Favourite historical novelists?

[StillStunned]

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.

 

[ronde]

Probably not everybody's favorite type of fiction, but William Sarabande's "The First Americans" series, W. Michael Gear and Kathleen O'Neal Gear with their "People of the XXX" series, and Charlotte Prentiss with Children of the Ice. All are novels about Native Americans set in pre-historic times. All are really thoughtful and thought provoking examinations of how and why those first people did what they did, their religions, and how the environment shaped their lives.

 

[SimonDoom]

I don't write historical fiction but I've read some. I recall enjoying E.L. Doctorow's The March, which is a work of fiction based upon Sherman's march across Georgia during the Civil War.

Neil Stephenson's work is interesting because it sometimes incorporates history, like in Cryptonomicon or The Baroque Cycle trilogy. His spin on historical characters can be interesting. He describes Isaac Newton, for example, as being an incredibly unpleasant and almost sociopathic person in the cycle. I go back and forth on Stephenson, because his style is interesting and very imaginative, but long-winded and undisciplined.

 

[djrip]

I don't write historical fiction but I've read some. I recall enjoying E.L. Doctorow's The March, which is a work of fiction based upon Sherman's march across Georgia during the Civil War.

Neil Stephenson's work is interesting because it sometimes incorporates history, like in Cryptonomicon or The Baroque Cycle trilogy. His spin on historical characters can be interesting. He describes Isaac Newton, for example, as being an incredibly unpleasant and almost sociopathic person in the cycle. I go back and forth on Stephenson, because his style is interesting and very imaginative, but long-winded and undisciplined.

I love the Baroque Cycle! Sometimes the poetic way he visualizes things blows me away. Waterhouse's father in the billowing smoke and flames above their building when London burned.. Shaftoe on the ground in Mexico feeling the impact of coin stamps through the ground and experiencing it as a beating heart pushing the life blood of silver throughout the world economy... A duel fought with cannons... Eliza having sex with a guy specifically because she was infected with Syphilis and that was how she killed him...

 

[djrip]

I enjoyed Raptor by Gary Jennings, about a hermaphrodite in the 4th century or thereabouts in the declining Roman Empire who takes on the role of both a man and a woman over the course of the story.

 

[nice90sguy]

John Barth's epic virtuoso masterpiece "The Sot-Weed Factor" is a pastiche of 18th century writing - but so well done you'd think it was written 300 years ago . I love its long chapter titles that go on for half a page an all begin "In whych..."

And it has a lot of extremely raunchy sex-scenes.

 

[HordHolm]

George Macdonald Fraser. His certainty of detail was meticulous (he seemed to have an intimate knowledge of every copy of Punch produced in the 19th century), allied to a masterly use of pacing and humour. He certainly wasn't politically correct, but that only made his depictions of the 19th century prejudices more believable.

 

[StillStunned]

George Macdonald Fraser. His certainty of detail was meticulous (he seemed to have an intimate knowledge of every copy of Punch produced in the 19th century), allied to a masterly use of pacing and humour. He certainly wasn't politically correct, but that only made his depictions of the 19th century prejudices more believable.

I'm a huge fan of Flashman, but my favourite book of his is Mr American. I went off GMF a bit when I read his collection of essays and discovered I wasn't a big fan of some of his politics. Maybe now time has passed I can look past that.

Oh, and The Pyrates is just masterful comedy.

 

[StillStunned]

I'm a huge fan of Flashman, but my favourite book of his is Mr American. I went off GMF a bit when I read his collection of essays and discovered I wasn't a big fan of some of his politics. Maybe now time has passed I can look past that.

Oh, and The Pyrates is just masterful comedy.

And the narrator in The Countesses of Tannensdal is a soldier who's recovering from Napier's march on Madgala, which I would never have known about without Flashman.

 

[HordHolm]

I'm a huge fan of Flashman, but my favourite book of his is Mr American. I went off GMF a bit when I read his collection of essays and discovered I wasn't a big fan of some of his politics. Maybe now time has passed I can look past that.

Oh, and The Pyrates is just masterful comedy.

Absolutely, his politics were definitely 'old school', but I wonder if that wasn't a necessary part of his art (and I also wonder if that didn't moderate as he got older - his foreword to Flashman on the March suggests a post-2001 reappraisal). But no matter how different his politics were to mine I've learnt more about the 19th Century from GMF than from any number of school rooms/books/dry-as-dust lectures. BTW, agree about Mr American - there's a real sensitivity there.

 

[ImiGirrst]

I probably shouldn't out him here, but I really want @Saintdragonslayer to finish his second story for Lit. I admit I haven't been a very good beta reader because I only got to the second chapter, but I thought it was a real step up from his Julie and Joe story that so many people on Lit really loved. I got so wrapped up in the characters that I wanted to know more about minor ones, really wanted him to develop a secondary plot line. Maybe I should have just kept my mouth shut and encouraged him to get out what he had, because it was really, really good.

 

[Duleigh]

So, who else can you fine people recommend?

