An exclusive excerpt of AN ARTFUL DODGE & thoughts on "historical truth" versus "verisimilitude"

Karen Odden - every other Thursday

I'm thrilled to be able to share the sneak preview, first three chapters of my new book! There's a link at the bottom to read them for free!

But before you do ... I want to say a few words about writing about the Victorian period and the tension between historical truth and verisimilitude. 

One of my favorite anecdotes that illustrates this tension comes from my friend Susan Elia MacNeal, who writes the Maggie Hope series, which begins during WWII, with Maggie serving as a secretary in Churchill's office. For her research, Susan went to the War Rooms, where she read facsimiles of Churchill's letters in his handwriting. In his letters, he uses the abbreviation "OMG." If you think about it, it makes sense -- it's the age of the telegram, when abbreviations saved money.

Now, if Susan were to put that detail in one of her books, she would be sustaining historical truth but destroying verisimilitude -- which we could define as what the reader believes to be true about the period. Imagine the outcry! I can hear the chuckling Goodreads reviews now ... "What's Churchill going to write next? LMAO?" 

None of us writers want to push the reader's "disbelief" button. When it comes to including elements that pull readers out of the story -- well, we have to pick our battles. Sometimes we hit that button inadvertently. 

For example, a few years ago, a reviewer wrote something along the lines of, "I love your books, and they're pretty accurate, except you have Inspector Corravan drinking coffee, when Victorians drank tea."

I've been explicitly warned not to engage on social media platforms over reviews. But had I engaged, I would have replied, "Yes, Victorians drank a lot of tea, and the image of women drinking tea has been widely documented both in words and images (such as this painting, above). But in the 1870s, there were still 7 million tons of coffee being imported annually into England, most of it arriving through the London docks. Elaborate silver coffee services (that you can still see in museums) were still being produced."

That said, even though it's historical truth, I might not have had Corravan drink coffee had I realized it was going to hit the "disbelief" button.

However, there are elements that I'm willing to hit the "disbelief" button to include. The most important is giving my Victorian heroines agency. 

Sometimes, I receive comments along the lines of, "I just don't believe [your heroine Annabel or Nell or whoever] could go running around London the way she does. Weren't Victorian women confined to their homes?"

It's a valid question. TV shows and movies show Victorian women indoors, at balls, drinking tea, languishing in chaises, reading novels, riding in closed carriages. Books by Victorian writers including Anthony Trollope and Wilkie Collins and Mrs. Henry Wood often show women in somewhat stifling surroundings. 

But keep in mind two things. First, these characters are mostly unmarried, upper-class women who are going on the marriage market. They need to be watched and guarded lest their honor be lost and they become unmarriageable. That was a real, historical risk for women of a certain class -- but not for all classes. Second, these characters are fictional! Writers (for TV or of novels) gain a lot of plot advantages by constraining their female characters in particular ways -- in making certain acts impossible. It creates tension, anxiety, stress, frustration -- all good plot drivers and conflict-generators. 

I don't believe in giving women characters undue amounts of agency and justifying it by calling them "spunky." I try hard to be accurate, and that includes showing my heroines behaving plausibly within the strictures and mores of the time.

 

However, one of the ways I work around the conventional constraints in fiction and give my heroines legitimate agency is by having them be members of the lower and middle classes, or orphans with no father or older brother to oversee their actions. In real-life Victorian England, who's watching these women? Virtually no one! Their honor and virtue and morality didn't need to be so desperately protected. Their goal wasn't necessarily to marry. Working women walked all over London alone, without chaperones. They went to shops, they bought breakfast from street vendors, they visited galleries and museums and the Crystal Palace in 1851. They worked in hospitals, in wealthy families' homes, in dressmaking shops, in bakeries, in music halls, in shops, and in brothels. 

And in AN ARTFUL DODGE, they work as thieves. Kit Jimeson is a member of an all-women thieving gang operating out of the Elephant & Castle area of Southwark (above), south of the Thames. My fictional gang is based on the historical (real) gang of women thieves who were working out of E&C beginning in the 1870s. In later years, especially in the 1920s, they'd become known as the Forty Elephants, and they were active into the 1930s. Scotland Yard tried repeatedly to shut them down. To read more about the real Forty Elephants, you might look up Brian McDonald's excellent book Alice Diamond and the Forty Elephants: Britain's First Female Crime Syndicate. 

