When Mystery and History Combine
“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” These famous opening words to an L.P. Hartley novel encapsulate the real problem with writing about history. It’s not just a matter of dates; it’s a matter of a whole culture that needs to be understood. And so, because the job is immense, we tend to not do it.
Unless, of course, we’re novelists, who go boldly where (in many cases) we should probably have feared to tread.
I integrate some history, in some way, into nearly all of my books, even the mystery novels. Whether it’s personal history (a family secret, an obscure act from the past, a hidden relationship) or community history (an old murder, a reinvented personality, a buried treasure), there’s a lot there that can provide a perfect backdrop for a modern mystery to be solved by a modern sleuth… as long as the author gets it right.
Because, after all, the past is indeed a foreign country, and they do in fact do things differently there. It may feel romantic to write a novel that takes place in Arthurian Britain, or the antebellum South, or feudal Japan, but really entering into those times in order to make a story feel at home there takes a lot of mental, physical, and emotional energy!
For me, it’s always worked the other way. I don’t know that I’ve ever consciously chosen an era; I think that they choose me. I grew up in Angers, France, where history seeps into the air one breathes: it’s a medieval city, but when I was a child, most people were still recovering from the German occupation of the country—so both the middle ages and World War II have always called to me for understanding and exploration.
And once you find a place and time that calls to you, the stories follow. Invariably. Because when you step away from the dates and kings and factoids that are the way we learn history and really step into the past as a foreign country, the stories pop out.
The first Martine LeDuc mystery, Asylum, pretty much wrote itself. In reading about the history of Montreal, a city I love, I came across a list of children who’d been buried in an asylum’s graveyard, and that story pretty much hit me in the face. Why were so many children in an asylum in the first place? and why did so many of them die? That led me to uncover the truth about both the Duplessis orphans and the CIA’s MK-Ultra program, and gave me an instant mystery for my very modern-day detective to solve.
And one day the curator of the Provincetown Museum took me into the storeroom and showed me a recent acquisition: children's Civil-War-era shoes discovered inside the walls of a house on Pleasant Street; it didn't take long for that to become the Sydney Riley mystery taking place during the Portuguese Festival, The Deadliest Blessing.
No matter what time and place you write about, you have to do research. Just as someone writing a hard-boiled police procedural wouldn’t fail to find out about the caliber of various guns and the habits of underworld criminals, so the mystery writer dipping into the well of the past must spend time in their chosen “foreign country.”
And it’s hard work! We might well love to write, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy, or that it isn’t work. And it can be emotionally draining. I’ve spent a lot of time with my head in places I’d really rather not go, and learning things I didn’t want to know, because that’s how you explore another culture: by immersion in it, all of it, the pretty parts and the dark places.
And as a mystery writer, it’s almost always those dark places that intrigue. It’s a safe way to explore some of the darkness we experience today, whether in our own times or in our own lives. It puts things in a kind of perspective. And, like any travel, it enriches the traveler.
There are a lot of mysteries that take place in the past, as well as other writers who take bits of the past on which to base present-day mysteries. Why not explore one or two of them? It’s a wonderful way to learn just how “they do things differently there.”