An Honourable Estate by Elizabeth Ashworth

It may have been the effigies that first caught my eye – the woman with her hands clasped in prayer and her husband beside her with his legs crossed and his hand resting on the hilt of his sword as if he were ready, at any moment, to defend her honour. 

I was in the parish church at Wigan in Lancashire and the effigies were those of Lady Mabel Bradshaigh and her husband, Sir William.  As I studied them a man came across to speak to me.

“Have you seen the cross?” he asked.  I glanced around the church, wondering if he meant the cross on the altar. “No,” he said, “I mean have you seen Mab’s Cross?”

He told me where to find it – across a busy road junction, up the hill and in the grounds of a primary school.  It wasn’t much to look at really. The stones were worn away and there was no longer any sign of a real cross, but it was the story behind it that intrigued me.

"Sir William Bradshaigh, second son to Sir John, was a great traveller and a soldier, and married to Mabel, daughter and sole heiress of Hugh Norres de Haghe [Haigh] and Blackrode, and had issue, etc.  Of this Mabel is a story by tradition of undoubted verity, that in Sir William Bradshaigh's absence (being ten years away in holy wars) she married a Welsh knight.  Sir William, returning from the wars, came in a palmer's habit amongst the poor to Haghe; Mabel, who when she saw and congetringe [conjecturing] he favoured [resembled] her former husband, wept - for which the knight [her second husband] chastised her; at which Sir William went and made himself known to his tenants; in which space the knight fled, but near to Newton Park, Sir William over took and slew him.  The said Dame Mabel was enjoined by her confessor to do penance by going once every week, bare footed and bare legged, to a cross near Wigan from Haghe, whilst she lived, and [it is] called Mabb's to this day."

I wanted to know if there was any truth in this story so I began to research and came across a small booklet in the Lancashire Authors’ Association library.  Written by Rev. T.C. Porteus in the 1930s it is called New Light on the Mab’s Cross Legend. In it, Porteus compares the two main versions of the legend with the factual history of the time.  His interpretation made a lot of sense and this is what I used as the basis for my plot development.

In his booklet, Porteus refers to William Bradshaigh as a ‘Lancashire Robin Hood’ because he did not in fact fight in the ‘holy wars’ but was outlawed for not attending court on suspicion of being involved in the murder of one Sir Henry de Bury.  An Honourable Estate also contains elements of the Robin Hood legend.  There are sheriffs and outlaws as well as Scots and wars and rebellions as the narrative follows the fortunes of Mabel and William as famine sweeps England during a succession of very wet summers when crops rotted in the fields.  Because William is an outlaw, the lands at Haigh are forfeit to the king and are given to another man, Sir Peter Lymesey.  But Mabel won’t give up her inheritance.  In a 14^th century inquest into the ownership of Haigh, it is recorded that Mabel ‘intruded’ on the lands.  In other words she refused to move off them.

It seems that Mabel was a determined woman in real life.  Perhaps she didn’t need a man with a sword to defend her honour, but she must have loved William even though she did commit adultery.  She paid for the chapel at Wigan to be built so that they could be buried there together – perhaps she is still praying for forgiveness, although I think William must have forgiven her a long time ago.

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book trailer:  http://youtu.be/b4mLgPJqr88

