Still More Research
Harry Turtledove and I did a panel together at WorldCon about writing historical fiction. His wife, Laura Frankos, and I were on a panel together about research. It's difficult to explain to someone who hasn't felt it, the deep draw that research has for research nerds like ourselves.
I do research for pleasure as much as because it provides stories for murder mysteries. Pleasure isn't really the word - some of the research is absolutely horrifying. But there's a deep satisfaction in reaching back and seeing names, faces, stories - as well as the very frequent "WTF?!?!" that one gets from reading primary sources. "THEY DID WHAT???"
Pleasure at finding documentation of what really happened, and what factors went into the events.
I love primary sources. How, in that week in sixteenth-century London, did three people get "frighted" to death? Or die of "winde"? One person died "Suddenly" - what was that about? "Burnt in his bed by a candle in St. Giles Cripplegate..." Must have happened a lot, the equivalent of smoking in bed. And how did that other unfortunate person happen to get killed by a fall from the belfrey at All Hallows the Great? What were they doing up in the belfry, for Chrissake? Sadder and more appalling, that 42 women died in childbed that week, and 16 infants simply died.
Back when I was teaching, I used to give an assignment: I had a file of excerpts from 12th century London, of murder cases. I'd ask the students to tell me what those documents told them about how murders were investigated, about who took charge of solving crimes, and why people murdered each other? If you're learning how to use primary sources, you can at least have fun doing it.
Another thing I enjoy researching - though the results are even more horrifying (but deeply useful for writing murder mysteries) - is economic history. Seeing how things are put together. How money - or simply the need for inexpensive labor - affects EVERYTHING. I've been an economic determinist since I started reading history: people do what they do, most of the time, to survive. To get money. One thing I love about Tolkien's fantasy is that he had a very clear idea that, whether you're in Minas Tirith or Rohan, you've got to have farms producing a local economy (something you frequently don't see in a lot of fantasy books or films. Where are they getting their food from? Where are they getting their money? Who does the dishes and cleans the out-house?) (I assume Bilbo Baggins owned farm property in the Shire that gave him rental income from tenant farmers).
Writing the Benjamin January series, I've found a couple of truly excellent books about how plantations were financed, and what the banking system was in the US in the 1830s-40s. The fact that the South was SO fanatic about preserving the institution of slavery was because the whole economy was based on credit, and banks would loan money with enslaved humans for collateral a lot quicker than they'd loan money on just land. Cash-crop plantations operated on credit. The owners of cash-crop plantations were pretty much the only ones who had the money to go into politics. Ergo - laws forbidding the distribution of abolitionist literature in the South (and less formally, the insistence that African men and women were actually much happier and better off when enslaved, and so prices needed to be put on the heads of abolitionist leaders).
If you're writing murder mysteries, two-thirds of your plots are finance or romance. But this kind of research - "Plantation Goods" and "Banking on Slavery" - dry as dust and both fascinating and disgusting.
On the other hand: favorite primary sources. Fascinating and sometimes just frakking weird. The Fugger Newsletters - 16th century field reports from branch banks in European cities to central HQ in Augsburg, so that the head of the Fugger banking family could decide what was a safe bet to loan money to. AMAZING stuff, that you pretty much can't make up. And, The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, which is just fun, a blog by one of the court ladies in 10th-century Japan. (The title makes it sound like a sex manual, but it's not). And I love the BBC Farm Series (which may still be available on YouTube) - how did stuff actually get done? (Something else I'd assign in my history classes).
On the panel about historical fiction, Harry and I both wore our t-shirts that said: STUDY HISTORY AND LEARN THAT PEOPLE HAVE BEEN THIS STUPID FOR THOUSANDS OF YEARS. Yeah, stupid a lot of the time; cruel and greedy a lot of the time. Human all the time. A lot of them, doing the best they could with the information they had.
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