Favourite historical novelists?

[Kumquatqueen]

Julian Rathbone's The Last English King (about the run-up to 1066, all the power struggles between King Edward and the Godwins and then William the Bastard taking advantage) and Kings of Albion (the Wars of the Roses as seen by a visiting merchant from Vijanayagara) are both excellent.

I also love Stephenson's Baroque Cycle. CJ Sansom has good historical murder mysteries set in Tudor times, and Ellis Peters' Cadfael mysteries are set in 1100s England during the Anarchy with Stephen and Matilda fighting for the throne. They get a bit repetitive after you read 20 of them, but still excellent.

Patrick O'Brien and CS Forrester for naval life.

 

[SimonDoom]

Patrick O'Brien

I only recently read Patrick O'Brien for the first time, and I was surprised at the literary quality. I was expecting competent genre writing, and it's much better than that.

Master and Commander is an under-the-radar film that didn't get the attention it deserved and it also does a great job depicting what it would be like to serve on a ship like that during the Napoleonic Wars.

 

[MillieDynamite]

Creative representations of history have always been an issue, especially when actual historical characters are main characters. The series Deadwood is a prime example. It is way off the track historically but very entertaining. They did get the murder of James Butler "Wild Bill" Hickok correct. The rest only has a weak relationship to history. Westerns have always held only a passing resemblance to history, a romantic fascination, and a glorified rose-colored glasses West, which never was but should've been.

To this day I love I, Claudius and Claudius the God. But... I have a problem with Graves... essentially, his version of the August Family has bled into the public view (inasmuch as the 'public' has a view of them) so that Augustus is a pleasant, bluff old paterfamilias rather than the butcher his contemporaries thought of him as, whilst Livia is poisoner-in-chief of the Empire, whereas in reality there is no evidence whatsoever that she was responsible for one single death, let alone cutting a swathe two generations wide through the family. And then there's Tiberius - not a particularly nice character, particularly as he aged, but what Graves doesn't focus on is just how much he may have been trying to delegate to the Senate out of a genuine wish to have a respectful relationship with them whilst their response of 'tell us, oh mighty one, how you would like us to make up our own minds' may have driven him up the wall.

And these characters are only part of the issue - pretty much all of them: Caligula, Claudius himself, Messalina, and so on, are represented in a certain way by Graves for literary reasons, but those images drive the perception of them nowadays (which isn't, I confess, Graves' fault as such, and is rather than a function of his success) to the exclusion of the actual contemporary evidence, and the analysis of serious historians. That said, he nailed Sejanus. And his ability to world build is marvellous. I really recommend recent works by Mary Beard and Tom Holland (Dynasty is a must) to get a balanced picture of the family - Tom Holland on Tiberius and Claudius is a particular eye-opener.

 

[MillieDynamite]

As an added comment, Friends didn't call Hickok, Wild Bill, or Bill. He was Jimmy to his friends. I read it in a book, so it must be truer than the internet.

 

[jehoram]

Ellis Peters' Cadfael mysteries are set in 1100s England during the Anarchy with Stephen and Matilda fighting for the throne. They get a bit repetitive after you read 20 of them, but still excellent.

She did a good job of using dialog that invoked a feeling of being archaic without being glaringly anti-modern. The first ten or so were fairly repetitive... young love being thwarted and then fulfilled... but her last ones were quite different in tone.

I'll have to put in a vote for Bernard Cornwell, both in his Sharpes novels and his Saxon chronicles. He could write battle scenes better than anybody. But, again, there are certain tropes that creep into his stories as well.

 

[MillieDynamite]

Happens to the best of them. The trope helps identify it. But there are more than a few well-worn tropes out there.

She did a good job of using dialog that invoked a feeling of being archaic without being glaringly anti-modern. The first ten or so were fairly repetitive... young love being thwarted and then fulfilled... but her last ones were quite different in tone.

I'll have to put in a vote for Bernard Cornwell, both in his Sharpes novels and his Saxon chronicles. He could write battle scenes better than anybody. But, again, there are certain tropes that creep into his stories as well.