Mistress of the Sea by Jenny Barden

I'm invariably fascinated by the answers authors give to the 'What made you choose to write about that?' question, and now it's being put to me I find myself wanting to give two responses - the short and the more complex! The short answer is that as soon as I delved into the early life of Sir Francis Drake and unearthed the bare bones of his first great enterprise: the attack on the Spanish 'Silver Train' carrying bullion across the isthmus of Panama, I thought it would make a cracking good backdrop for a novel. This true story has all the ingredients of a rip-roaring adventure. It begins with Drake the little-known sea captain, smarting from the humiliation of having been forced to flee from the rout of John Hawkins' fleet in the Gulf of Mexico, determined upon vengeance for what he saw as Spanish treachery, and it ends with Drake the national hero who returned from his raid on the Spanish bullion supply in triumph, having masterminded an ambush that netted a fortune for himself and the Queen, cocked a snook at the Spanish, and proved that the might of King Philip II's empire was not invulnerable. In the run up to achieving this victory, Drake had endured a series of setbacks and reverses, the loss of over a third of his crew to disease, the death of two of his younger brothers (one killed in a skirmish and the other most likely a victim of yellow fever), the failure of two earlier attempts to capture Spanish treasure (the first of which resulted in his own serious injury), and the disaffection of some of his men which caused Drake to scuttle one of his two ships in order to prevent their desertion. It was only Drake's tenacity that kept the enterprise going. Then, in the end, an alliance with black runaway slaves (the Cimaroons) and French privateers (the Huguenots led by Guillaume Le Testu) gave Drake the manpower he needed in order to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. This was a story in which a few individuals managed to achieve an act of singular significance. No more than 31 men returned to England out of Drake's original crew of 73, but they had severed the artery carrying Spain's life blood in bullion from Peru to fund her wars in Europe, and they had helped Drake set the course for the rise of England as a great maritime power.

As I unravelled what had actually happened, I began to imagine myself in this story, and to ask: 'What if a woman had been there?' and so the idea for Mistress of the Sea was born as an epic romantic adventure based on this real episode in history. Then a trip to Panama gave the concept even more impetus. I walked along parts of the Camino Real, sections of the original route for the Silver Train that have survived the passage of time and the flooding of the Panama Canal, and I saw the places where the hooves of pack mules over the centuries had worn hollows in the stones as they trailed over the rainforest clad mountains between the old city of Panama and Nombre de Dios. I walked through forest so thick that it was impossible to see even a glimpse of the sky, close to a hundred per cent humidity, plagued by flies and mosquitoes, and I felt I was drawing close to understanding what it must have been like. I had been down the mines of Cerro Rico: the 'Rich Mountain' of Postosí which was the principal source of the silver from Peru in the sixteenth century, and I had followed in the path of the conquistadors to many other places, so by travelling along the 'Royal Road' in Panama, and envisaging Drake's spectacular raid on the bullion in transit, I had a sense of the the pieces of a much broader picture slotting satisfyingly into place. That's the short answer.

The more complex explanation goes back to the roots of my writing before I ever imagined I might one day be a published author. I sometimes say that I became interested in history after an encounter with a suit of armour at Tamworth Castle, and it's true that I was fascinated with knights and the legends of King Arthur from a very early age, and that armour had a special attraction for me (perhaps because it had the potential to hide the wearer!). As a young girl, I wanted to do brave deeds, brandish a sword like Excalibur, and rescue maidens (or little boys!). I had an alter ego called Geni who would do spectacular things such as appear and disappear at will, run like the wind, and climb right to the top of very tall trees. And when everyone else had gone to bed, I'd be up, gazing out of my bedroom window in my home town of Burton on Trent, watching the town twinkling in the darkness beside the floodplain, and I'd imagine fabulous castles room by room, from the dungeons upward. No sooner was one properly envisaged in minute detail, from the stones to the heraldic shields, the trapdoors and secret passageways, than I'd move onto thinking about the next. I realise now that this was an ideal preparation for conceptualising and planning out a novel. 

After proving to be a horror in infancy and getting into all manner of scrapes (probably because I wanted to chase dragons rather than dress dollies), I turned out to have some ability to pass exams and blessed with a natural talent for drawing (for which I have my mother to thank). So I left school to study fine art, then switched to law to earn a living and became a solicitor in the city of London, until the birth of four children necessitated a change in direction. Then it was back to painting, something which only came to a close after I saw the self-portrait by Carel Fabritius that hangs in the National Gallery. This picture so entranced me that it set me on a quest to find out more about the artist's short life (Fabritius died young in the explosion of the Dutch gunpowder arsenal at Delft in 1654). Such academic biographies as there were only fuelled my desire to tell his story as it came bounding into life in my mind. That was how my writing began: in secret and quiet inadvertently, since I had no particular desire to write a book and did not even think I could do so. I wrote a fictionalised account of the life of Fabritius and found an agent on the strength of it. The interest of publishers in that book led me to refine and hone and try again. I wrote about another artist a few generations earlier: an invented character based loosely on Juan Sánchez Cotán who was a conquistador in my story as well as being an illuminator and a monk. Thus my interest in the Age of Discovery was reawakened and then nourished by travels in South America. Gradually the threads of the passions which have run through my life came together: the love of art and a fascination with the ideals of chivalry; adventure and legend, and the romance of exploration. That second book came even closer to publication, but after being turned down at acquisition meeting because it did not involve English characters, I thought I would write next about my own countrymen (I include women in that!). And who was active in the New World at the time, foremost among the early English seafarers to come into conflict with the Spanish? Francis Drake. It was a natural next step for me to write about Drake's first great Caribbean adventure, and to want to add a compelling love story - the result was Mistress of the Sea.

