Guest Author: David Coe/DB Jackson!
Today I'm delighted to introduce a good friend of mine, David Coe . . . er, DB Jackson. Well, both. David is the proud papa of a brand new, wonderful (I know because I blurbed it) historical fantasy novel, Thieftaker under the name DB Jackson. I'll let him explain.
It takes a pretty geeky guy to set a historical fantasy in the pre-Revolutionary period of American history. I mean, it’s one thing to set a book or series in the years of the Revolutionary War, or the Civil War, or some other war. Wars are glitzy, they’re violent and tragic and filled with tension -- they are the perfect setting for any sort of fiction. But the years before the war? Really?
To which I have to answer, “Yes, really.” Now, I freely admit that I am, in fact, pretty geeky. How geeky? Well, I have a Ph.D. in history, so I’m thinking that makes me pretty darn geeky. But I had compelling reasons for setting my new book Thieftaker, book I of the Thieftaker Chronicles, in 1760s Boston.
The idea for the Thieftaker series was sparked by a footnote that I read in Robert Hughes’ history of Australia, The Fatal Shore. (Yes, a footnote in a history book. Told you I was a geek.) The footnote described the life of London’s most famous thieftaker, the notorious Jonathan Wild. Wild was a brute and criminal who was responsible for nearly all the thefts that he “solved” as a thieftaker. He or his henchmen would steal goods, and then those things that Wild couldn’t sell for great profit he would turn around and return for a fee. He made a fortune, and all the while was hailed for his uncanny ability to recover stolen goods. And I thought “What a great idea for a book character!” I modeled my lead character’s nemesis, Sephira Pryce, after Wild. It might be the first time I had a book idea present itself to me in the form of an antagonist rather than a protagonist.
In its first incarnation, Thieftaker was set in an alternate fantasy world. After discussions with my editor, however, I decided to shift it to a real world historical setting. My editor suggested London, but I have to admit that I balked at this. So many books are set in London, and I really don’t know the city very well. I know, I know -- research would be a great excuse to travel there. But I feel no connection to London. On the other hand, having studied U.S. history, and having spent a good deal of time visiting Boston to see my older siblings, all of whom went to college there, I felt that Boston would be a perfect backdrop to the story.
In the 1760s, Boston was somewhat rundown, even seedy. Not long before, it had been the leading city of Colonial North America. But economic troubles had taken away some of its luster. Her sister cities, New York and Pennsylvania, had surpassed her in both population and financial prowess. I liked the idea of setting the Thieftaker books in a city like this. That sense of a town past its prime worked well with the noir feel I was searching for as a I wrote the first book. And I felt that Boston’s fall from grace created nice parallels with my lead character, Ethan Kaille, a conjurer and thieftaker, who is also past his prime and down on his luck.
In addition, Boston in the mid-1760s was becoming the hotbed of colonial protests against British authority. This was a place and time fraught with anxiety and uncertainty. Most colonists in the 1760s still considered themselves loyal subjects of the British Empire, but they were also starting to perceive that there was something unique about their status as Americans. For a character like Ethan, who is trying to find his way in the world after serving nearly fourteen years in prison, this added uncertainty seems a perfect complement to his personal struggles. And nowhere were the ambiguities of colonial status more stridently argued than in Boston. By setting my book there, I was able to weave into my story such colorful figures as Samuel Adams, James Otis, and Thomas Hutchinson, and to use the Stamp Act riots of August 1765 as the backdrop for the murder mystery that forms the core of Thieftaker’s plot. In short, once I decided to recast Thieftaker as a historical fantasy, pre-Revolutionary Boston quickly emerged as the perfect setting for the book.
The biggest challenge I faced lay in creating a magic system that would blend as seamlessly as possible with that colonial backdrop. Fortunately, Boston and the surrounding countryside already had a longstanding relationship with the supernatural. The Province of Massachusetts Bay had seen witch scares going back nearly a hundred years, including the Salem Witch Trials of 1692, which saw over one hundred and fifty people jailed and twenty executed. In Thieftaker, conjurers and witches are not the same thing. Witches are creatures of myth and nightmare; preachers rail against witchery and black magick in their sermons. Conjurers like Ethan, on the other hand, are quite real. They can cast spells that heal, that reshape matter, that even can control the actions of others. But while witches don’t actually exist, fear of them is constantly conflated with fear of conjurers. Ethan and others of his kind must keep their abilities secret, lest they be hanged as witches.
By connecting my imaginary magic system with the true historical phenomenon of witch scares, I was able to find that seamless blending of the fantastic and the historical I was after. The paranormal aspects of my story wound up reinforcing the sense of time and place that are so important to the book. And, in return, the historical references to something with which most readers are familiar -- that age-old fear of witches -- made the magic system seem that much more “real.”
Of course, one doesn’t have to tie a story so closely to historical events in order to make historical fiction work. What I’ve described here was just my approach for this series. But I have to admit that with every new connection I was able to make between my imagined characters, worldbuilding, and narrative on the one hand, and the historical events I was reading about on the other, the process of writing the book became that much more exciting. In the end, the choice of Colonial Boston as the setting for the book worked out better than I had ever dreamed it would.
*****
D.B. Jackson is also David B. Coe, the award-winning author of a dozen fantasy novels. His first book as D.B. Jackson, Thieftaker, volume I of the Thieftaker Chronicles, will be released by Tor Books on July 3. D.B. lives on the Cumberland Plateau with his wife and two teenaged daughters. They’re all smarter and prettier than he is, but they keep him around because he makes a mean vegetarian fajita. When he’s not writing he likes to hike, play guitar, and stalk the perfect image with his camera.
http://www.dbjackson-author.com
http://www.dbjackson-author.com/blog
http://www.facebook.com/dbjacksonAuthor
http://twitter.com/dbjacksonauthor
http://www.goodreads.com/dbjackson
http://amazon.com/author/dbjackson
It takes a pretty geeky guy to set a historical fantasy in the pre-Revolutionary period of American history. I mean, it’s one thing to set a book or series in the years of the Revolutionary War, or the Civil War, or some other war. Wars are glitzy, they’re violent and tragic and filled with tension -- they are the perfect setting for any sort of fiction. But the years before the war? Really?
