Historical mystery Quotes

“Lucia Robson's facts can be trusted if, say, you're a teacher assigning her novels as supplemental reading in a history class. “Researching as meticulously as a historian is not an obligation but a necessity,” she tells me. “But I research differently from most historians. I'm looking for details of daily life of the period that might not be important to someone tightly focused on certain events and individuals. Novelists do take conscious liberties by depicting not only what people did but trying to explain why they did it.”She adds, “I depend on the academic research of others when gathering material for my books, but I don't think that my novels should be considered on par with the work of accredited historians. I wouldn't recommend that historians cite historical novels as sources.”And they sure don't. They wouldn't risk the scorn of their colleagues by citing novels. But, Lucia adds:“I think historical fiction and nonfiction work well together. … I'd bet that historical novels lead more readers to check out nonfiction on the subject rather than the other way around,” she says, and then notes:One of the wonderful ironies of writing about history is that making stuff up doesn't mean it's not true. And obversely, declaring something to be true doesn't guarantee that it is. In writing about events that happened a century or more ago, no one knows what historical ‘truth’ is, because no one living today was there.That's right. Weren't there. But will be, once a good historical novelist puts us there.”

“In my long career in this historical fiction business, though, I've found that the most effective storytelling concept is this: Once upon a time it was now.That has become my credo and my method as a longtime historical novelist.It's quite simple, if you see as Janus sees:Today is now.Yesterday was now.Tomorrow will be now.Three hundred years ago, the eighteenth century was now.You, as a historical novelist, can make any time now by taking your reader into that time. Once you grasp that, the rest is just hard work.Stay with me, and you'll see how such work is done.”

“If you don't know what those old occupations were, how they were done, and how they interacted with the passersby, you're not prepared to write a historical novel. A historical figure doesn't pass through a blank countryside. That means you, the novelist, must learn by research what the whole place was like in those times. As much as you can, you must be like someone who has lived there, because you're going to be not just the storyteller but also the tour guide taking your readers through the past.”

“my own definition of bad historical fiction hits these points:It fails to transport the reader to a former time.It fails to put the reader in another place.It fails to bring characters to life.It fails to make the reader shiver, sweat, sniffle, sneer, snarl, weep, laugh, gag, ache, hunger, wince, yearn, lust, lose sleep, empathize, hate, or need to go potty.It seems dubious.It has characters who seem too good or too bad to be true.It has anachronisms.It has clichés and stereotypes.Its writing style distracts the reader from the narrative.It takes historic license with times and facts.It is pointless.It is carelessly written.It is easy to put down.”

“Mortmain is an old French word that should be tattooed on the inside of any historical novelist's skull. This wonderful and terrible word means “dead hand.” Its definition is: “The influence of the past regarded as controlling the present.” (It is also used as a legal term with the same basic meaning.”

“Most historical accounts were written by fallible scholars, using incomplete or biased resource materials; written through the scholars' own conscious or unconscious predilections; published by textbook or printing companies that have a stake in maintaining a certain set of beliefs; subtly influenced by entities of government and society — national administrations, state education departments, local school boards, etcetera — that also wish to maintain certain sets of beliefs. To be blunt about it, much of the history of many countries and states is based on delusion, propaganda, misinformation, and omission.”

“Without entering here into a dissertation upon the historical romance, it may be said that in proper hands it has been and should continue to be one of the most valued and valuable expressions of the literary art. To render and maintain it so, however, it is necessary that certain well-defined limits should be set upon the licence which its writers are to enjoy; it is necessary that the work should be honest work; that preparation for it should be made by a sound, painstaking study of the period to be represented, to the end that a true impression may first be formed and then conveyed. Thus, considering how much more far-reaching is the novel than any other form of literature, the good results that must wait upon such endeavours are beyond question. The neglect of them—the distortion of character to suit the romancer's ends, the like distortion of historical facts, the gross anachronisms arising out of a lack of study, have done much to bring the historical romance into disrepute.”

“Gnosticism is undeniably pre-Christian, with both Jewish and gentile roots. The wisdom of Solomon already contained Gnostic elements and prototypes for the Jesus of the Gospels...God stops being the Lord of righteous deed and becomes the Good One...A clear pre-Christian Gnosticism can be distilled from the epistles of Paul. Paul is recklessly misunderstood by those who try to read anything Historical Jesus-ish into it. The conversion of Paul in the Acts of the Apostles is a mere forgery from various Tanakh passages... [The epistles] are from Christian mystics of the middle of the second century. Paul is thus the strongest witness against the Historical Jesus hypothesis...John's Gnostic origin is more evident than that of the synoptics. Its acceptance proves that even the Church wasn't concerned with historical facts at all.”

“In the second place, however, history is made in such a way that the final result always arises from conflicts between many individual wills, of which each in turn has been made what it is by a host of particular conditions of life. Thus there are innumerable intersecting forces, an infinite series of parallelograms of forces which give rise to one resultant — the historical event. This may again itself be viewed as the product of a power which works as a whole unconsciously and without volition. For what each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no one willed. Thus history has proceeded hitherto in the manner of a natural process and is essentially subject to the same laws of motion. But from the fact that the wills of individuals — each of whom desires what he is impelled to by his physical constitution and external, in the last resort economic, circumstances (either his own personal circumstances or those of society in general) — do not attain what they want, but are merged into an aggregate mean, a common resultant, it must not be concluded that they are equal to zero. On the contrary, each contributes to the resultant and is to this extent included in it.”

“There were always historians who said [historical Jesus research] can not be done because of historical problems. There were always theologians who said it should not be done because of theological objections. And there were always scholars who said the former when they meant the latter.”