Kate Thompson and K. D. Alden Talk Historical Fiction and Women’s History

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Two historical fiction authors meet up for a cyber “cuppa” and imaginary scones with clotted cream to celebrate Women’s History Month and chat about the pleasures and pitfalls of writing historical fiction based on real life characters. The topics range from catching ghosts to resurrecting long-forgotten women on the page; from muses to murders; from data to dogs. Please join us! (And if you prefer coffee and cookies, that’s okay.)

Kate Thompson, author of The Wartime Book Club, is a U.K. author with roots in serious journalism.

K.D. Alden, author of Lady Codebreaker, is an American author who accidentally fell in love with history after decades of writing romantic comedy. 

K.D.: Hi, Kate! I have become an instant fan of yours since reading The Wartime Book Club. Though your book is set in the British Channel Islands and mine in the United States, we both write women’s historical fiction about characters who are inspired by real events or real people.

Funny though, when our publisher brought up the possibility of co-authoring an article for CrimeReads, I blinked in surprise. Do I write about crime? I wondered. I suppose I do! What are saboteurs, smugglers and spies if not criminals? The protagonist of Lady Codebreaker spends three quarters of the book cracking open secret messages to catch these bad guys.

In The Wartime Book Club you also write about criminals: Nazis, collaborators and traitors. Did you ever think of yourself as a crime or thriller writer?

Kate: Hi K.D. So good to meet you. Thank-you for such brilliant questions! And back at you. I adored Lady Codebreaker and I’m awed at how much research and love went into the novel. I could sense you almost bleeding words onto the page!

Firstly, great question. I don’t regard myself as a thriller, or crime writer and yet, when you dig into it, most of the Wartime Book Club is about the subversive behavior of two strong women fighting against a totalitarian regime, who end up getting arrested!

Publishing is very genre driven isn’t it. It has to be to enable the reader to know what they’re getting. But often, readers will pick up my books and then later say, “it was quite dark wasn’t it, I wasn’t expecting you to tackle such heavy issues such as domestic violence, or subjunction of women”. We make assumptions based on books covers and titles. I think all good books must contain surprises and be there to challenge, shock and emotionally move the reader, as well as entertain. What do you think?

K.D.: I absolutely agree. A book’s cover and title are, by necessity, only “teasers” or clues as to what exists within its pages, and it’s truly impossible to sum up a hundred-thousand-word story with an image or a tagline.

A novel is a simulacrum of life for its characters … and every life is full of unexpected events and circumstances. Full of questions, tests, twists, tragedy and comedy. My favorite books play the full range of human emotion like a violin, eliciting laughter, tears and everything in between.

Writing historical fiction is, to me, an attempt to capture a few ephemeral but extraordinary ghosts in a butterfly net. I love having the chance to resurrect forgotten heroines from the past, breathe new life into them and introduce them on the page to today’s readers.            

Kate, you have a background in journalism and have also written non-fiction. What inspired you to make the transition to fiction—and historical fiction in particular?

Kate: I think, like you, I feel aggrieved that so often women are hidden in the margins of history, their voices rarely amplified. So when you stumble upon an incredible woman you want to do what you can to celebrate their achievements. I’ll give you an example. The first novel I ever wrote, Secrets of the Singer Girls, was inspired by a woman I shared a name with. The other Kate Thompson was a tough apron-clad East End matriarch, who, in addition to raising nine sons in a notoriously rough tenement slum, formed a tenants’ association to take on greedy landlords and pioneered the country’s first rent strike. She forced her ‘slumlord’ as she called him, to back down and reduce rents and this led to a change in housing law in the UK. By the time of the Second World War she was putting out incendiary bombs and fighting local government for better shelter provision in the Blitz. She was then crushed to death in a preventable accident on the steps down to the tube in 1943. Uncovering her life gave me the history shivers. She was a magnificent woman, yet not even a footnote in the history books. I realized that the best way to get people to read and care about her, was to weave her into a work of fiction. Barnes and Noble said recently, “if you want to learn about the past read non-fiction, if you want to be moved by the past, read historical fiction” and it’s so true. I realized I had more chance of people reading about these amazing women I was discovering, if I had them walking, talking, breathing and living in the pages of my novels. What inspired you to write fiction?

K.D.: I’ve had the dream of writing ever since I can remember—probably because I was such a voracious reader as a child. Somehow I knew I’d write a book one day, but I had no idea what kind of book it would be.

