since we had such limited time in Jerusalem.  We were not permitted to visit the Dome of the Rock, the  magnificent mosque that dates back to the 7th century, for the huge esplanade known as the Temple Mount and Haram esh-Sharif, Arabic for the “Noble Sanctuary,” was off-limits to non-Muslims because of security concerns.  And unfortunately, my back problems flared up after two days and I had to take frequent breathers for the pain eases up when I sit down; all those Jerusalem outdoor cafes definitely came in handy.  I would have loved to see the 12th century crusader Church of St Anne, which was turned into a Muslim theological school by Saladin.  But I was in so much discomfort by then that I had to give up; Elke kindly offered to visit the church on my behalf and take photos for me.
I was looking forward to walking the ramparts and so it was very disappointing when they were closed on Saturday for what we assume were security threats.   Elke volunteered to take Sunday morning off to accompany us and we decided to delay our departure for Jaffa, hoping they would be open then, as they were.   The walls date from the 16th century, built mainly upon the site of the medieval walls; two sections are open to the public, from the Jaffa Gate to St Stephen’s Gate and then from Jaffa Gate to the Dung Gate—yes, that is actually its name, for medievals liked to call a spade a spade.  There were some very steep steps and it was such rough going in patches that guide books cautioned it was not for the elderly or the infirm, which I thought was a good description of me by the time I hit the half-way point.   It was well worth the effort, though, for it was easy to gaze from the ramparts and imagine Balian d’Ibelin doing the same thing, looking down upon the Saracen army and knowing that he and he alone stood between the terrified citizens and death or slavery. How many men throughout history have been able to save thousands of lives?  You’d think Balian would get more credit for his heroics, but instead he got obscurity and even worse, The Kingdom of Heaven.
We could not have had a better tour guide than Elke, and I am so glad that we were able to meet—thanks to the magic of Facebook.   Over the years, I have heard some marvelous stories from friends and readers about their experiences reading my books.   One of my favorites came from a woman who wrote that she was about half-way through The Sunne in Splendour  when it all came together for her; she said she shot upright in bed and screamed, “Oh, my God!   This is the Richard III!”  Her husband, who’d been peacefully sleeping beside her, was less than thrilled.    I heard from an Australian reader who wrote to tell me that she’d loved Sunne but could not enjoy Here be Dragons because Llywelyn reminded her too much of a former lover.    A friend confided that after reading the scene in which Llywelyn and Joanna consummated their marriage, she went upstairs and—in her words—“gave my husband the best night of our marriage.”     But I don’t think it is possible to top Elke’s story.
She read Sunne when she was only eight years old, which surely sets a record in itself.  But because she was so young, she’d never heard of Richard III or the Wars of the Roses.  So can you imagine what a horrible shock it was to her when she reached the chapter at Bosworth Field?     She told me that she came to her mother in tears, wanting to know why I’d let Richard die!     She did forgive me in time, and Sunne has remained one of her favorite books despite those psychic scars it inflicted upon her eight-year-old self, and when we were in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, she said a prayer for Richard’s soul, which touched me deeply.
We left Jerusalem with regret, for it is truly one of the world’s great cities.  Because my back pain was still rather bad, we arranged with our hotel for a taxi since that would be easier for me than public transportation.   During our stay, we found the Israelis to be very friendly and willing to go out of their way to help hapless tourists, as was proved when we arrived in Jaffa, which is today a suburb of Tel Aviv.  A red flag went up when our taxi driver had trouble finding the hotel and when he finally located the address, it was closed up, with no signs of life.   He sought help from passers-by, to no avail.  I’d rented a phone for our visit and of course it wasn’t working; my dead zone apparently recognizes no borders.  With some assistance from our driver, Paula was able to reach a hotel representative, and we learned that there was no one on the premises and we should have been sent codes to allow us to enter the building and then our apts, none of which was mentioned on the website.   We did eventually get in, and were very pleased with the spacious accommodations; I would definitely go back—as long as the entrance codes were provided in advance.  But we were grateful to our good-hearted taxi driver, for he could easily have shrugged and left us to fend for ourselves; even the passers-by waited around to be sure we’d not be stranded.
There is not much left of medieval Jaffa; the crusader castle has long been dust on the wind.  But I wanted to walk in the Old City, to see the harbor, and envision how it was during the heyday of the kingdom of Outremer.  I’d never really seen the Mediterranean before, just a glimpse of a distant blue haze from a train through the south of France, so I enjoyed our “cruise” up the coast toward Tel Aviv and then back to Jaffa, although it took more imagination than I possessed to put us into a medieval galley, sailing with Richard’s small fleet as they desperately sought to reach Jaffa before it fell to Saladin.
For us, the highpoint of our time in Jaffa was getting to meet my friend Koby, who’d been my cyberspace pen-pal for several years.  We spent an afternoon exploring the Old City with Koby as our guide; he was in uniform and attracted quite a few smiles from passersby for soldiers are highly respected in Israel. We had fun discussing medieval events and battles, although Koby did also try to convince us that those cute, cuddly koalas in Paula’s Australia are actually dangerous stealth ninjas who like to pounce upon people from tree camouflage.
On the following day, I rented a car and we drove up the coast to Acre, known now to the Israelis as Akko.  Enda offered to drive and I gladly took her up on that, for we’d have been returning to Jaffa after dark and my night vision is…..well, let’s just say that I could benefit from a seeing eye dog while driving at night on unfamiliar roads.   I was excited about visiting the subterranean crusader city buried beneath 18th century Akko, which was rebuilt by Daher el-Amar after lying in ruins for centuries.  Excavations that began in 1954 revealed and restored some of the halls in what had been the Hospitaller compound, and I’d been looking forward to seeing them.   But upon our arrival in Akko-Acre, we found that it was closed to the public for the Akko Festival of Alternative Israeli Theatre was holding a four day festival and this was where their plays were being performed.    Here is a link to a website that shows some of the photos of the excavated knightly halls, so you can see why we were disappointed.     http://www.biblewalks.com/Sites/KnightsHalls.html
Aside from this unexpected setback, our day was filled with laughter and memories in the making.   We were able to connect with Koby again, and this time we also got to meet some of his family–his mother, Susan, who grew up on Long Island, and his younger sisters, Kinneret and Merav.  They share his love of history, so the 21st century receded into the distance as we talked enthusiastically about the past.  Akko is a historian’s gem, more than four thousand years old, with one of the world’s oldest ports, and during the crusader period, it was notorious for its diverse population, its raucous vitality, and its multitude of opportunities for bad behavior.  It is surprising how many famous men found their way to Acre—Alexander the Great, Marco Polo, St Francis of Assisi, St Louis, Napoleon, who suffered a rare military defeat there.  We smiled to see a street named after Salah al-Din.    There is one named after Richard the Lionheart, too, which I am sure would please him, although I doubt he’d be happy to know that his nemesis, the French king, also has a street of his own.