I hope that many of you will enjoy the adventure, and I thank you for the interest you have shown in reading this. Especial thanks to Deborah Swift for her generosity in hosting this wonderful site.

Mistress of the Sea will be released in hardback by Ebury Press, Random House, on 30 August 2012 with the paperback to follow

Jenny's website can be found here: http://www.jennybarden.com/
She's also on Twitter @jennywilldoit and facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jennybardenauthor
and goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/6438523.Jenny_Barden

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Hope in Hungnam by David Watts Jnr

I was inspired to write it after watching a special (maybe on the History Channel?) about US Korean War vets who go back to Korea and meet their South Korean counterparts. 

During this special they talked about an almost entirely unknown event in the Korean War. It was the evacuation of 100,000 civilians from Hungnam in North Korea just before Christmas, 1950. As if that were not remarkable enough, they profiled one ship that took an astounding 14,000 North Koreans to safety in a single voyage. That ship was the SS Meredith Victory and her captain was Leonard LaRue. The narrator made the  point that if this had occurred during World War II, there would have been movies made about it by now. At that moment, I knew I had to write about it. It was simply too great a story for the world to not know of it.

I decided that the narrative of saving 100,000 lives from being trapped in Communism in North Korea was too staggering to really wrap our minds around, so I created a fictitious US Marine and a fictitious North Korean woman and wove their stories together with that of the great rescue from Hungnam. 

By zooming in tightly on just this woman (and her two children) and what it meant to them to be rescued, and what it meant to the world for them to be rescued - I hope to tell the story in a way that really engages the reader.

Hope in Hungnam takes place during the darkest days of the Korean War in 1950: from the brutal Battle of Chosin Reservoir to the stunning Christmas Eve evacuation of civilians from Hungnam, North Korea. As the flames of war engulf the Korean Peninsula, US Marine Jack Stiles desperately searches for meaning in the frozen killing fields of North Korea.

Bloodied by war and bigotry, Stiles' world is changed forever when he is critically wounded at Chosin Reservoir and left for dead. Nursed back to health by a mortal foe, he soon faces the realities of war, life, and love with new clarity.

Twitter: @davidwattsjr
Facebook: www.fb.com/davidwattsjr
www.HopeinHungnam.com
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Spartacus The Gladiator by Ben Kane

How I came to write Spartacus: The Gladiator and why I became a writer

It’s a funny thing, but the idea for writing about Spartacus came about by chance. In March 2009, I was talking with my agent about ideas for books. I had already set my mind upon a trilogy (now quadrilogy) set during the second (Punic) war between Carthage and Rome, but we were talking about other possibilities as well. I won’t mention many of them, because I haven’t written the books yet, but Spartacus came up. It sounds naïve, but in that moment it was as if someone had switched a light bulb on in my head. I had watched the famous Kubrick movie once as a boy, and it had made a great impression on me. (I should add that we didn’t have a TV when I was growing up, or I am sure that I would have seen it more than once!) I had had cause to read about Spartacus in the previous few years. As many of you know, Marcus Licinius Crassus was the man who put down Spartacus’ rebellion in 71 BC. He is also a character in my first novel, The Forgotten Legion. That day, the plan for a set of novels about Carthage and Rome won out, but the idea didn’t go away.