 

[vanmyers86]

Writers who are currently publishing:
Diana Gabaldon. Her Outlander series is meticulously researched and beautifully written. Her how-to guide on writing sex scenes, "I Give You My Body," is excellent - I learned a lot from it and still refer to it.
Ken Follett inspires both love and hate, but I still have my first edition copy of The Pillars of the Earth that I bought as a student. I recently went back through it and was impressed all over again. We read The Eye of the Needle (set in WWII) when I was in high school, which was my introduction to his work. His research is top-notch.
Beverly Jenkins is another great researcher - her historical novels always teach me something, usually about Black history, and feature lots of action.

Writers no longer publishing:
I also loved Robert Graves' I, Claudius and Claudius the God. I read them in high school or college, and they permanently colored my view of that time period.
Death Comes as the End by Agatha Christie was set in ancient Egypt. It was her only foray into historical fiction, but it made a lasting impression on me.
Catherine Cookson wrote straight-up romantic historic fiction set in England. and she evokes the time periods between c. 1870-1950 very well. She's fallen out of mainstream popularity, but the BBC did shows based on several of her novels back in the 1980s and 1990s.

 

[MillieDynamite]

James A. Michener writes compelling stories but sometimes plagiarizes. When I read Centennial, that fact turned me off of him. I recognized some of his Cattle Drive segments as having been lifted (almost word for word) from Hopalong Cassidy's stories. I guess if the writer is dead, it's just borrowing.

 

[djrip]

James A. Michener writes compelling stories but sometimes plagiarizes. When I read Centennial, that fact turned me off of him. I recognized some of his Cattle Drive segments as having been lifted (almost word for word) from Hopalong Cassidy's stories. I guess if the writer is dead, it's just borrowing.

I liked The Source. Haven't read any of his others. And I was 13 or so. I liked Atlas Shrugged back then too.

 

[Escierto]

After watching the television series, I read all 13 books of The Saxon Chronicles aka The Last Kingdom by Bernard Cornwell. I especially liked the battle scenes and any scenes where Christians and Christian priests are being killed. Since the hero hates Christians there are plenty of those scenes.

 

[Kitty_so_frisky]

not at much historical novelists as novelists who thoroughly rearranged history for me

"The Sunne in Splendour" by Sharon Kay Penman fundamentally changed my view of the "War of the Roses"

"The Years of Rice and Salt" by Kim Stanley Robinson made me realise just how little I know about the history of the rest of the world.

The Sunne in Splendour is one of my very favorites! I first got hooked on Tudor and Plantagenet fiction by reading Philippa Gregory, but since then, have read many more by her, Sharon Kay Penman, Elizabeth Chadwick, Alison Weir and more.
I especially love Alison Weir’s Innocent Traitor. Weir wrote historical non-fiction before she became a novelist, so her books are always incredibly well-researched.

 

[MillieDynamite]

When I first moved in with my adoptive family, back in my foster-hood days, my favorite books were Arthur Hailey's Money Changers, Aiport, Hotel, and Wheels. I haven't ever found Overlord, so I'm not sure what it's about. They weren't exactly historical fiction, more like business dissection stories. They give you a hard look into the business and the people that make up that business: the good, the bad, the corrupt, and the lonely. They get right into the nuts and bolts of the automobile and air travel industries, the elevators, rooms, kitchens, boardrooms, dirty deals, backstabbing, extortion, and embezzlement of banks and hotels.

 

[onehitwanda]

I only recently read Patrick O'Brien for the first time, and I was surprised at the literary quality. I was expecting competent genre writing, and it's much better than that.

Master and Commander is an under-the-radar film that didn't get the attention it deserved and it also does a great job depicting what it would be like to serve on a ship like that during the Napoleonic Wars.

Patrick O'Brien is amazing, if for nothing else than the lesser of two weevils, which in my mind is the absolute pinnacle of punning.

Capt. Jack Aubrey: Do you see those two weevils doctor?

Dr. Stephen Maturin: I do.

Aubrey: Which would you choose?

Maturin: Neither; there is not a scrap a difference between them. They are the same species of Curculio.

Aubrey: If you had to choose. If you were forced to make a choice. If there was no other response...

Maturin: Well then if you are going to *push* me...

The doctor studies the weevils briefly.

Maturin: ...I would choose the right hand weevil; it has... significant advantage in both length and breadth.

Aubrey: There, I have you! You're completely dished! Do you not know that in the service one must always choose the lesser of two weevils?

 

[SimonDoom]

Patrick O'Brien is amazing, if for nothing else than the lesser of two weevils, which in my mind is the absolute pinnacle of punning.

Having an "inordinate fondness for beetles" myself, I loved that scene.