After a leisurely lunch with Koby’s family, they departed and he and Paula, Enda, and I strolled through the narrow streets of the Old City down to the harbor, where we took another brief cruise, thinking of all the conquerors and would-be conquerors who had crowded to the prows of their ships, eager for their first sight of the city called Akka by the Egyptians, Ptolemais by the Greeks, Romans, and Byzantines, Akka  again after the Muslim conquest, and St Jean d’Acre by the crusaders.
Our last day in Israel was, for me, the most memorable.  Another of our Israeli Facebook friends, Valerie Bendavid, had offered to drive us out to see the battlefield at the Horns of Hattin, where Saladin had destroyed the army of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Valerie suggested we make a few stops on the way, so we got to see the impressive ruins of the Hospitaller Castle of Belvoir, which is the best-preserved crusader castle in Israel, and another site that I’d already written about in an early Outremer chapter.  After Hattin, it held out against a siege by Saladin for a year and a half, and that is easy to understand after studying its plans, for it was in effect two castles, with  rectangular outer walls, reinforced with square towers, that surrounded a  square inner enclosure that also had four corner towers.  In the 12th century, it was poetically described by Muslim historians as “a nest of eagles and the dwelling place of the moon.”

We got our first view of the famous River Jordan and were surprised to find that it was not at all like the raging torrent I’d always envisioned it to be.  The Sea of Galilee was quite impressive; the largest fresh-water lake in Israel, it is about 21 miles long and 8 miles wide, and yes, I looked that up.  Many of Jesus’s miracles were said to have happened here.  During the years when the Kingdom of Jerusalem flourished, it was the site of an important castle at Tiberias, which would be used as bait by Saladin to lure the crusader army to its doom at Hattin.
Our last stop before the battlefield was another place with multiple names.  Today it is called Zippori, but its original Greek name was Sepphoris; during the period when it was under Muslim control, it was known as Saffiyura, and in the time of the crusaders, it was called Le Sephorie.  It was already a strongly fortified city in 100 BC; Herod the Great had a palace here.  Nero renamed it Eirenopolis Neronias—Nero’s City of Peace; who knew Nero had a sense of irony?   A famous Jewish scholar, Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi lived there c. 200 AD.   We could easily have spent several days in Sepphoris, for there was so much to see.  The remains of the ancient city include the street gridlock, ruins of the Roman theatre and bathhouses, a synagogue, several churches, private dwellings, a crusader fortress.   Here is a brief video on YouTube that shows you what an amazing site it is, a treasure trove for lovers of history or archaeology.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwp2rY1CQSw
My main interest was the crusader citadel, a two story dwelling that dates from the 12th century, although there were some modifications under the Ottomans.   Le Sephorie was a place of great significance to Outremer, for it is one of history’s most intriguing What Ifs.   The army of the kingdom had gathered here in June, 1187 to discuss Saladin’s invasion.   He was laying siege to the castle at Tiberias, which was being defended by the Lady Eschiva, wife of  the Count of Tripoli.  But the count argued against rushing to her rescue, pointing out that that they’d have to march through a parched territory without water.  He insisted Saladin would not harm his wife, that he was using the siege to lure them into fighting a battle on his terms, on terrain he chose, a battle they were not likely to win.  Their greatest successes had occurred when they adopted a defensive strategy, and he urged them to follow it now, to remain at Le Sephorie and its springs.   For once, Guy de Lusignan, the unpopular king of Outremer, listened to reason, and when the other lords supported the count, he agreed that they would not move on Tiberias.   But later that night, Gerard de Ridefort, the Grand Master of the Templars, paid a stealth visit to Guy, warning him that his manhood would be impugned and he’d become a figure of mockery if he failed to take action against Saladin.
The Templar leader seems to have had the strategic sense of a Benedictine abbess, for this was not the first time he’d urged a military action that would result in disaster.  He was also motivated by malice, by a burning hatred of the Count of Tripoli.  According to chroniclers, the count had promised an heiress to Gerard, and then reneged when a Pisan merchant offered him the lady’s weight in gold.  Gerard stormed off to join the Templars and devoted the rest of his life to revenge.  Guy had a fatal flaw—he would heed the last man to offer him advice, and so he allowed himself to be persuaded by Gerard, announcing the next morning that they would leave Le Sephorie and march on Tiberias, after all.
Quite a few historians have called this one of history’s most boneheaded military blunders, and I totally agree.   The army marched out of Le Sephorie the next morning and the result was the battle at Hattin, which was an overwhelming victory for Saladin, who then took the castle at Tiberias, and chivalrously provided the Lady Eschiva with an escort to her husband’s lands in Tripoli, just as the count had predicted he’d do.    All of the Hospitallers and Templars who survived the battle were executed at Saladin’s command–all save one, Gerard de Ridefort, who was allowed to ransom himself.   Even if Dante did not mention him, I like to think he is roasting in one of the Inferno’s circles of Hell.
While at Sepphoria, we were able to see Koby again and to meet his older sister, Levav.  I can only hope she didn’t think I was rude, for Koby and I got into such an animated discussion of the battle at Hattin that we were soon back in the 12th century and lost all sense of time or place or other people; I doubt we’d even have noticed if we’d encountered a unicorn.
Our last stop was the battlefield.  The Horns of Hattin is an extinct volcano, with twin peaks overlooking the plain of Hattin.   It was here that I experienced a minor miracle of my own.   Despite my back brace (my medieval armor) and setting a measured pace, my back had continued to give me grief.  But when we reached Hattin, the pain suddenly eased dramatically, allowing me to reach the top.   I had not expected the terrain to be so rough, so rock-strewn.  It is a wonder that the legs of the horses did not snap like matchsticks, and it was easy to see why the Count of Tripoli could not have forced his way back up the slope to rejoin the army after his charge failed.
I always find battlefields to be sad places; too many ghosts.  Hattin is particularly bleak and desolate, and it took very little imagination to envision it wreathed in the smoke of the brushfires set by the Saracens, sweltering in the summer heat, the sky darkening with clouds of arrows, the wind echoing with the battle cries and screams of the dying men and horses.  I will never forget the sight of the Sea of Galilee shimmering along the horizon; to men suffering from severe thirst and heat, it must have seemed like a heartbreaking mirage, so close and yet so far.   When it comes time for me to fight this battle in Outremer, I will have some very vivid memories to draw upon.