Steven Pressfield. His novel, Gates of Fire is an incredible novelization of the Battle of Thermopile Simply incredible

 

[MillieDynamite]

Charles Dickenson and Robert Louis Stevenson are my favorite historical novelists. I like Alexandre Dumas (no, it isn't dumbass) but not as much as the others. Right at the moment, I can't think of anyone since 1900.

 

[Zootonius]

The only historical novel that made an impact on me is Robert Graves' I Claudius. Many remember the BBC series based on it. But the book cleverly implied things that the series made explicit.

 

[Voboy]

Good ol' CS Forester.

 

[12oclocktales]

Larry McMurtry's novels set in the American West for their humor and pathos.

 

[onehitwanda]

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.

 

[Duleigh]

Duleigh's Steven Ambrose Story.

While taking a college course on the history of WWII my professor told us that the final will be a paper written on a WWII book of our own choice, we just had to tell him what the book was first. I loved the book and the series Band of Brothers and I heard that the author Stephen E. Ambrose had just released a book about the B-24 bomber called "The Wild Blue" I have always wanted to learn more about the B-24, it was the most produced aircraft in the US inventory, my hero Jimmy Stewart commanded a squadron of B-24s, and it is the most underrated airplane of WWII. I told my professor that I was going to write a paper on The Wild Blue and he said he was happy that I made that choice. Keep in mind that I was in my 40s when I was in college so I tended to think differently compared to my fellow classmates.

The book sucked, the title of my paper was, "Steven Ambrose Stole $17.50 From Me" It wasn't a book about the B-24 as all the advertising said, it was a love story about George McGovern. George McGovern was a US politician that lost the US Presidency in the biggest landslide in US history. This book was an attempt to prop up his legacy. He volunteered to fly in WWII and became a pilot of the B-24 and was stationed in Italy. He had 3 combat missions that amounted to nothing, the rest were all training missions. The book barely talked about the B-24 or the training or the missions themselves and to make matters worse, Steven Ambrose plagiarized one or two paragraphs. It was the dreariest, most flavorless biographies that I have ever read, and I summed it up saying that "Steven Ambrose had twelve solid paragraphs of information stretched with pablum and fluff to fill a novel length book."

I handed the paper to my professor who said, "I can't wait to read this, Steven Ambrose is a close personal friend of mine."

I didn't sleep all weekend long, I paced the halls and sweated blood waiting for the axe to drop. I could see my 3.96 GPA fluttering away. Finally I get the paper back and I turn to the first page and my professor had written "I agree 100% - A+"

 

[DickandDoof]

Charles Dickenson and Robert Louis Stevenson are my favorite historical novelists. I like Alexandre Dumas (no, it isn't dumbass) but not as much as the others. Right at the moment, I can't think of anyone since 1900.

In 1988, I spent five months travelling around the South Pacific. One of my favourite islands was Western Samoa, where Robert Louis Stevenson lived out the last four years of his short life. Stevenson was admired and adored by the people of Samoa, where he was known as ‘Tusitala’ or ‘teller of tales’. When he died, they carried his coffin up to the top of a small hill called Mount Vaea. I climbed that hill to pay homage to RLS’s life and to see the tomb that became his home after death. Carved onto his headstone was Stevenson’s famous poem, Requiem:

“Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.”

 

[HordHolm]

The only historical novel that made an impact on me is Robert Graves' I Claudius. Many remember the BBC series based on it. But the book cleverly implied things that the series made explicit.

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.

 

[HordHolm]

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

Ah yes, the Wars of the Roses, the historical 'event' that confirmed for me that William Shakespeare is NOT my favourite historical author

 

[Wonderer67]

Allan Furst. Writes espionage novels set in and/or just before WW2 in Europe. He’s an amazing storyteller whose characters are not James Bond agents. No… his characters are everyday people, who find themselves in bad circumstances. A Soviet journalist forced to spy for the Germans by the Red Orchestra network just prior to ww2. A low level Polish cartography officer forming resistance cells after the Germans invade Poland. Or a Bulgarian peasant who learns the trade of spy craft by his NKVD handlers and rises thru the ranks.

His characters are amazingly detailed. The settings are rich and lush and descriptive. Your enemy may be your friend and vice cersa. It’s a shadowy central and Eastern Europe that he paints. He also lived in Paris for many years so many of his novels also take place there.

In fact, the review for his book “Dark Star” was “Nothing is like seeing Casablanca for the first time, but this is as close as it gets.”

Im not much of a reader of novels any more but I own and read these all.

 

[MagicFlute]

Christopher Nicole. I have only read a handful of his books, including "The Sun of Japan" trilogy but his world building and integration of fiction and history is incredible. It really brings the story alive and makes you keep reading.
Also, similar Authors are : James Clavell and John Gordon Davis.

For a more modern history, I did enjoy "The Year of Living Dangerously" by Christopher Koch.

 

[SimonDoom]

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 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.

 

[HordHolm]

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.

It's only since I read it first (about 40 years ago now) that I've gone on to study straight history on the period, and I still find it difficult not to picture Augustus et al in any way other than that which Graves presented - which is certainly a testament to the quality of his writing. His autobiography of his early life up to the end of his first marriage post WW1, A Goodbye to All That, is well worth a read.