Kate, what you said above about weaving real people into fiction to move readers resonates so strongly with me. I learned about world events and famous figures through reading historical novels, because when I was young volumes of history were too dry for me, and I didn’t find them engaging. But if I could step into a protagonist’s shoes and feel that I was living story events along with her, then I could gulp down history and digest it with pleasure!

My previous book, A Mother’s Promise, is about a simple young girl who finds herself at the heart of a 1927 Supreme Court case called Buck v. Bell. I was absolutely insistent that I write it from her point of view, despite the fact that the story evolved from the extremely convoluted topic of eugenics.

Why? Because it was about grand theory put into practice on an unfortunate, pregnant and unwed teenager (a victim of rape) whose mental acuity was misrepresented. She neither knew nor cared about the pompous philosophy espoused by eugenicists who believed that traits such as poverty and crime could be passed on genetically. She must have felt that an asteroid had hit her when the court ruled that the government could sterilize her. And I wanted readers to feel the tragedy that had been visited upon her.

So, a change in topic, Kate: While I’m most comfortable hiding behind my laptop and playing with my imaginary friends, you also host a podcast called From the Library With Love. (I can’t wait to listen to more episodes!) When did you begin this, and why?

Kate: Ha ha, trust me, as an introvert I am all too familiar with the ease and comfort of hiding behind my laptop with my imaginary friends. I was forced to come out from behind it by the women I was interviewing. Last year I was sitting in front of a 100 year old Bletchley Park codebreaker, Betty Webb, listening to her unique voice, when it struck me, other people need to hear this. I couldn’t find many podcasts out there sharing stories of the men and women who made history, ordinary people who lived through extraordinary times, and that’s where the idea came from. So now I have a mix of authors sharing stories from the past, and our wartime generation telling their remarkable tales and you know what? I love it! It’s helped me to fight my own shyness. So when are you coming on? I’d LOVE to interview you for the podcast.

You can listen to Betty’s episode here.

K.D.: I’ll certainly listen to Betty’s interview! And thank you, I’d love to be on your podcast!

So we both delved deeply into history in order to write The Wartime Book Club and Lady Codebreaker. Did you ever feel overwhelmed by facts and timelines and so many real tragic stories while you constructed a workable fictional plot? (I did!)

Kate: Yes, I read in your authors note that you literally ran screaming when a five inch thick tome on The Codebreakers arrived in the post. I get that! Writing about the past often comes with a heavy duty of care to get it right and it’s easy to feel crushed under the weight of so many stories. Someone wiser than me said, you have to accept this is your version or interpretation of the past. All you can do is your research and then try to distill the essence of it into your narrative, whilst staying true to the people you are writing about. I wrote about a real woman called Louisa Gould, who harbored an escaped Russian slave and was arrested by the Nazis and sent to Ravensbruck. I became so worried I’d offend her family by including her that I contacted her family, who very kindly replied to say, ‘we aren’t proprietorial about her history, this is your interpretation of her story’. I tried to keep uppermost in mind that the plot must come first, and that everything must weave itself around that. I love how you said, ‘I wrote and worried and researched and wrote and still the plot dangled like a burglar, stuck in the window with his pants down,’ I get that. I do. How long did it take you to pull up the burglar’s pants?

K.D.: I’m laughing so hard as I read that question! The burglar got stuck as he was raiding all the history that would fit into Lady Codebreaker’s forty-year timeline. And it was finding a way to tie it all together that put him in that predicament.

At last my Muse took pity on me at 3 a.m. one night. She said, “You need a MacGuffin.” (For people not as nerdy as I am, that means something in fiction that is an object to chase.)

“Are you kidding me?” I asked the Muse. “I have about 47 MacGuffins already!”

I don’t know what your Muse looks like, but mine is about 8 feet tall and carries a satchel that contains zip-ties, a hatchet, a shovel, a tarp and lye. “ONE MACGUFFIN,” she growled, as the floorboards shook. Then she vanished again, thank God.

Once I pulled the covers back down from over my head, I figured it out. The first saboteur/spy my Lady Codebreaker caught could be blended with some others … giving her a worthy villain to chase and ultimately catch. ONE MacGuffin.

So that’s when I was able to pull up the burglar’s pants. LOL. Thanks for asking, Kate.

On from a metaphorical burglar and a muse to our characters:

I based Lady Codebreaker on a real woman, Elizebeth Smith Friedman. Kate, you drew heavily on the history of Occupation in the Channel Islands and included many real people as minor characters in The Wartime Book Club. But your two main protagonists are fictional, correct?