One final thought on this land often called the cradle of civilization.   I am very glad Paula, Enda, and I were able to make this trip, and I am grateful to Koby, Valerie, and Elke for their advice, assistance, and the pleasure of their company.  When I lived in Hawaii years ago, the word Aloha was multi-purpose, used for greetings and farewell and as an expression of love.    I’d like to end this blog with the beautiful Hebrew word Shalom, which—like Aloha– has various meanings, including a blessing for peace, which we wish for all the Israelis and Palestinians who call it home.
December 8, 2014
PS  My blog is balking again at letting me insert photos; I thought we’d resolved this problem, but apparently not.  I am going to post it as is and then will put up some photos once we exorcise these new demons.

I ended my book tour for A King’s Ransom at the Tucson Festival of Books, which was a delightful experience and one I recommend highly to all my fellow book-lovers.  While in Tucson, I met and became friends with a gifted writer who shares my passion for the past, Judith Starkston.  When I learned that she was completing Hand of Fire, a novel about the Trojan princess Briseis, famously captured by Achilles during the siege of Troy, I was fascinated; I’ve always been intrigued by the story of Troy.   Judith kindly sent me an ARC to read, but neither of us expected that I’d suddenly find myself needing to have my cataract surgery performed sooner rather than later.  I was delighted with the results of the surgery; I would not go so far as to say I was viewing the world in black and white and it suddenly flamed into vivid technicolor, but there is no doubt that everything is brighter and sharper now.  But the surgery wreaked havoc on my schedule and I have had to postpone reading Hand of Fire.   Fortunately, I can still introduce Judith and her story of Briseis and Achilles to my readers.
What inspired you to write this book?
It may sound strange, but I began to write in order to answer a question that had bothered me for a long time. For years I’d taught the Iliad, Homer’s epic poem of the Trojan War, and kept wondering with my students how Briseis, the captive woman who sparked the bitter conflict between Achilles and Agamemnon, could possibly have loved Achilles.
The Greek had killed her husband and brothers, destroyed her city and turned her from princess to slave—hardly a heartwarming courtship. She is central to the plot and yet she gets only a handful of lines. In those few words, the one clear notion expressed is her sorrow when she is forced to leave Achilles.
I should say I always liked Achilles, the existential hero who calls the whole war into question—which shows he’s no brainwasher—so the answer wasn’t some ancient version of Stockholm Syndrome.
What drew you to historical fiction?
I loved ancient history and literature as a student while I earned my Classics degrees. That is the base that trained me.
Many years ago, I walked through the British Museum with my toddler son on my shoulders. I was retelling the myths painted on the Greek vases in front of us. We were happily lost in our imaginative world. I turned to go to another display case and discovered a crowd behind me listening in. So I think I’ve been “writing” historical tales for a long time.
Tell us about Hand of Fire.
Hand of Fire is partly a romance—Briseis and Achilles fall in love but in an unconventional manner that includes a mystical element. Achilles is half-immortal and I made full use of that half of his conflicted personality.
In addition to the romantic element, Hand of Fire explores why some people, women especially, can survive great tragedy and violence against them, even managing to take delight in what life still has to offer.
It is a coming of age tale featuring a smart, strong-willed teenage woman in an ancient culture that, counter to our modern stereotypes of the past, expects Briseis to be powerful, literate and a leader. Briseis succeeds in rising to those expectations despite the circumstances arrayed against her—and she’s strong enough to take on the mightiest of the Greek heroes.
Can you tell us a little about your main character?
Briseis is essential to the plot of the Iliad, and yet we only know that she was a princess captured by Achilles. To develop who she was I needed both an understanding of what she could plausibly have done in the course her life and her inner psychology.
Intriguingly, the world Briseis lived in—the details of its everyday life, religious beliefs, language, etc. have only come to light recently—dug from the earth by contemporary archaeologists. The cuneiform libraries of ancient Anatolia (modern Turkey) and the Hittite Empire, where Troy and Briseis’s city of Lyrnessos were situated, have begun to be translated and provided the material I needed. I discovered in the evidence a powerful role for Briseis, that of a healing priestess, called in Hittite a hasawa.
That role made perfect sense for a woman who fell in love with Achilles, the warrior who is also a healer and a bard. The stories—one taken from clay-recorded history and one from mythology—meshed and a strong-willed redhead began to form in my imagination.
Would you classify your writing more as plot driven or character driven?
Hand of Fire is very much character driven. I wanted to figure out who Briseis could have been—after a while she became very real to me and when I found myself struggling with a scene it usually meant I was trying to make Briseis do something that simply wasn’t in her nature. Characters are a very bossy lot once you let them get into your imagination.
Achilles stumped me for the longest time. He’s larger than life, half-immortal and deeply conflicted. In an early version I had him as one of the point-of-view characters, but it didn’t work. I couldn’t hear his voice. I finally wrote his part of the story as epic poetry in iambic pentameter, which is the closest I could get in English to the hexameter verse of Homer. Once I used a medium that was mythological and writ large, he gradually revealed himself. Later I used that understanding to remove the poetry and slide in his character in the more standard format of scenes.
Which is more important in “historical fiction”: the historical or the fiction? How important is it to get the history right?
I think you have to tell a compelling story first, but also get the history right. I feel a special obligation to do that with Hand of Fire because Bronze Age Turkey is still a new field.
Until recently, various prejudices and giant blanks in our knowledge led scholars to assume the Trojans were culturally Greeks, but now we know Troy and all the area now called Turkey, which in the Bronze Age was made up of various kingdoms but dominated by the Hittites, had its own language, cultural traditions and style, quite distinct from the Greeks.  Older novels set in the Trojan War focus only on myth or follow the belief the Trojans were Greek.
In addition to my research via books, academic journals and archaeological site reports, I have travelled in Turkey, spent hours studying museum collections, talked with archaeologists, and experienced firsthand the geography of the settings of my book.
However, none of that desire to get the history right is worth anything if you don’t tell a story that your reader can’t put down.
What do you hope readers take away from your book?
Despite being a book about war with a lot of death and violence, the fundamental theme of Hand of Fire is one of hope. I think people will come away with a renewed sense of the resiliency of humanity and of women in particular.
Also, my aim was to build the Bronze Age world of these Greeks and Trojans vividly enough that readers feel like they’ve lived there. For most people, that’s a new and exotic world and yet it will feel surprisingly familiar in some ways. I guess you could call Hand of Fire historical escapism with a positive message.
Can you tell us about your future projects?
I’m in the middle of a historical mystery featuring the Hittite Queen Puduhepa as “sleuth.” She would be as famous as Cleopatra if she hadn’t been buried by the sands of time. Her seal is on the first extant peace treaty in history next to her foe, Pharaoh Ramses II. Now that she’s been dug out, I’ve taken her remarkable personality, which seems perfectly suited for solving mysteries, and I am writing a series. She ruled from her teens until she was at least eighty, so I think this series may outlast me.