 

[JuanSeiszFitzHall]

To me, the public persona of Gore Vidal was loathsome, although I think he enjoyed cultivating that image, and it kept him in the public eye. His historical/political novels, however, I consumed voraciously.

 

[MillieDynamite]

Vidal took some liberties with history, but he did represent the times he wrote about accurately as to the mood and overall activities of the time. However, his portal of Lincoln, portraying him as some overly aggressive man with dark emperor-al ambitions goes more than a bit too far. On the flip side, Billy the Kid may be the most accurate book about him.

To me, the public persona of Gore Vidal was loathsome, although I think he enjoyed cultivating that image, and it kept him in the public eye. His historical/political novels, however, I consumed voraciously.

 

[stxjimmy]

To this day I love I, Claudius and Claudius the God. But... I have a problem with Graves... essentially, his version of the August Family has bled into the public view (inasmuch as the 'public' has a view of them) so that Augustus is a pleasant, bluff old paterfamilias rather than the butcher his contemporaries thought of him as, whilst Livia is poisoner-in-chief of the Empire, whereas in reality there is no evidence whatsoever that she was responsible for one single death, let alone cutting a swathe two generations wide through the family. And then there's Tiberius - not a particularly nice character, particularly as he aged, but what Graves doesn't focus on is just how much he may have been trying to delegate to the Senate out of a genuine wish to have a respectful relationship with them whilst their response of 'tell us, oh mighty one, how you would like us to make up our own minds' may have driven him up the wall.

And these characters are only part of the issue - pretty much all of them: Caligula, Claudius himself, Messalina, and so on, are represented in a certain way by Graves for literary reasons, but those images drive the perception of them nowadays (which isn't, I confess, Graves' fault as such, and is rather than a function of his success) to the exclusion of the actual contemporary evidence, and the analysis of serious historians. That said, he nailed Sejanus. And his ability to world build is marvellous. I really recommend recent works by Mary Beard and Tom Holland (Dynasty is a must) to get a balanced picture of the family - Tom Holland on Tiberius and Claudius is a particular eye-opener.

I,Claudius is a superlative novel, bringing its setting to life so convincingly. But it is a fictional account of Claudius not a history of the Claudian/Julian family. But yes the picture painted of Augustus is of a grand old man and not the ruthless young Octavian who wrested control for so long.
Robert Harris is better on Octavian in his Cicero novels.
I think historical novels accomplish most when they motivate the reader to actually seek out a history.

Much as I love I,Claudius I think my favourite historical novel is the incomparable Wolf Hall by Hillary Mantell.

 

[ChloeTzang]

I forgot about I, Claudius. I think it's been thirty years since I read it, but I loved that one. Beautifully written. I didn't have a sufficiently developed independent knowledge of the history to find fault with it; I loved the way the characters were drawn.

Don't forget his "Count Belisarius." Brilliant.
Georgette Heyer, of course. ALL her Regency Novels. She was a brilliant brilliant writer.
CS Forester and all the Hornblower novels.
Mary Renault and the "Alexander Trilogy" - "Fire from Heaven," "The Persian Boy," and "Funeral Games." If you've never read them, try them.
Rosemary Sutcliffe. "Sword at Sunset," and her assorted novels set in Roman Britain, and in Saxon England.
Alfred Duggan, an English writer from the 50's, not so well known now, who wrote some great historical novels
Conn Iggulden and his Genghis Khan series - I just about lived these when I was reading them, as well as the series about Rome and Julius Caesar
Julian Stockwin and his Kydd series
George MacDonald Fraser and the Flashman series - I learnt so much history from the Flashman footnotes
Sharpe, and if you know, you know....
Patrick O'Brien of course
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and his historical novels - The White Company, and Sir Nigel in particular
GA Henty - from way back, he wrote educational historical novels for boys - very dated, but some fascinating history - the main characters are always boys who are long with the great men - "With Clive in India," "Under Drake's Flag," stuff like that. Like Flashman, you can learn a lot of actual history from these
WE Johns and the early Biggles novels set in WW1 - if you want authentic and gritty and real "what it was like flying in WW1," the early Biggles novels are superb, they don't gloss over the horror, and very very good, but written for a specific target audience - middle class english boys.
Hervey Allen's "Anthony Adverse." It's an epic, published in 1934, when Gone with the Wind came out and was the best selling novel in the US over 1934 and 1935. I think it actually outsold Gone with the Wind. Whatever, it really is worth reading.
Louis L'Amour. Some of his historical novels are out of the world good. My favorite is "The Walking Drum."
Frans G. Bengtsson and "The Longships" gets you right into the mindset of the old Vikings.
Beowulf. Enough said. I love Beowulf. The story. The language. Everything

