At the end of May, I went to the Bloody Words mystery conference in Toronto, where I met some wonderful people and (I hope) acquired one or two new readers. As part of the BW programming, I was a member of the author panel discussing the topic “Rewriting History: How much can and do historical mystery writers play with historical facts & people—should facts take a back seat to story?”
Sylvia Warsh, our moderator, started things off with the following quote:
“We must never become slaves to the history; we must be prepared to jettison, rearrange, conflate, to play as fast and loose with the facts as we need to to create good fiction.”
OK, I’m a complete, self-described history geek, as both a writer and a reader, and to me, that quote (by Sarah Bower, a former UK editor of
The Historical Novels Review, no less) felt like
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