Hand of Fire will be followed by at least one sequel and possibly a prequel of sorts focusing on Iphigenia and Achilles. This spring I made a research trip to Cyprus because the sequel to Hand of Fire will end up there—but it’d be a spoiler if I revealed how or why. (Also I’d have to know the answer to both of those and I’m not entirely sure yet…) Suffice to say Cyprus is a beautiful and dramatic island with a density of Bronze Age archaeological sites that is almost alarming. My husband and I had a delightful trip and maybe that’s reason enough.
Thank you, Judith, for a very illuminating interview.  My readers love it when writers lift the veil, allowing them to glimpse how a novel takes form and offering a view into the author’s inner world.  Hand of Fire is sure to appeal to anyone interested in history in general and the ancient world in particular.  I am looking forward to reading it.   Here is the link to Judith’s website.
http://www.judithstarkston.com/
This may be my last blog for a while, as I am soon to leave on a research trip to Israel.  I felt very cheated that I was unable to follow in the Lionheart’s footsteps when I was writing my account of his crusade.  So I am very excited that I will be able to track the shadows of Balian d’Ibelin, his Greek queen, and the tragic young king, Baldwin IV, through the streets of Jerusalem, Jaffa, and Acre.
September 25, 2014

I am sorry it has taken me so long to get a new blog up, but I have had to make a choice between keeping current on Facebook or putting up new blogs, and since most of the action seems to occur on my Facebook pages, that is the road I’ve chosen.   I am not the most co-ordinated of people, so my balancing acts end in a splatter more often than not—one reason why I’ve yet to venture onto Twitter like so many of my fellow authors.  I just hope this will not make me such an anomaly that when I die, they’ll carve on my tombstone, “Only writer never to tweet.”
In my last blog, I recommended a number of books that I thought would interest my readers.  But I forgot a few, so here I go again.   Those who want to protect their bank accounts might want to stop reading here.
In that blog, I’d recommended a few series that I never miss—Bernard Cornwell, Dana Stabenow, Priscilla Royal, Sharan Newman, Steven Saylor, C.J. Harris, P.F. Chisholm—all but Dana’s set in bygone times–the Middle Ages, ancient Rome, Saxon, Elizabethan, and Regency England.  But there are more, of course.
I was a fan of the Brother Cadfael series written by Edith Pargeter under her pseudonym Ellis Peters.   And how could any reader not love Amelia Peabody, the marvelous creation of Elizabeth Peters?  They both were very prolific writers, and I wish I knew their secret of continuing to produce books of such high caliber.  So often a series begins to get stale if it goes on too long; I am sure many of you can name writers who’ve continued with a series beyond its natural shelf life.   But Elis Peters and Elizabeth Peters were notable exceptions.    Another writer whose books I eagerly anticipated was Margaret Frazer.  I was lucky enough to call her a friend, and I miss her very much, for she was a wonderful human being as well as a very talented author; to learn more about her, see my blog here.  http://sharonkaypenman.com/blog/?p=390 .  It is very sad to think that we’ll never have another new Brother Cadfael or Amelia Peabody adventure or be able to sympathize with Sister Frevisse when her quiet convent life is interrupted yet again by the discovery of a body at her nunnery’s door.    But it is some small comfort that all three of them have left a rich legacy of books for us to revisit and for new readers to discover.
I also highly recommend Laurie King’s Mary Russell series, set during and after the first world war.  Her imaginative premise is that a brilliant young girl crosses paths with Sherlock Holmes, then in restless retirement in Sussex.  It is the first time that the fabled detective has encountered a mind as agile and insightful as his own and he cannot resist taking her under his wing, first as his apprentice, then as his partner, and eventually as his wife.  Yes, I know that very idea must sound heretical to Conon Doyle purists, but trust me—Laurie King pulls it off with panache, making their unlikely union both credible and fascinating to her readers.
I suppose Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Milhone mysteries might be considered historical, for they are set in the pre-computer age, the 1980’s.   Sue is another writer who has not only defeated the staleness dragon, she has gleefully trampled it into the dust.  She has been moving through the alphabet—from her first, A is for Alibi to her latest, W is for Wasted—and the series is just as fresh and vital today as it was at its initial launch.   The ending of this successful series is bound to be bittersweet for her legion of fans; I will certainly miss Kinsey and I confess that I’m curious to see how Sue manages to concoct a relevant title that begins with the letter X.
I’ve often praised Elizabeth Chadwick and Margaret George’s historical novels, but it is always worth doing again.   Same for Brian Wainwright, who has written both an excellent historical novel in Within the Fetterlock and a wickedly clever spoof in The Adventures of Alienore Audley.   I am not sure how Richard III would have reacted to it, for we don’t really know much about Richard’s sense of humor, and he has always struck me as a man who was firmly rooted in the Middle Ages.  But I’d wager that his more irreverent brother Edward would have thought it was hilarious.
I’ve had readers tell me that my books introduced them to the compelling world of the Welsh princes, others who were unfamiliar with Simon de Montfort until they read Falls the Shadow, and still more who confessed that they had a totally different opinion of Richard III after The Sunne in Splendour.   I cherish these compliments, for books have so often led me away from familiar roads and onto intriguing byways that I’d otherwise have missed.  This is one reason why I want my writers to be trustworthy when it comes to research.  I knew nothing of 16th century Japan until I read James Clavell’s Shogun.  What little I know of the Valley of the Kings and 19th century archaeology comes from Amanda Peabody via Elizabeth Peters, who had a PhD in Egyptology.  And thanks to Christy Robinson, I have become aware of a truly remarkable woman, Mary Dyer.
Christy has written two scrupulously researched novels about Mary Dyer, titled Mary Dyer Illuminated and For Such a Time as This, both of which are now on my towering TBR list.  She has also crafted one of the best opening lines that I’ve encountered, a very important skill for writers as that first sentence is the bait, meant to lure readers in.  I’ve spent a lot of time and trouble with those first sentences in my own books; my personal favorite is “Richard did not become frightened until darkness began to settle over the woods,” probably because it was my first such sentence.   Mary’s is “Mary Barrett closed the wide gate of the farmyard behind her, and though she did not know it yet, this was the day she’d see her death.”   After a beginning like that, who would not want to know more?    I have asked Christy to write a few paragraphs about Mary, her compelling history, and the novels, and they can be found at the end of this blog.
