Time Machine Problems: Writing Historical Pulp

Writing Historical Pulp has its challenges. And its rewards.

I quite enjoy small Pulp and comic book surprises in television shows and movies when they are done right. More often somebody in the props department doesn’t do their research. An example of this was The Green Mile (1999) where “Del” Delacroix (played by Michael Jeter)  is reading a copy of Weird Tales in his cell before his execution. (A really nice touch.) It is the  November 1937 issue with the Seabury Quinn story “Living Goddess” on the cover. Too bad the story takes place in 1935.  But Frank Darabont wasn’t the first to do this.

The TV show M. A. S. H. did this back before Gary Burghoff left the show in 1977. They showed Radar sleeping with his teddy bear and a comic book (no doubt to suggest his immaturity). That comic is a January 1969 issue of The Avengers. The Korean War was 1950 to 1953. That comic must have fallen out of a time machine.

Inaccuracies of this sort happen all the time. The movie, Pennies From Heaven (1981) with Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters is set in 1934. The look of the film is seamless until you go into Peters’ classroom (she is a teacher) and you see the poster of Flags of the World. The Canadian flag is the standard maple leaf version. Which was created in 1965. (Loren D. Estelman makes the same mistake in the Western novel, White Desert (2000). Murdoch goes into the RCMP office where a maple leaf flag is sitting in the corner…)

Slip ups of this sort are easy to do. I know from personal experience. I wrote a story that rewrote the ending of Frankenstein, in which Victor meets his creations and takes a pistol to shoot them. I had a revolver that was probably a hundred years too late. A fan was kind enough to point this out and even sent me pictures of the type of guns that would have existed back in the 18th Century. Out goes the revolver, in comes the flintlock. (That story had a happy ending, by the way.)

I can’t claim to have written a lot of historically-oriented fiction. I did pen a number of strange Northerns set in historical Canada. “The Wolves of Dracula” has French trappers take on the Count trapped in the body of a wolf. Others are based on my grandfather’s experiences in Alberta in the 1920s. I also have a Victorian detective named De la Mare who encounters ghosts. (The Victorian thing is very popular today with another Sherlock Holmes novel appearing every ten seconds….)

The following items do come to mind for anyone attempting to create stories set in the past.

1) Class barriers were very important. Lords and ladies did not hang around with merchants. Middle-class gentlemen did not marry servant girls. The old boys network (known as the Old School Tie because it started at Public School) was vital as was the Club to which you belonged. The majority of suggestions here will apply to the middle class since they were most frequently the main characters in Victorian fiction (since they were the primary audience). Policemen and detectives tended to be from the lower classes and received little appreciation.

2) The roles of women were narrowly defined. Unmarried women worked as governesses or in hospitals as nurses. They were not well paid. Once married it was expected that women would not work outside the home. Of course, we are writing about extraordinary people and the female characters can challenge these boundaries. There were women doctors and scholars but they were not common and certainly faced much harassment from all levels of society. Enola Holmes is a good example of an extraordinary female in a man-dominated society. Caleb Carr’s female detective in The Alienist and Angel of Darkness is a better one.

3) Race barriers are as important. It is not pleasant to think of how racist the world was (and still is). But creating a diverse cast of characters without truly dealing with this creates a fairy wonderland in which racism never existed. A good example of this is the TV show The Irregulars. In the first episode (which I could not finish) our main character, an Asian girl living in a London street gang, accosts a white male Londoner without much reprisal. In truth, she would have been arrested, beaten, imprisoned. Asian girls did exist in Victorian London but they could not do much of anything this character does (even with magic).

Perhaps I am pickier than most. I couldn’t watch Kevin Sorbo as Hercules either. He has a very modern attitude towards women and life that instantly made me think the whole thing was a tissue of silliness. (I never made it to Xena.) But that is the challenge. Keep things accurate without writing only about abhorrent white men. The world can be racist/sexist but you as the writer should not be. If you truly wrote with the attitude of Arthur Conan Doyle (or Robert E. Howard) the results would be unpalatable.