Lo! the Spear-Danes’ glory through splendid achievements
The folk-kings’ former fame we have heard of,
How princes displayed then their prowess-in-battle...​

Gore Vidal - "Julian" and " Creation"
Robert Silverberg - Lord of Darkness
Jean Auel - Clan of the Cave Bear - I grew up reading these....
Wallace Breem - Eagle in the Snow
Janet Morris - "I, the Sun," the saga of the Hittite king Suppiluliumas. Set in a world that existed fourteen hundred years before the birth of Christ. They called him Great King, Favorite of the Storm God, the Valiant. He conquered more than forty nations and brought fear and war to the very doorstep of Eighteenth Dynasty Egypt...
Sholem Asche, and if anyone here's read any of his books I'll buy you a coffee.
MM Kaye and "The Far Pavilions"
James Clavell Shogun
AEW Mason - Fire Over England
Rudyard Kipling. How could I leave out "Kim"
Wilbur Smith and his historical South African novels - "When the Lion Feeds"
Martin Caidin and "Whip" - I'm not that big on WW2 novels, but this and Leon Uris "Battle Cry" were great. When we were on holiday in NZ in 2017 we actually went to visit where the Marines camp was in Battle Cry - bit of Marines history for himself too

I could do this all evening. LOL. But those are the ones that spring to mind without even looking

 

[AchtungNight]

My favorite historical writers include Harry Turtledove, John Jakes, Clive Cussler, and Mel Brooks.

 

[Bodington]

My favorite historical novelist is Bertrice Small. She wrote about 50 novels set in varied times and different places. She was meticulous in her research, producing interesting plots weaving fiction with actually historical events or facts. In one of her novels her fictional heroine is mistress to Henry Frederick the eldest son of King James I. Prince Henry died at the age of eighteen from typhoid fever and we are treated in the novel to a poignant scene depicting the heroine nursing the dying Prince of Wales. The fictional account does not disturb the actual history of England.

I learned some intriguing historical facts from reading her novels. One was concerning Catherine Howard, King Henry VIII’s fifth wife. She was executed for adultery and leading a promiscuous life prior to the royal marriage. During the eve of her execution Catherine spent many hours practicing how to lay her head upon the block, which had been brought to her at her request, so that she could die with her dignity intact.

Another event was the description of Margaret, King Henry VIII’s older sister traveling to Scotland to become the wife and queen to King James IV. The journey was a remarkable progression whereby ordinary residents along the journey joined in to swell the royal procession to conclude a remarkable trip whereupon the teenaged bride met her husband. This marriage was of great significance since their grandson became King James VI of Scotland and later King James I of England upon the death of Queen Elizabeth I, and thereby England and Scotland became the United Kingdom.

This brings to mind one of the most unfathomable decisions in plot for the TV show “The Tudors”, a television drama depicting the reign of King Henry VIII. For some bewildering reason the script writers of this television show had Margaret marry the King of Portugal. Why they felt incumbent to so defies logic and common sense.

 

[CyranoJ]

Favorite historical novelists:

Colleen McCullough. Detailed, voluminous, adept at drawing out vivid characters from masses of historical detail. Especially love the Masters of Rome series, including The First Man in Rome and The Grass Crown.
Margaret George. Lots of the same virtues as McCullough but even more propensity to execute novels at an epic scale. Best outings for my money are The Autobiography of Henry VIII: With Notes by his Fool, Will Somers and The Memoirs of Cleopatra.
Sandra Gulland. The Josephine B. Trilogy is a classic survey of the life of Napoleon's empress and the bizarre and fascinating times she lived through.
Robert Graves. I, Claudius, pretty well covered in this thread.

Older novelists:

Leo Tolstoy. War and Peace is surprisingly engrossing when you get into it. The level of historical detail and the unique approach to characters and writing the human experience both elevate it to well-deserved classic status.
Charles Dickens. Barnaby Rudge. The history is backdrop to a Dickensian melodrama, but it's vividly realized, and the evocation of an episode otherwise unknown to me -- the Gordon Riots -- was fascinating.