In early 2010, I started hearing a lot of news about an upcoming TV miniseries called Spartacus: Blood and Sand, starring a then little-known actor called Andy Whitfield. This made me start thinking about writing Spartacus’ story all over again. I did some more research on him, and became even more enamoured of his achievements, and amazed by how close he had come to getting away. He was someone who was subjected to a great injustice, and he didn’t take it lying down. Instead, he fought back ― in the process shaking the mighty Roman Republic to its core. Although the reasons for Spartacus’ fame have quite modern roots (he was resurrected as a symbol of the small man’s fight against oppression in the 18^th and 19^th centuries), his name is one of the most well-known from ancient times. Thrilled, I went as far as writing the plotline for a novel and submitting it to my UK publishers. Sadly, but perhaps sensibly, they were keen that I concentrate on my other novels. I went back to work, finishing the novel Hannibal: Enemy of Rome.

The itch to write Spartacus became a lot worse over the subsequent months, however, and I kept badgering my publishers. I am pleased to say that eventually, they gave in! I started writing Spartacus’ story in mid-December 2010, and I had it finished by mid-June 2011. The story just burst out of me. At about 100,000 words (the normal length of my novels is about 145,000 words) I knew there was no way this amazing man’s story would fit into one volume. Cap in hand, I went back to my publisher. This time, they were quick to agree to a second book. The first volume immediately became Spartacus: The Gladiator, while I named the second Spartacus: Rebellion. That book also took me little more than 6 months to write. In all, I lived, breathed and dreamed Spartacus for more than a year. It was the most amazing experience, and I was very sad to end the story. I actually dreaded writing the final battle (most everyone knows what happens, but I won’t mention it just in case), but when the time came, the writing flowed so well. Working up to 16 hours a day, I wrote more than 15,000 words in 8 days. By the end, I was totally drained, but it had been a fantastic experience. It is my sincere hope that readers will get as much enjoyment out of reading the books as I did in writing them.

I believe that my path to full time writing is a little different to many. It wasn’t born of an overwhelming desire to write ― either about a particular subject, period or person, or just to write in general. The seeds were there, it’s true. I have always read huge amounts, and have been fascinated by history, particularly military history, since I was a boy. So what made me actually start writing about Rome? Well, quite simply, it was my extreme frustration at being ‘on call’ as a veterinarian one Saturday night in 2003! I’ll tell you the short version of the story.

I had worked a full week, Monday to Friday, and then all day Saturday. By 6 p.m. Saturday, all I wanted to do was to get home and cook my dinner. Every time I tried to do so, my pager went off. It did that 6 or 7 times in the subsequent hours. By about midnight, I had still not got home for more than a few minutes at a time. When the pager went off yet again, I threw it at the wall in utter frustration. It smashed and fell to the floor, still beeping. Fortunately, I was able to read the telephone number that was displayed on it. I went back to the surgery, treated a cat (I think!) and came home. I opened up my laptop and started writing a book about Roman soldiers. My efforts soon became a habit, and then an obsession. Yet they paid off, because in August 2007, after a bidding war between 6 major publishers, I secured a three book deal. Since then, my feet have barely hit the ground.

To find out more about Ben and his books visit: www.benkane.net, check out his Facebook page or follow him on Twitter: @benkaneauthor

Into the Valley of Death by A.L.Berridge

My father had no sons. What he did have were four daughters – and just across the road, eight hundred and fifty boys. He was Headmaster of Christ’s Hospital, the first and oldest Bluecoat School in the UK.

That’s where it all began for me. I grew up round boys who weren’t my brothers, and was able to get an unusual view of what men are like when women aren’t around. I learned about their insecurities, their courage, their constant need to prove themselves. I saw their easy physicality with each other, the fights and embraces, the competitive friendships that were curiously like love.

I probably understood none of it, but the old fascination bubbled quickly to the fore when I became a writer. My novels are all set in the traditionally male world of war, but although they’re full of action it’s always been the characters and relationships that interest me most. It was the characters that led me into the Crimea, and the ‘Valley of Death’ where the Light Brigade charged.

It started when I watched a repeat of the 1968 film, ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’. David Hemmings made Captain Nolan every bit as gorgeous as I remembered him, but the film itself never engaged me. It was witty and satirical, it made all the right political points about the nationalistic stupidity of the war  – but for me it had no heart. I didn’t even cry at the end. I wanted to scream at the screen ‘What about the people? Shouldn’t we care?’