I’m already on page three, so I will save the rest of my book musings for a future blog.  I will end with a mention of another extremely gifted writer who has created her very own genre.  A few years ago, I was doing a panel discussion at my favorite bookshop, the Poisoned Pen in Scottsdale, Arizona, with Diana Gabaldon.   Afterward, we were taking questions from the audience and someone asked me if I could offer only one bit of advice to aspiring authors, what would it be.
I admitted that I’d made a monumental error when I first began writing Sunne; I did not write in chronological order.  At that time, I was writing for myself, not for publication, and so I felt free to hopscotch through the story of the Yorkist kings.  If I felt like doing a scene between Edward and his icy Woodville wife, I did; if I then wanted to write about Richard’s turbulent childhood, I did.   This scattershot approach spared me any attacks of Writer’s Block and was fun, too.  I proceeded on my merry way for more than four years, only then to have the only copy of this opus stolen from my car, a loss so traumatic that I could not write for almost six years.
When this mental log jam finally broke and I began again, I repudiated my earlier carefree method and embraced the traditionalist’s view—to write the book in chronological order.    I then explained to the Poisoned Pen reader that I felt this approach provided the inner discipline I needed and—most importantly—it allowed for character development.  I cited Edward as an example.   The cocky seventeen year old we meet in Chapter One is very different from the weary, cynical wastrel who dies forty years and many chapters later, whispering to his daughter that the worst secrets are those about to be found out.   If I’d written his story piecemeal, how could I have portrayed the slow deterioration of his character?
At this point, I became aware of the amusement of some of the audience members, who were glancing over at Diana and laughing.  She then confided that she always wrote in that “scattershot” way, and the monumental success of the Outlander books certainly made a very convincing argument in favor of it—if you happened to be a writer named Diana Gabaldon.  I was fascinated by her revelation, but remain convinced that the chronological approach is still the best approach for the rest of us.   Diana doesn’t need to play by the rules, not with that sort of talent and imagination.   So I am delighted that the Starz Outlander series has been getting such wonderful reviews, both from her devoted readers and those elitist critics who look askance at any book or film that can be labeled “historical.”    Then along came a modest little series called Game of Thrones.    As most of you know, I am a passionate Thrones fan, and I am sure I will enjoy Outlander very much, too.    And  I also harbor a small hope that somewhere  a Hollywood producer is mulling the success of these breakthrough series and then calling out to his loyal assistant, “Hot damn, historicals sell!  Who knew?  Find me a historical for my next project, maybe one set in the 12th century.”
And now, Christy Robinson on an awe-inspiring woman of great courage, compassion, and strength, who blazed across colonial America like a comet and would be martyred for her faith.
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Thank you, Sharon, for the opportunity to appear in your blog. Even though my novels’ story is set in the 17th century, and half in England, half in New England, my characters’ lives were written somewhat in your fashion. They’re not light, fast reads: they’re chewy! I’ve ripped a few pages (metaphorically speaking) from your historical novels, and have constructed the missing bits by thinking through the events moment by moment, and knowing close associates and enemies of my characters. I developed an Excel spreadsheet with all the characters’ events, as well as national news (epidemics, wars, heads of state), plotted by year—for 50 years before my story, and 40 years after. This blew apart a number of myths, and filled in what must have happened in the quiet times. And it set me on a path to discover documents that have lain hidden in archives for 350 years. Those documents showed me that in Mary and William Dyer (to steal your book title for a moment), Here Be Dragons!
The two stand-alone but sequential novels center on Mary Dyer, 1611-1660, an Englishwoman who emigrated with her husband William to Boston, Massachusetts, in 1635. (Perhaps you’ve seen the Mary Dyer statue in Boston.) They were married as Anglicans, but after passing some strict requirements were admitted to the Puritan church in Boston. In a short time, they were part of a “grace” movement led by Anne Hutchinson. Mary’s third pregnancy resulted in the premature stillbirth of an anencephalic girl, which was later disinterred and pronounced a “monster” that was proof of Dyer’s and Hutchinson’s heresy. In 1638, they and other families were ordered out of the colony. They purchased several islands from the Narragansett Indians and formed the colony of Rhode Island. From the very beginning, though they were all religious people, the founders determined to form a secular democracy. (Governors John Winthrop and Thomas Dudley of Massachusetts disdained democracy. They had a theocracy, a church-state coalition.)
Mary gives birth eight times, six live to adulthood. William rises in government positions as well as in farming and trading. He’s appointed the first Attorney General in North America. He’s commissioned Commander-in-Chief Upon the Seas for the Anglo-Dutch war in America, and the Dutch city of New Amsterdam builds the “wall” of Wall Street to protect themselves from Dyer and his colleague, John Underhill. Mary returns to England for a visit in 1652, becomes a Quaker, and goes back to America via Boston in early 1657. Because she’s a Quaker and Massachusetts hates Baptists and Quakers with a murderous passion, she’s immediately cast into prison without trial, though the court meets several times to settle civil and ecclesiastical matters. William rescues her, and back in Newport, they become part of the church-state conflict roaring across New England. As many of her friends are tortured and executed, Mary determines that as a woman of high social status, her martyrdom for liberty of conscience will be so shocking that the persecution will have to stop. So she violates her banishment-on-pain-of-death to commit civil disobedience. Twice. The second time, in 1660, she’s executed by hanging. Friends write a protest letter to King Charles II, and he orders a stop to capital punishment. Meanwhile, William Dyer and colleagues are writing the Rhode Island charter for the king to seal and grant them. The charter, granted in 1663, includes religious liberty and the importance of secular democratic government. In the 1780s, the charter became a template for the United States Bill of Rights, specifically the First Amendment regarding freedom of speech, assembly, and religion. Even in today’s increasingly secular society, that right means liberty for all, not liberty for *some* who would impose their beliefs and behaviors on others.
So, Sharon, to bring it back to your blog—breathing life back into the legendary Mary Dyer, and telling William’s story for the first time ever (because Mary got all the ink!), has something of you in it through analysis of your research methods and writing style. History has to be seen in context, not in abbreviated quotes for political capital. I’m so excited about the 5-star reviews from readers, including English-lit professors (because I was a book editor before an author) and history educators. The books are found here: http://bit.ly/Church-State . I’ve written two other books, keep four blogs, and am plotting out a new novel, to be set in England in the 1650s. The main characters will allow a cameo appearance by Mary Dyer. Because I can.
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“Because I can.”   The mantra of writers everywhere!   Thank you, Christy.
August 12, 2014

My Facebook friends and readers already know that this blog vanished in a puff of smoke two days after I’d posted it.   But for the benefit of those of you who do not hang out on Facebook and may have wondered if you’d hallucinated reading it, it was indeed up and then gone, thanks to the host, which was in the process of migrating its servers.     I can only hope it never happens again, for although I can re-post it, as I am now doing, all of the original comments were zapped into a black hole of cyberspace.   Anyway, once again  here is the blog, Read This at Your Peril.