4) Remember everything took a lot longer. Traveling across oceans took weeks. Train travel improved things but still took longer than what we are used to today. The flipside to this is people were more patient because they had to be. They enjoyed leisurely novels, for instance. No music-video-10-second attention spans. I encountered this when I wrote “The Case of the Phantom Legion”. Set in 1926, I wanted my female hero, Orestia von Klarnstein, to fly her plane from New England to New Orleans. Commercial airlines were scanty and I had to figure out a route of local airports she could have jumped from. I cheated a bit by giving her an airplane that intentionally based on a model a few years in the future (a prototype) to increase the length of time between refuelings.

5) Reading and writing were essential. No phones, radio, TV, email, etc. People wrote letters, read newspapers front to back, and the mail was delivered twice a day. And of course words like color were spelled with a u.

6) There was some variation on the outskirts of the Empire. What might have been true in urban London might not be so in British India or in the Canadian wilds. These locales offer extra material for writing fantastic fiction since it doubles your chances of finding something creepy or mysterious in source material. Kipling’s “The Mark of the Beast” or Algernon Blackwood’s “Running Wolf” come to mind.

7) Verbal expressions are very important. Not just accents, but actual word use. No one is going to say “Far Out!” or “That would be cool.” These are far too modern. Even words like “phoney” have a date stamp since it came from the invention of the telephone. If your story takes place before 1876 then this screams bad research. A word like “fake” comes from “fakir” which is a Muslim monk known for miracle-working. This word dates back to the Crusades and therefore is alright as an alternative for “phoney”. You can’t catch them all but reading stories from the Victorian era will help suggest what is appropriate. If Sherlock said it, it’s got to be alright.

8) Research is essential. If you are going to set your story in London, look at a map, read up on the history of the city. If it all seems too much, an unenjoyable task, then perhaps stick to writing about the here and now. Historically-oriented writers love the search and the research.

9) Which is the other see-saw you must balance on. As a history writer you want to sound authentic and you might include references to things that are current at that time. For example from Doyle’s “The Five Orange Pips”:

Sherlock Holmes sat moodily at one side of the fireplace cross-indexing his records of crime, while I at the other was deep in one of Clark Russell’s fine sea-stories until the howl of the gale from without seemed to blend with the text, and the splash of the rain to lengthen out into the long swash of the sea waves.

To the current reader, the reference to William Clark Russell is as ordinary as having one of your characters reading a James Patterson novel in an airport. (Does anyone read Patterson anywhere but in the airport?) ACD tells us a little about himself (and Watson) in that name drop. It isn’t really important and the modern reader may not even know who Russell was. (Though you can always “google” it.)

And therein lies the challenge. If I wrote a De la Mare story with a reference to Russell you might not get it either. You might ask, why even bother? The modern reader has no expertise in such things. Do I do it to add verisimilitude? Perhaps. But if it requires you go to look it up, either you will not bother or if you do, you might not feel the time worth the effort. How much window-dressing do you include? You’ve spent hours and hours researching, only to include very little of the material. To fall into irrelevant info dumps on chintz curtains will bore the reader. To not suggest enough of the past, is to fall into lameness. The teeter-totter moves again.

Conclusion

Is it all worth writing Historical Pulp? You have to research a bunch, suggest a time long gone, but not lecture. You are hampered by old prejudices but must write without those liabilities. It is a ton of work but well worth it. When your story comes off, like a tricky pool shot, the resulting feeling is gold. There will always be experts who can point out you have the wrong gun (or comic book). Somebody else will have more knowledge on the finer points. Thank them. Don’t grumble. They have given you a gift, a chance to improve your work. And usually for free. (Think of how expensive it would be to have a Victorian scholar fact-check your story!)

You can choose to disregard the facts, but results can be laughable. I remember sitting in a Calgary movie theater watching Clive Barker’s Nightbreed. When the creepy graveyard of Athabasca, Alberta showed up the audience howled. Fortunately for Clive, he was far away in England so he probably didn’t hear it. Some mistakes are just too hard to forgive….