So of course I had to write it – or rather my own story set in that situation. My hero had been brooding in my mind for some years already (and boy, can that man brood!) but with the Crimea I knew I’d finally found his setting. He’s young and bitter, a junior officer compelled by his father’s disgrace and suicide to serve as a humble ranker, and what better place to put him than in a war famous for the incompetence of its commanders and the heroism of its soldiers? Harry Ryder landed in the Crimea as if he was born to be there – which in a way, of course, he was.

The others were already there, and each in their way grew out of the setting. Ryder was always going to attract women, and history had placed them on the spot in the person of the soldier’s wives who accompanied their men to the Crimea. There was nothing fragile about the women who survived those hardships, and I knew from the start that Sally would prove at least as brave as my men. I found her in a Roger Fenton photograph taken at one of the camps in 1855, and it was the same source that gave me my other principals. The smart Grenadier Guards, destined to be reduced to desperate and ragged brigands, gave me the character of Dennis Woodall, pompous, self-obsessed, and unutterably lonely. The savage Highlanders gave me Niall Mackenzie, the gentle stalker from Strathcarron who turns out to have the fighting spirit of a berserker Viking. The young cavalrymen who charged without question to what looked like certain death gave me Charlie ‘Polly’ Oliver, the idealistic schoolboy desperate to ‘do his bit’. I knew ‘Polly’ better than any of them, because his roots were in my past. The school he went to was Christ’s Hospital.

I still needed a plot, but that landed on my desk on the very first day. I’d ordered a first batch of books and expected to face many months of trawling before I got the seed of an idea, but while I was waiting I had a quick skim through Wikipedia to remind myself of the overview. I started with the Battle of the Alma, and there it was, staring me in the face: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Alma . This is a basic account, of doubtful accuracy in some details, but there’s something on that page that would get the antennae of any writer twitching. I’m not saying what it is, but I’d bet that any other writer reading this will spot it immediately. Something there is very odd indeed…

And it turned out to be true. The more I researched, the more I found that mysteriously repeated incident at the Alma was only the tip of a very large iceberg. There was a story there all right – and one that had never been told. So I told it, Penguin liked it, and ‘Into the Valley of Death’ came out on 10^th of May.

But the trouble with inspiration is that it just doesn’t know where to stop. I’m in the middle of my next novel right now – and that too is set in the Crimea, with a young and brooding hero called Harry Ryder…

To buy ‘Into the Valley of Death’ on Amazon: 

Louise's website: http://www.louiseberridge.com

Tom-All-Alone's or The Solitary House by Lynn Shepherd

Tom-All-Alone’s/The Solitary House

My book has two titles – The Solitary House in the US, and Tom-All-Alone’s in the UK, and in fact the source of those two titles is probably as good a place to start as any.  Both Tom-All-Alone’s and The Solitary House were titles Charles Dickens considered when he was writing Bleak House. I’ve chosen these ‘alternative titles’ for my book because it is, in effect, an ‘alternative Bleak House’.

My book is a murder mystery which runs in parallel with events in Bleak House. At certain points in the plot the two stories converge, and episodes in Bleak House also take place (usually from a different viewpoint) in my novel. I also draw in characters from Dickens, ranging from the lawyer Tulkinghorn, to little Jo the crossing-sweeper, to the first detective in English fiction, Inspector Bucket.

So why Dickens, and why Bleak House?

My first novel was called Murder at Mansfield Park, and that title is one of those that do exactly what it says on the tin: I took Jane Austen’s novel and turned it into a murder mystery rather in the format of a classic Agatha Christie. The fun for me in that novel – and hopefully for the reader as well – was not just to take Austen into a new genre, but to write the book in her style. That was a real labour of love, and I worked very hard both to mimic her beautiful prose, and ensure that the language I used was authentic for the period.

I never intended to write a sequel, but so many readers told me they loved Charles Maddox, my ‘thief taker’ detective, that I realised it was rather foolish not to make more use of him.  And I also realised that I might be able to develop the idea of ‘literary murder’ further, and take on another giant of English literature. And who better than Charles Dickens?