I am sorry it has taken me so long to put up a new blog, but no sooner had I finally vanquished that pesky pneumonia dragon than the deadline dragon moved in.   At least this delay gave more of you a chance to enter Pauline Toohey’s drawing for her novel, Pull of the Yew Tree.   Pauline and I are happy to announce that the winner is Barbara, no last name given, who posted the eighth comment.   Barbara, please contact Pauline at paulinemalley@hotmail.com or me at  sharonkpenman@yahoo.com, so arrangements can be made to send your personalized copy of Pauline’s novel.  Thanks to all of you who took part in the drawing.
Now, why the warning?   Because I’ve already enticed so many of you into joining me on the merry road to book bankruptcy, and I am about to do it again.   But I did have a twinge of conscience, so I decided to play fair.   If you continue to read this blog, you will find a number of books that you are going to find very tempting.   Some I have had a chance to read myself, others not yet thanks to the deadline dragon.   Because deadlines have become as tight as nooses nowadays, that means I have had to seriously limit my pleasure reading time, a real sacrifice for anyone who is an avid reader, which I’ve been since the age of five or so.   But they are all on my TBR list, and they are all books that I think are likely to interest my fellow lovers of history.
I’ll begin with the ones that I was actually able to read.   I’ve just finished M.K. Tod’s Lies Told in Silence, a novel set in France during World War I.    This was one of mankind’s most tragic wars, not only because of the staggering death toll, but because it need not have happened.    Most of you are probably familiar with the famous comment by the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, as war loomed.  Looking out the window at a man lighting the gas lamps in St James Park, he said sadly, “The lamps are going out all over Europe.  We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”     Considering the bloody history of the 20th century and the continuing global conflagrations in the 21st century, it is hard to argue with him.     M.K. Tod captures this sorrowful sense of loss as men and women were caught up in a tide beyond their control, one that would transform their lives beyond recognition.  She has created characters that readers will care about and has very effectively dramatized how soldiers suffered, physically and psychologically, in the so-called “Great War,” a theme that continues to resonate with us today.   Her novel is now available on Amazon.   http://www.amazon.com/Lies-Told-Silence-M-K-Tod-ebook/dp/B00LEYV2PI/ref=la_B00ELV1H7E_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1404232864&sr=1-2
I also recommend The Invention of Wings, by Sue Monk Kidd, author of the moving The Secret Life of Bees.    This novel is the story of two truly remarkable sisters, Sarah and Angelina Grimke, who were born into the aristocracy of the Ante-Bellum South, but were those rare individuals who were guided by conscience, not society’s dictates.  For the Grimke sisters, that meant a rejection of slavery, becoming abolitionists, and in time, suffragists.     I wish we had more people like the Grimke sisters, but I am glad we do have Sue Monk Kidd to keep them from being forgotten.
Another book I enjoyed was I am Livia, by Phyllis T. Smith, a novel about the Emperor Augustus’s formidable consort, Livia.   My views of Livia were formed by the classic BBC series, I, Claudius, which means I imagined her to be a woman you’d dare not dine with.   Ms. Smith  treats Livia more kindly than  Robert Graves, but I was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt; after all, I hoped that readers would do that for my revisionist portrayal of Richard III.  And after I finished the novel, I investigated a bit; in other words, I Googled Livia, and discovered that her hands were not quite as blood-stained as I, Claudius would have us believe.
And I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to read the ARC for An Air of Treason, by P.F. Chisholm, the newest entry in her wonderful series about Robert Carey, the real-life, swashbuckling cousin of Elizabeth Tudor.   These books are so much fun, filled with action and humor and surprise twists and fascinating details of Elizabethan life.     An Air of Treason revolves around one of the most dangerous mysteries of Tudor England—the fate of Amy Robsart, Robert Dudley’s unwanted wife.   For those who have not yet had the pleasure of entering Robert Carey’s world, the first in the series is A Famine of Horses.  I cannot recommend these books highly enough; I think they are that good.
Briefly detouring into the realm of non-fiction, I have to mention Sharan Newman’s Defending the City of God, a biography of Melisende, Queen of Jerusalem in the early years of the turbulent 12th century.   And in the autumn, we can look forward to a new biography of Edward II, by Kathryn Warner, who probably knows more about Edward’s life than he himself did.     The next two books are not historical, at least not in the medieval sense, but I wanted to remind you how much I enjoyed Kirk Douglas’s I am Spartacus, his account of the making of this classic film about the slave who was able to threaten the very foundation of ancient Rome     And another compelling book is The Elephant Whisperer by Anthony Lawrence, written by a man who devoted his life to the preservation of these magnificent animals.
We all have series that we love, so here are a few of mine.  Steven Saylor’s Gordianus books are set in the waning days of the Roman republic.   Bernard Cornwell has created one of my all-time favorite characters in Uhtred, star of his Saxon series.  His latest is The Pagan Lord, and for new readers, the first one is The Last Kingdom. This next series is not at all medieval, but Dana Stabenow’s mysteries set in Alaska and featuring the unforgettable Kate Shugak and her equally memorable wolf-hybrid, Mutt, are so much fun that it might not be completely legal.     I also recommend Sharan Newman’s Catherine Levendeur series set in 12th century France, Priscilla Royal’s mysteries rooted in 13th century England, and C.J. Harris’s mystery novels set in Regency England.    Both Sharan and Priscilla delve into matters not often touched upon in novels of the Middle Ages, each having a character who has an outsider’s perspective, Solomon, a Jew who does not find life easy in a Christian society and Brother Thomas, a young monk who struggles to understand why God has given him forbidden urges that his Church condemns as mortal sin.  Both men are true to their times, reflecting the beliefs and mores of their medieval world, but their vulnerability can be heartbreaking and gives their stories a complexity not always found in novels meant to entertain.     Lastly, for my fellow dog lovers, there are the books of David Rosenfeld and Spencer Quinn, which combine suspense with humor and reflect their own affection for our four-legged friends.   The first in David’s Andy Carpenter series is Open and Shut, his newest Hounded, due out in July.   Spencer’s Chet and Bernie series has a new entry, Paw and Order, which will be published in August, and the start of their career begins with Dog on It.
