April 2010

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A PLAY OF PIETY - COMING DECEMBER 2010

I've received a copy of the cover for A Play of Piety, the sixth book in the Joliffe series due out in December 2010. For those of you who just can't wait, we'll be releasing some sample chapters here on the website in the near future.

- Margaret

THE HISTORY IN THE MYSTERY #1

THE COLD AND THE DAMP: WHITHER THE WEATHER

At a question-and-answer session someone once asked me why I have so much weather in my books. The question took me aback for a moment, since it had never occurred to me not to have weather in my books. For one thing, I like weather, which is just as well because I live in a part of the world where there are four radical seasons, and within each season conditions can vary widely from day to day, so I’d be in trouble if I didn’t like weather. There’s so much of it here. As for using it in my stories, for me weather is part of each day’s texture, and because I like stories that have texture, I weave weather deeply into mine, hoping to give them richer texture and the deeper-set sense of time and place that comes with that.

Mind you, sometimes I succeed all too well. When my then-co-author and I were reading the galley proofs of The Servant’s Tale (set in a very bleak midwinter) we found ourselves breaking off to have one sort of hot drink or another, not something we commonly did when working. Only later did we realize the cold and damp we were reading about in the story were actually making us feel the need for something warm to compensate. That was very disconcerting, more especially since, in one sense, the weather was not even our fault: That was what the weather actually was like during that particular winter in England. In fact, there were several wet, cold years of bad harvests and hard winters in succession during the 1430s, and for several books the weather is simply miserable. Not because I wanted it to be, but because that was what it was.

How can I know something like that? In my research over the decades, I have accumulated all manner of information (some day I’ll tell you about my Chronology Cards) from all manner of sources, including medieval chronicles. And one of the things included in chronicles are reports of unusual weather. When no report is made about the weather in any chronicle, I have assumed that the weather was within its ordinary parameters and have felt free to have days of ordinary sunshine and simple rain or snow or whatever. But sometimes very specific reports are made in the chronicles -- such as the three years of famine brought on by wet, cold summers in the early 1430s, culminating in a winter of excessive cold when the Thames froze at London. So in the three books set during that time, the weather is miserable -- and it’s not my fault.

On the other hand, when it came time to pick a time of year to set The Boy’s Tale as the next book in the series, the choice of a warm and sunny June was not random in the least. In fact, it was something of a holiday.

- Margaret

IN THE FICTION

This morning as I was browsing through the Edward R. Hamilton Bookseller catalog I was once again amused to discover that my books have been listed not under Mysteries, but Fiction. Apparently someone has taken to heart the comment / criticism I sometimes receive that my books are heavier on history than on mystery, but I'm actually rather flattered.

If you aren't familiar with Edward R. Hamilton, you might want to check them out. You can order their Bargain Books catalog from their website. The prices are generally very low, and no matter how much you order from the catalog, the shipping handling charge is always $3.50. What a deal!

- Margaret

A MEDIEVAL YEAR IN ENGLAND

In crafting my stories, I try to shape the plots and characters to the realities of life in England in the 1400s, rather than casually (one may even say, of some authors, carelessly) re-shaping medieval times and minds to suit my whim.  Toward the goal of understanding medieval life as deeply as may be, I started -- a long while ago, when my research and I were much younger -- putting together a guide, from many sources, to what I suppose can be called A Medieval Year in England.

It was never meant to be more than a gathering of details for my own use about the yearly returning patterns of medieval English life -- the seasonal work on the land, the holidays and holy days, the hunting seasons, the folklore that were part of people’s everyday lives.  I say I “started putting together” because to this day, every once in a while, some new tidbit of information is added to the file, despite my occasional spasms of attempting to declare “Enough!”.  It seems that research, like death and taxes, is forever.  But at some point I set some of what I had gathered into a series of very short articles for an SCA newsletter.  Lately, they surfaced out of my welter of papers (I had, of course, filed them right where I would be able to find them again; this was, as usual, a mistake) and because so much of what is in them is, like weather, woven into the texture of my stories, I thought you might enjoy reading them, month by month, through a modern year. 

We'll be taking our first peek at them next week, beginning with the month of May.

- Margaret