That’s what led me to Bleak House, which I’ve always believed to be his masterpiece. I decided very early on that I didn’t want to imitate Dickens’ style, so I opted instead for inhabiting his world. I immersed myself in Victorian London, in an attempt to re-create the sights, sounds, and smells of the city. I researched the leather trade in Bermondsey, and the rookeries of Covent Garden and St Giles; I was shocked by what I learned about the sex trade (and I don’t consider myself naïve), and surprised how quickly villages like Brixton were becoming absorbed into the metropolitan sprawl.  It was a fascinating journey, and I’ve been thrilled how many people have responded to the portrait of London I’ve tried to paint for them.

So if you adore Dickens, I think you’ll have fun reading Tom-All-Alone’s/The Solitary House – I’ve certainly written it in a spirit of love and respect, and the more deeply you know Dickens, the more echoes and ‘nuggets’ you will find in my novel. But I’ve also been very careful to construct my book so that everyone can enjoy it, so if you’ve never read Bleak House, or any other Dickens for that matter, I hope it works just as well as a good old-fashioned Victorian murder mystery.

Tom-All-Alone’s is available from the UK from Corsair, and The Solitary House is issued in North America by Random House. The US Kindle version includes a free bonus copy of Bleak House. Lynn’s website is www.lynn-shepherd.com, and this includes a video which was shot in some of the locations used in the novel. Her Twitter ID is @Lynn_Shepherd.

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Legionary by Gordon Doherty

It was a characteristically bleak autumn afternoon in Northumberland as I sauntered along the tumbled ruins of Hadrian’s Wall. After an obligatory imagining of myself kitted out in legionary armour, barking out orders to my cohort, I sat down to take in the landscape. I tried to envisage the rolling hills in the age when the auxiliaries of Britannia would have lined this ominous frontier and garrisoned the forts, milecastles and watchtowers. I imagined a firm and seemingly eternal signpost shouting out to all and sundry ‘This is Rome and she’s here to stay!’ Yet now I could see only the squat remains of foundations and surrounding rubble and the Romans were long gone. A question entered my thoughts, demanding to be answered: how had the greatness of Rome faded from the invincibility of the pax romana to this?

Fast forward a few years: I was strolling along the inner tier battlements of the Theodosian Walls of Constantinople/Istanbul (or more accurately I was tentatively inching along them and trying not to look down – they’re pretty high up and a bit crumbly) around the Golden Gate area. The structure extended north into the smog of the city, sentinel-like towers standing empty but eerily defiant after fifteen hundred years. The place was electric, the air crackling with history and I felt that hunger for an answer again: how could the Roman and Byzantine grip on Europe, Western Asia and Africa have dwindled to nothing, leaving behind a behemoth-like architectural carcass like this?

Having done my reading I now know the textbook answers to the two questions above, but have been left with something far more valuable: a sustained intrigue, nay obsession, over the decline from the pax romana to the post-Roman world and the real answers to these questions.

While the order, prosperity and pristine legions of the high principate are a fascinating blend, I find it somewhat too perfect. What really fires my imagination is the 3rd century AD and onwards, an age which sees Rome’s forts and cities decaying, her pagan ideals being swept into history by Christianity, her economy stagnating and her legions thin, scattered and all-too-mortal. What events could have occurred in this era that have since been lost to the ghosts of the past, echoing along the battlements of these walls and fortifications? What of the people of these times, they would have had to live with the reality that greatness was slipping away from them while they still clung to the ideals of their recent ancestors. And then there were the ‘barbarians’; with the Goths, Vandals, Franks, Alans, Parthians and Huns just a selection of the powerful and now militarily equal peoples pressing relentlessly on the empire’s borders, fiery conflict and desperate and heartfelt emotion must have been rife.

So all this has me jilting the perfection of invincible Rome and falling for the complexity of her flawed descendant and that’s why I sat down to write Legionary. Perhaps it is my admiration for the spirit of the underdog that nudges me this way and I feel that one day a psychiatrist might confirm that. Whatever the reason I’m just grateful for what has turned out to be a perpetual fuel for my writing.

And even now when I visit the ruins, I’m still seeking true answers to those questions that demand to be answered.

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www.gordopolis.com/writing