Now for books that I’ve not been able to read yet, which I hope to read in the future.    Laurel Corona’s The Mapmaker’s Daughter is set in Spain on the eve of the expulsion of the Jews.     Paula Lofting has written a novel set in 11th century England, Sons of the Wolf.    David Blixt’s Master of Verona sounds like a fascinating journey into Renaissance Italy, with no less a guide than the oldest son of the famed poet, Dante.    Margaret Skea ‘s Turn of the Tide explores clan loyalties in 16th century Scotland.   Charlene Newcomb has written a novel that I’d be interested in reading, Men of the Cross, the story of a young knight who follows the Lionheart to the Holy Land on the Third Crusade, where he finds a forbidden love and discovers the high price that battlefield glory exacts from soldiers; readers of A King’s Ransom know that I have great sympathy for the toll that PTSD has taken upon fighting men down through the ages.     And in the autumn, Judith Starkston’s novel about the Trojan War, Hand of Fire, will be published, as will Alix Christie’s Gutenberg’s Apprentice, set in medieval Germany and dealing with an invention of great importance to any book lover.     Finally, we were recently discussing on Facebook whether there were any novels written about Edward III.   Well, guess what I found?   Fields of Glory by Michael Jecks, which focuses upon that very king and the Battle of Crecy.
See why I gave you all fair warning?     This blog is like a banquet for book lovers, with delicacies to tempt every palate.     Please feel free to join the Book Bankruptcy Party and suggest books of your own that you either enjoyed or hope to read.   We can always argue that spending money on books is actually a virtue, right?
Now I shall go back to fending off the deadline dragon.  Once I finally got A King’s Ransom off to my editor, I’d hoped to see the last of him, but he was called back into service for the new book—Outremer, the Land Beyond the Sea–set in the Kingdom of Jerusalem during the latter years of the 12th century.     So far he has confined himself to lurking in the shadows, watching me with glowing red eyes and blowing smoke rings to amuse himself.  As long as he does not start snacking on sheep or spaniels or worse, like Daenerys’s fierce pets in Game of Thrones, I’ll try not to complain.
June 28, 2014, re-posted on July 1, 2014

I have a very interesting blog today—if I say so myself—an interview with Australian writer, Pauline Toohey, in which she discusses her historical novel Pull of the Yew Tree.  While I have not yet been able to read it due to my recent struggles with the pneumonia dragon, it is high on my TBR list, for it is set in fifteen century Ireland and focuses upon one of the most powerful Irish clans, the Fitzgeralds; I am happy, too, to report that they were Yorkists and a young Richard, Duke of Gloucester, makes an appearance at one point in the novel.  I know this is enough to send my Ricardian readers hurrying over to Amazon!    There seems to be a genuine curiosity about how we writers do our thing, and Pauline’s interview lifts the veil a bit, giving us a glimpse of a writer at work.   Like me, Pauline is a dog lover and goes for long walks with Moby, her border collie rescue, as she searches for inspiration and plots chapters in her head.  Although her road is to be found Down Under and mine in the Jersey Pinelands, this is something I’ve often done, too, my dogs pacing patiently at my side as my thoughts slide back into the twelfth century.   Pauline shares my admiration for Bernard Cornwell, too, so clearly we are kindred spirits.
Pauline and I thought it would be a good idea to do a book giveaway as part of the interview, so anyone who posts a comment to this blog will be eligible to receive a free, signed copy of Pull of the Yew Tree, with Pauline’s compliments.   Here is the link to it on the Amazon mother ship.  http://www.amazon.com/Pull-Yew-Tree-Chronicles-Crom-ebook/dp/B00CQCQXWO/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1400635338&sr=1-1 It is also available for my British, Canadian, and Australian readers on their own Amazon websites, and let’s not forget Book Depository, with its marvelous free shipping policy.     Now, I am happy to introduce you to Pauline Toohey, author of Pull of the Yew Tree and an upcoming contemporary crime novel in which she draws upon her two decades-plus experience as a police officer with the Victoria Police.
Q1. Tell us of your debut novel.
A1. Pull Of The Yew Tree is set in 15th century Ireland and follows the powerful Fitzgerald family of County Kildare. The O’Byrne clan from County Wicklow is their eternal angst, being one of the strongest clans from the east. My story is Part One of the Crom Abu series – Crom Abu being the Fitzgerald war cry.
Gaels and Irish Noblemen rarely saw eye to eye, so life was full of warring, double-dealing and unwise pacts, and in this, my characters dive disastrously into strife and heartache … not unlike the Plantagenet crew, I suppose. The tale deals more so with the outcomes of using family members to buy loyalty, and an emotive love story carries the plot. We experience life at that time through the young eyes of Jarlath Fitzgerald and Ainnir O’Byrne. I’m reliably assured tissues are required, but there are occasions for giggles, too.
To this point, there is little conveyed in fiction novel format of the Fitzgeralds and this era in Ireland. I’ve received a warm welcome as a new author from many of your fans, Sharon, with some 5-star and 4-star reviews on major sites. Very chuffed. Very chuffed indeed … and humbled. It’s quite nerve-racking putting your ‘art’ out there for critiquing.
Just a little something to entice your fans; the Fitzgeralds were loyal Yorkists. Richard of Gloucester makes a cameo appearance crossing paths with my characters in the foggy morning that saw the Battle of Barnet.
I certainly hope I’ve delivered characters to love, characters to question, and a beautiful medieval Ireland. I can say, as with all my writing, there’s also a dog to love. Gotta have a dog in a story. Gotta have a dog!
Q2. As the story follows the life of a chronicled family, do you find yourself pinned to a set path? Do you map your story before plunging in?
A2. I read your interview with Bernard Cornwell, and grinned at his admission, “I don’t even know where the chapter I’m writing now will end.”
Yes, I have historical incidents to adhere to, but how I connect them, and how I deal with the ‘between’ remains a pure mystery until completion. I never know where the chapter will take me. What comes, comes, and then I lead on again from there.
I’m given a licence to wander with the fictional characters in my work, but all the same, I certainly have some necessary ‘stops on the road’ when dealing with the real.
At times I envy writers who plot and are able to stick the ‘script’. I’m sure it would make for easier going. Yet on the other hand, I wouldn’t experience the joys of ploughing through unknown territory, and the surprises that a relatively-fluid piece entices.
Q3. Do you use a particular process to develop your characters?
A3. No. Not in the strict sense. Again, and similar to the plot process, things grow (or shrivel as the case may be) almost instinctively. The characters tend to ‘make’ themselves, and no doubt, a finicky editing process is necessary to ensure all is polished. But it’s alleged by some of my readers, that all my female characters in Pull Of The Yew Tree are very strong. It wasn’t intentional by any means. And on churning over the tidbit of feedback, I looked at my family and my friendships. All the women in my life are extremely strong, capable and forthright. I obviously possesses an inherent need to encourage a defined strength in all females.