Kate: Yes, kind of. I would say that Grace is an amalgamation of all the librarians I interviewed, both for this book and The Little Wartime Library. Bea is very much the funny, feisty, irreverent wartime East End women I interviewed, especially a flamboyant blonde called Minksy who used to entertain shelterers during the Blitz. Her voice was always in my mind when I was writing. I love how you say Elizebeth Smith Friedman almost seemed to be challenging you from the past, daring you to resurrect her.

K.D.: Do you relish the opportunity to right some of the wrongs from the past in your historical fiction? I was so outraged at the fact that J. Edgar Hoover took credit for my character’s work that I was inspired to give her a chance to “get even.”

Kate: Definitely. Books are great medium for getting even. I discovered this awful pompous, patriarchal librarian who in wartime said, ‘if women have not enough energy to read anything but trash, we should be doing them a real service if we prevented them from reading at all.’ My hackles instantly went up and I turned him into a character in The Wartime Book Club and eventually got him sacked, disgraced and packed off to live in a dreary suburb. It was very liberating! In your book the stakes are even higher. Without any spoilers can you tell us how you tackled J. Edgar Hoover’s appropriation of Elizebeth’s work?

K.D.: Well, the main thing I did was to make it clear to the reader what he’d done. But there is an over-arching plot that involves Hoover and Elizebeth (renamed Grace in LC) at odds, shall we say.

But back to you!

Both The Wartime Book Club and Lady Codebreaker have at their core one relationship which deepens and changes over time as the characters develop, mature and are faced with dramatically rising stakes.

Your novel examines a friendship between two women, mine a friendship that deepens into love between a woman and a man. Eventually one friend—and one spouse—make ethical choices that they would not have made at the beginning of each novel. Do you see this as a strength, a weakness, an “immoral imperative” or simply poetic justice?

Kate: I think I see it as a reflection of life. We all change as we grow and develop. I think womens’ capacity for empathy grows as they age. I definitely see it amongst my friends. The choices we make define us as we age and we do all change as we get older, so it would seem natural that the plot of a book should reflect real life. Wartime brought out the best (and worst in people) The occupation of the Channel Islands was a moral quagmire for so many and I enjoyed exploring the moral dilemmas and ethical choices that islanders faced daily. I hope it also makes the reader reflect and think, ‘what would I have done living under Nazi Occupation, how would I have behaved?’

What drove the development of your characters?

K.D.: In the case of Elizebeth and William Friedman (Grace and Robert Feldman in my novel) I built on information I could find about their relationship. And I noticed that there was an interesting “arc” to their marriage: while he initially was her protector, she became his over the decades they were married. And so the story question that entered my mind was, “How far would she go to protect him?” I’ll leave it at that to avoid any spoilers.

What’s next for you, Kate? Are you working on a new historical fiction novel?

Kate: I can’t say too much about it yet, but I am returning to non-fiction. I am working with a very special 95-year-old woman and together we are journeying back in time to research and write the story of how she survived the Holocaust. It’s been the most emotionally draining, challenging and life-changing book and I’m only half-way through. What’s next for you?

K.D.: I look forward to reading it! I’m working on a proposal for a follow-up book. At the risk of sounding like a lunatic, I can hear it calling to me … I’m fascinated by the protagonist’s psychology.

Kate: Can I finish please on a question for you, K.D?

I see you have two rescue greyhounds. I have two rescue lurchers. Do you think historical fiction authors see the past lives in everything?

K.D.: I do! Klepto and Sally. They’re retired racers and such love-bugs. And lurchers are part greyhound! What a coincidence.

Re: past lives. I don’t know about all historical authors, but I do wonder myself whether humans and other creatures get, for lack of a better work, recycled. My dogs have such wisdom and understanding and empathy in their eyes … as if they’ve seen it all.

Kate, this chat has been such a pleasure! I hope we’re able to meet in person one day!

***

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Kate Thompson was born in London and worked as a journalist for women’s magazines and national newspapers before becoming a novelist. Over the past ten years, Kate has written twelve fiction and nonfiction titles, three of which have made the Sunday Times top ten bestseller list. She now lives in Sunbury with her husband, two sons, and two rescued Lurcher dogs, Ted and Saphhie. Her new novel, The Wartime Book Club, is now available.

K.D. Alden is the pseudonym of an award-winning author who has written more than twenty novels in various genres. She has been the recipient of the Maggie Award, the Book Buyer’s Best Award and an RT Reviewer’s Choice Award. A Mother’s Promise is her first historical novel. K.D. is a graduate of Smith College, grew up in Austin, Texas, and resides in south Florida with her husband and two rescue greyhounds. Her new novel, Lady Codebreaker, is now available.

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