To read the first three chapters of AN ARTFUL DODGE and to meet Kit and her friends for yourself, click here: https://bit.ly/4uoYSIN

Birthday of the Rock (& starting my new mystery snail style)

 Ovidia--every other Tuesday

Yes, it's still Chinese New Year. The whole festival lasts 15 days and today (Jan 31st) is the 10th day or the Birthday of the Rock.

That probably came about because the Chinese words for '10' and 'stone' share the homonym 'shí'.

As kids we were told that if we could carry a small stone around all day without losing it, we would have a fruitful year (ie good results in our exams). I know some girls were given a piece of jade or a tiger eye stone on a chain to wear, but most of us just had a smooth pebble in our pocket.

The Rock's Birthday was also a day when the stone pestle and mortar (like this one below) couldn't be used in the kitchen,

and when snails shouldn't be crushed. Maybe because of the shape of their shells? We also had a few stone snails in my grandfather's garden.

I don't kill snails at all if I can help it, I'm very fond of snails. They're small, have pretty poor eyesight but are sensitive to their surroundings, and protect themselves from the outside world with hard (but fragile) shells. 

Which is kind of how I feel when I'm starting on a new book, like now.

It's a terrifying time with so many ideas and options and possibilities that I could go on forever trying to decide. But snail style, I just start where I am. 

My next book will be another history mystery, set here in Singapore after the Japanese Occupation.

But in what kind of surroundings? Snail style, my characters will need somewhere to eat--the kopitiam or sidewalk coffee shop (precursors of the one I lunched at today) were just appearing then--

 --and they haven't changed all that much!

It's nice to be around friendly people who aren't friends, who'll nod and say 'hello' but won't start a conversation so you can study them and decide which of them you want to add to your collection. 

Like people, snails are very sociable creatures. Patricia Highsmith (who wrote “Man has no more soul than a garden snail. The point is, the garden snail has a soul, too.”) is said to started collecting snails after seeing two of them being companionable in a pet shop window.

I imagine they were like a couple I saw at the kopitiam today, in office wear. The man looked in his forties and was focused on his curry rice and hardly said a word. The woman, who looked much younger, talked non-stop. She had a bowl of seafood noodles in front of her but hardly swallowed more than a few mouthfuls of soup. 

I wonder if the two are colleagues or relatives or some permutation of friends. And if I were to write them in, would I kill him off and point suspicion to her or vice versa? Or would the spectator (poor me in this case) be unceremoniously bumped off for seeing them together?

Here are a couple of snails being companionable. It's easier for snails. because their close encounters with other snails generally lead to either sex or cannibalism. But when it comes to people there's such a wealth of other options... though sex and cannibalism remain interesting options!

I want to look more into the habitat too. Nowadays food supplies are transported in from centralised distributors, but back in the post war days the coffee shop owners would wok-roast their own coffee beans with sugar and butter and sometimes sweet corn stalks and pineapple skins to the requisite dark brown colour and fragrance. 

A kopitiam's reputation was based as much on the strength of its kopi (coffee) and sweetness of its homemade kaya (coconut jam) as the rice and noodle dishes it might serve.

Which opens up possibilities of pointing out the last meal a victim ate contained kaya or kopi was Not prepared in the kopitiam (s)he was found dead in, or that the stone mortar used to bash someone's head in couldn't have been wielded by a superstitious person... unless he or she's the one now making panicky offerings to the Rock to atone...

I won't share any of the photos I took (without permission while pretending to be taking selfies) of all the people in the koptiam. I know the stories I make up about their lives and how/ why they chose what they're wearing/ eating/ carrying/ complaining about/ watching/ texting comes more from me than from them, but until I've settled on the general outline of my next book I'm 'auditioning' characters for major and minor roles and this is probably the second most exciting part of the writing process. 

And it's a lot more pleasant and less painful than the actual writing! 

But I'll leave you with one more snail picture:

I like this one because you can see the snail eyes on stalks that extend and turn to take in everything around it. 

Happy Rock Birthday, everyone! (And please tell me, would you read a book with snails in it? Or would you find them taboo as clues?)