To which I have to answer, “Yes, really.” Now, I freely admit that I am, in fact, pretty geeky. How geeky? Well, I have a Ph.D. in history, so I’m thinking that makes me pretty darn geeky. But I had compelling reasons for setting my new book Thieftaker, book I of the Thieftaker Chronicles, in 1760s Boston.
The idea for the Thieftaker series was sparked by a footnote that I read in Robert Hughes’ history of Australia, The Fatal Shore. (Yes, a footnote in a history book. Told you I was a geek.) The footnote described the life of London’s most famous thieftaker, the notorious Jonathan Wild. Wild was a brute and criminal who was responsible for nearly all the thefts that he “solved” as a thieftaker. He or his henchmen would steal goods, and then those things that Wild couldn’t sell for great profit he would turn around and return for a fee. He made a fortune, and all the while was hailed for his uncanny ability to recover stolen goods. And I thought “What a great idea for a book character!” I modeled my lead character’s nemesis, Sephira Pryce, after Wild. It might be the first time I had a book idea present itself to me in the form of an antagonist rather than a protagonist.
In its first incarnation, Thieftaker was set in an alternate fantasy world. After discussions with my editor, however, I decided to shift it to a real world historical setting. My editor suggested London, but I have to admit that I balked at this. So many books are set in London, and I really don’t know the city very well. I know, I know -- research would be a great excuse to travel there. But I feel no connection to London. On the other hand, having studied U.S. history, and having spent a good deal of time visiting Boston to see my older siblings, all of whom went to college there, I felt that Boston would be a perfect backdrop to the story.
In the 1760s, Boston was somewhat rundown, even seedy. Not long before, it had been the leading city of Colonial North America. But economic troubles had taken away some of its luster. Her sister cities, New York and Pennsylvania, had surpassed her in both population and financial prowess. I liked the idea of setting the Thieftaker books in a city like this. That sense of a town past its prime worked well with the noir feel I was searching for as a I wrote the first book. And I felt that Boston’s fall from grace created nice parallels with my lead character, Ethan Kaille, a conjurer and thieftaker, who is also past his prime and down on his luck.
In addition, Boston in the mid-1760s was becoming the hotbed of colonial protests against British authority. This was a place and time fraught with anxiety and uncertainty. Most colonists in the 1760s still considered themselves loyal subjects of the British Empire, but they were also starting to perceive that there was something unique about their status as Americans. For a character like Ethan, who is trying to find his way in the world after serving nearly fourteen years in prison, this added uncertainty seems a perfect complement to his personal struggles. And nowhere were the ambiguities of colonial status more stridently argued than in Boston. By setting my book there, I was able to weave into my story such colorful figures as Samuel Adams, James Otis, and Thomas Hutchinson, and to use the Stamp Act riots of August 1765 as the backdrop for the murder mystery that forms the core of Thieftaker’s plot. In short, once I decided to recast Thieftaker as a historical fantasy, pre-Revolutionary Boston quickly emerged as the perfect setting for the book.
The biggest challenge I faced lay in creating a magic system that would blend as seamlessly as possible with that colonial backdrop. Fortunately, Boston and the surrounding countryside already had a longstanding relationship with the supernatural. The Province of Massachusetts Bay had seen witch scares going back nearly a hundred years, including the Salem Witch Trials of 1692, which saw over one hundred and fifty people jailed and twenty executed. In Thieftaker, conjurers and witches are not the same thing. Witches are creatures of myth and nightmare; preachers rail against witchery and black magick in their sermons. Conjurers like Ethan, on the other hand, are quite real. They can cast spells that heal, that reshape matter, that even can control the actions of others. But while witches don’t actually exist, fear of them is constantly conflated with fear of conjurers. Ethan and others of his kind must keep their abilities secret, lest they be hanged as witches.
By connecting my imaginary magic system with the true historical phenomenon of witch scares, I was able to find that seamless blending of the fantastic and the historical I was after. The paranormal aspects of my story wound up reinforcing the sense of time and place that are so important to the book. And, in return, the historical references to something with which most readers are familiar -- that age-old fear of witches -- made the magic system seem that much more “real.”
Of course, one doesn’t have to tie a story so closely to historical events in order to make historical fiction work. What I’ve described here was just my approach for this series. But I have to admit that with every new connection I was able to make between my imagined characters, worldbuilding, and narrative on the one hand, and the historical events I was reading about on the other, the process of writing the book became that much more exciting. In the end, the choice of Colonial Boston as the setting for the book worked out better than I had ever dreamed it would.
*****
D.B. Jackson is also David B. Coe, the award-winning author of a dozen fantasy novels. His first book as D.B. Jackson, Thieftaker, volume I of the Thieftaker Chronicles, will be released by Tor Books on July 3. D.B. lives on the Cumberland Plateau with his wife and two teenaged daughters. They’re all smarter and prettier than he is, but they keep him around because he makes a mean vegetarian fajita. When he’s not writing he likes to hike, play guitar, and stalk the perfect image with his camera.
http://www.dbjackson-author.com
http://www.dbjackson-author.com/blog
http://www.facebook.com/dbjacksonAuthor
http://twitter.com/dbjacksonauthor
http://www.goodreads.com/dbjackson
http://amazon.com/author/dbjackson