I will admit to consciously writing a weak female into the sequel. It was an interesting experience, reining in my gut-deep need. But I will not reveal whether I succumbed to inserting a redemptive quality … or perhaps I just did.
Q4. Your thoughts on what makes a piece of writing enjoyable?
A4. If my reader reacts with strong emotion to the losses or wins my characters experience, if my reader laughs and cries, then I’d say ‘mission accomplished’. I think of myself as an ‘entertainer’, not a teacher, not an instructor, nor a historian for that matter. Entertainment and a pull of strong emotion is what I, as a reader, hope for when investing time in a book. I must also add that I am a prose lover. For me, a well-strung sentence can be like music.
Q5. And your experience as a writer?
A5. I discovered the love of writing at a comparatively late age – early 40s. When I declare this information, I like to add the fact that Australian author, Bryce Courtenay (recently deceased) began his penning at a similar age. Big shoes to fill, I know, but you gotta aim high.
My want for writing and scribing stories was always there, I suppose, sitting patiently on my ‘bucket list’, but life and its responsibilities, along with other benchmarks in sight, simply got in the way.
A number of personal tragedies redirected my course, and forced me to find some peace and solace, and there it was, waiting in the therapeutic act of writing. So, here I am. I write every day, and I count my blessings knowing how fortunate I am to have this opportunity.
Q6. Are you influenced by any particular writers?
A6. Inspired and influenced, certainly. I admire many, but want to ‘go my own way’. Having said that, I believe improving one’s writing requires reading ‘great’ pieces. Not good pieces, great pieces.
There are a number of authors I keenly return to, and before I list them, let me assure your readers you and I are not in cahoots with this question. So in no particular order, allow me to answer:
Bernard Cornwell with his simplicity and well-timed infrequent humour, not to mention his fabulous battle scenes;
Sharon Penman (you may have heard of her) and her character development, and meticulous research;
Aussie authors, Tim Winton and Colleen McCullough
The Bronte sisters and Austen.
William Shakespeare’s pure beauty of language;
And my mum for her deeply-personal messages on every birthday card.
There are two particular lines in Pull Of The Yew Tree that herald from my mum’s eloquent ‘parenting’: ‘lower your expectations and you won’t be disappointed’ and ‘that wonderful feeling of want’. Those two lines echo noisily in my memories, and both prove themselves to be fabulous advice over and again.
Q7. How do you stir creativity?
A7. To be honest, there are times it just won’t come. In those dry spells, rather than force myself, I accept the pauses and busy myself with other things. I paint, and I love to reinvigorate my garden. I’m a busy mum with a business to run, and I have a liking for fine-dining. My rescue border collie, Moby, loves long walks, and I play the piano and the guitar. And of course, like many of us, that TBR pile is always in need attention. But to encourage creativity to reappear, I run, pound the roads in my Asics, eyes to the ground. The steps go a long way to budge that blockage. I have a great chiropractor to keep the hips and back in ready-mode, and have also discovered the benefits of pilates.
Q8. What are you reading now?
A8. Two on the go. An oldie but a goodie. Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame. It was my pick for my book club. I find the classics a ‘comfort read’ and often return to them. And the other, The Chemistry Of Tears by Peter Carey. But I also have my head in research material for the 3rd instalment for the Crom Abu series, and, another project a little closer to home.
Q9. My own research often uncovers some fascinating material. Tell us some of your more favourite discoveries.
A9. Hand-penned notes by people of interest, stir me greatly. You get a real feel for their temperament, their humour (or lack of) and their sense of purpose. I can often be found in the quiet rooms of our state library, engrossed in business correspondence and diary entries.
As for the research of medieval times, the following two are perhaps not unknown to your readers, but they certainly gave me fodder to play with. The merkin (pubic wig) often donned to conceal impurities and scarring, and the popular dish of frog blancmange accompanied by jumping frogs. Both make an appearance (not at the same time) in Pull Of The Yew Tree’s sequel. I couldn’t resist.
Q10. If my wish to visit Australia comes true, where do you suggest I visit?
A10. The Great Barrier Reef is a must; stunning place. So too, is central Australia: the red sands, the star-filled nights, the history and indigenous culture; truly amazing. And if I don’t mention a catch-up with members of the Sharon Kay Penman Australian Fan Club I’ll be in all sorts of trouble. Some of those girls know where I live.  But make it Melbourne please. Less travel for me.
Q11. And from here, what does Pauline Toohey have ahead of her?
A11. The sequel for Pull of the Yew Tree is complete. Melting of the Mettle is its title. It continues five years on from where the Yew Tree leaves off. Fingers crossed you’ll see it early 2015.
I also have a contemporary crime series (fiction), set to be released later this year.
Outside of writing, I’m exploring avenues to use literature, writing and reading to help the issues of Mental Health in Youth, and Prevention of Youth Suicide. These are causes close to my heart.
Q12. Historical fiction and contemporary crime? An interesting mixture.
A12. I recently retired from a 25 year career as a police officer with Victoria Police. Tackling this second genre grew from a chance meeting with Aussie author, Kerry Greenwood (author of the Miss Fisher series which is now a popular TV series). Kerry was envious of the knowledge my 25 years of service provides me, and insisted it was sacrilege not to use it. I’ve worked at the Homicide Squad, Major Drug Division, City Crime Divisions, and the more ‘busy and colourful’ towns that Melbourne has to offer. So I come well-stocked with plot ideas as well as intricate knowledge of police procedures and processes.
And I took Kerry’s advice.
Anna Murdoch is my main character. She’s a very capable and strong-minded woman, (no surprise there), and she presents to my readers a light-hearted insight into what it is to be human in a job that demands you to be somewhat robotic and cold. In Anna’s telling, I attempt to mix a ‘who done it’ with ‘comedy’. The first of the series is called My Rickety Metronome: An Anna Murdoch Crime Story, and will be out in September.
Q13. Do you have a preference for writing either style?
A13. Each is so different. With historical fiction, the research, and the attention to tone for my liking of prose, is extremely time consuming. I liken it to creating a well-orchestrated song. It’s a joyous yet slow adventure. As for the contemporary crime, all I need to do is close my eyes and conjure memories. It can be quick. Very quick. So as to your question, my mood dictates in what genre I write. How lucky am I!
Thanks so much for your time, Sharon, and for the enjoyment your writing has brought to your readers.
PS … I don’t care what you say, I will never believe Ranulf Fitz Roy is fictional.
Thank you, Pauline, for agreeing to do this interview.   Actually, Ranulf is grateful that  he is a figment of my imagination, for that allowed me to give him a happy ending and a peaceful death with his beloved Rhiannon, something that rarely happened to his Angevin real relatives.
May 20, 2014