 

[stxjimmy]

My favorite historical novelist is Bertrice Small. She wrote about 50 novels set in varied times and different places. She was meticulous in her research, producing interesting plots weaving fiction with actually historical events or facts. In one of her novels her fictional heroine is mistress to Henry Frederick the eldest son of King James I. Prince Henry died at the age of eighteen from typhoid fever and we are treated in the novel to a poignant scene depicting the heroine nursing the dying Prince of Wales. The fictional account does not disturb the actual history of England.

I learned some intriguing historical facts from reading her novels. One was concerning Catherine Howard, King Henry VIII’s fifth wife. She was executed for adultery and leading a promiscuous life prior to the royal marriage. During the eve of her execution Catherine spent many hours practicing how to lay her head upon the block, which had been brought to her at her request, so that she could die with her dignity intact.

Another event was the description of Margaret, King Henry VIII’s older sister traveling to Scotland to become the wife and queen to King James IV. The journey was a remarkable progression whereby ordinary residents along the journey joined in to swell the royal procession to conclude a remarkable trip whereupon the teenaged bride met her husband. This marriage was of great significance since their grandson became King James VI of Scotland and later King James I of England upon the death of Queen Elizabeth I, and thereby England and Scotland became the United Kingdom.

This brings to mind one of the most unfathomable decisions in plot for the TV show “The Tudors”, a television drama depicting the reign of King Henry VIII. For some bewildering reason the script writers of this television show had Margaret marry the King of Portugal. Why they felt incumbent to so defies logic and common sense.

The Tudors also had Henry’s illegitimate son the duke of Richmond dying in childhood instead of at 17, again for no apparent reason.
It also cast an actor to play Thomas Cromwell who looked alarmingly like Lou Reed.

 

[8letters]

For those of you who write historical fiction: do you have any favourite historical novelists whose style you admire? I'm not talking about plots or settings, but purely the style: something that we as writers can try to imitate to make our own stories read a bit more like the real deal, rather than modern-day hacks telling a tale in a far-removed age.

My favourites:
Georgette Heyer. Her Regency novels are a joy to read. She manages to balance an easy style with the formality you'd associate with the gentry and aristocracy two centuries ago. And the books are great fun too. The Toll Gate, The Unknown Ajax, The Grand Sophie if you want a strong, very modern female protagonist, Faro's Daughter, The Masqueraders. And of course The Spanish Bride, her novelisation of Juana Smith's adventures with Wellington's Peninsula Army (she's also the "Lady Smith" in Ladysmith in South Africa and in Canada). A lot of the dialogue is taken directly from the diaries and memoirs of the people who were actually there.

Dorothy Dunnett. Her House of Nicolo and Lymond series, and King Hereafter, are challenging to read, but she's a master of show, don't tell. Or rather, neither show nor tell, just let the reader figure it out. Her style is minimalist, but very evocative. She very rarely gets into any of the characters' deeper thoughts, but as a reader you still feel very close to them, just from how she writes how they act, how they speak. She has a tendency to write important scenes from the point of view of secondary or minor characters. However she does it, it's very effective. Oh, and her works are meticulously researched. You want to know about banking, trade and politics in Renaissance Europe? Read her books.

Robert Neill: Another writer with a sparse style, but he's great at setting mood. It's difficult to find his books nowadays, and I'm fortunate to have half a dozen second-hand copies. He's perhaps best known for Mist Over Pendle, his novelisation of the Pendle Witch Trials. Other books are disguised as simple romances, but they deal with very real issues of historical periods: for example Hangman's Cliff, about a village on the Kentish coast caught between smugglers and the law, Rebel Heiress, about Royalists returning to England after the Restoration in 1660 and having to learn to live with their Parliamentary neighbours, or Moon in Scorpio, which deals with the possibility of a renewed Civil War in the late 1670s.

So, who else can you fine people recommend? Again, I'm looking for style recommendations, rather than story recommendations.

I'd like to thank you for this post. Because of it, I've read three Georgette Heyer novels including The Grand Sophie , which I found a hoot.

 

[SimonDoom]

Michael Shaara's novelistic treatment of the Battle of Gettysburgh, The Killer Angels, is one of my favorites, and a must if you are a Civil War buff. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975.

 

[drobert44]

Read a few of Thomas Hardy, now onto Percival Wren.