Kate Atkinson, whose 2018 novel, Transcription, is set in World War II England, commented, “War is such a vast canvas to work on. There were so many real people whose lives were turned upside down by the experience. Violence and heroism, certainly, but also the less romantic side of plodding your way through something with no knowing what was at the end or when that end would come.”
For his part, author, journalist, and historian Adam Hochschild has written about World War I, in To End All Wars, and explored the Spanish Civil War, in Spain in Our Hearts. I asked Hochschild what had drawn him to the subject of war in his research and writing. “I think any occasion where people have to risk their lives is inherently dramatic,” said Hochschild. “It intensifies life, so to speak—and, sadly, does that even when the war involved is not worth risking your life for. And unfortunately, that is the case with most wars.”
WITH EACH NEW NOVEL IN MY SERIES, AND ALSO WITH MY stand-alone non-mystery, The Care and Management of Lies, I have been asked whether I had planned the narrative to reflect current events. I know I’m not alone among writers who are asked this question. Given the deadlines writers work to, the research involved, and the time it takes to actually write, together with the fact that most published books go into production at least six months before the publication date, it is perhaps coincidence that the events of the day are reflected in the narrative. Personally, I think history is a bit like fashion—it comes around again but looks just a bit different. Sometimes, however, the look and feel of the present are reflective of the past and inspire a writer. “The political climate in our current world, the rise of white nationalism in so many countries, made me see the parallels with pre-war Germany,” said Rhys Bowen, adding, “I felt compelled to tackle my theme.”
I asked Adam Hochschild if his experience as an anti-Vietnam activist informed his interest in war as a theme for his research and writing. “I felt that the Vietnam War was senseless and that it was evil of politicians to send young men off to risk, and sometimes lose, their lives there,” said Hochschild. “At one point, while working in the presidential campaign of the antiwar candidate George McGovern in 1972, I shared an office with several Vietnam vets also working in the campaign. One of them had lost his legs in Vietnam but came to work in the campaign every day in his wheelchair. If ever I had any doubts about whether it was worth putting twelve hours a day into this campaign, I just had to look across the room.”
The heightened emotions that attend war are compelling for any writer. The themes of love and war were always of interest to me—love between sweethearts, love between men serving in a war zone, and the love of an officer for his men, all of which I have been able to explore in my work, both in the “action” of the moment and from the distance of time. Writing about any era, whether the past or the present, and with any theme demands research, and I have discovered that often the research will leave me in a very dark place. I have used the archive at London’s Imperial War Museum on many occasions, sifting through letters and diaries to get to the essence of the human experience in a time of war. And sometimes there’s that moment when I have to just sit back and close my eyes to assimilate what I have read because the depth of human experience revealed has taken my breath away—and sometimes that experience has been expressed in the most simple terms in a letter.
Author Jeff Shaara has written many books about war, both fiction and nonfiction, covering conflicts from the Revolutionary War to the American Civil War to Korea and World War II. I was curious about what might have shocked or surprised Shaara in terms of his research, and he drew attention to the way his research compelled him to create fully realized characters who could not simply be labeled good or evil. “I found that those characters easily labeled the bad guys were every bit as sympathetic as the good guys,” said Shaara, adding,
The impact of that process is that I learn to love every character I’m writing about. That’s essential for me to get into their heads, since all of my stories are told through their eyes. If I don’t feel a deep empathy for the character, it’s impossible to feel comfortable putting words into their mouths, or to put myself into their thoughts. The powerful emotions I felt writing the death of the Red Baron caught me completely by surprise, as did the death of Rommel. I had a difficult and very emotional time writing those parts of the story, as difficult as it was writing the deaths of many of the American characters.
MOST WRITERS OF FICTION USE SOME ELEMENT OF PERSONAL story in their work. It might be a few words overheard while on a train or waiting in line at airport security. It could be an event witnessed and then reimagined as happening at a different place and time. I remember once, while on book tour, I went into the women’s restroom at an airport to wash my hands when a young woman came in, clad in her army uniform, the camouflage indicating that she’d returned from service in the Middle East. She looked in the mirror, then reached into her kit bag. She brought out a plastic bag with her makeup and proceeded to apply mascara, some blush, and a quick swipe of pink lipstick. She brushed out her sun-kissed hair and tied it back in an elegant chignon before checking her appearance and reaching back into her kit bag to swap her canvas shoulder bag for a delicate Chanel-style purse. One more quick check, and she picked up her kit bag and left, her heavy black boots echoing in her wake, as if she had just put on a mask to meet our civilian world and her loved ones again. I haven’t used that scene yet, but I will—it was too good to lose.
Other writers have had similar experiences, moments when some element of war was brought home to them in a moment they did not expect—and perhaps had all the more resonance due to their work. For Jeff Shaara, one of those moments came after he’d completed The Frozen Hours, telling the story of the US Marines and the Chinese at Chosin Reservoir in Korea. Says Shaara, “I was emotionally exhausted. I was fortunate to be able to interview survivors of that campaign, knowing how they turned out in the long run, which was almost always difficult—long-term awful effects of frostbite, for example—and, along the way, a number of those veterans who had offered me extraordinary material did not live long enough to see the book come out—that was tough. I had been given wonderful gifts from extremely generous men, and I never really had the opportunity to thank them or show them the respect I had given them by telling their story.”
Adam Hochschild recounted the following experience:
I had just finished giving a talk about a new book—Lessons from a Dark Time. Afterwards, in the line of people to get their books signed was a guy who said he had read Spain in Our Hearts, and it meant a lot to him because an uncle—who he had never known—had been killed as a volunteer in Spain. The man who told me this—perhaps in his sixties—told me that he himself was an emergency-room physician who had gone to the demonstration at Charlottesville in 2017 to be on hand in case anyone needed help. Which, tragically, they did. Something about that continuity of people working for justice, in different ways, across the generations, always moves me deeply.
Perhaps there’s something of that search for justice in our writing about war—and for me, personally, my respect has always been for those who go to war to write about war; the war correspondents who bring home stories not only of the nuts and bolts of military engagement but of the ordinary people whose lives will be changed forever by conflict. War correspondents are at the top of my list of people who write about war and who deserve our utmost respect—which is probably why the work of wartime journalists is a theme in my most recent novel, The American Agent. I can write about war only from hindsight, from research, and from personal engagement with others who have experienced war. I wrap my stories of war around a cast of characters so that they become both compelling and entertaining. I do not face guns every day. I am not risking death to tell my story. But sometimes the conflict a war correspondent encounters is on his or her own doorstep. In a December 2018 article in the London Sunday Times, veteran war correspondent Christina Lamb wrote about gang warfare on the home front resulting in young
lives lost to knife crime. She recounted this experience: “As a war correspondent, I have always been interested in the people behind the lines, and last year I was giving a talk about mothers in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria when a woman accosted me. ‘You write about all these terrible things in far-off places, but what about your own city?’ she demanded. ‘There’s a war going on here, against our sons.’”
Which brings us to the wars that we writers of mystery and crime are drawn to—the war within the individual, the community, and the wider world beyond that we explore in our storytelling. From the drawing-room whodunit to the searing thriller, almost every social ill or individual wound is encountered. Arguably, “mystery”—that broad-brush description used to describe so many very different books appealing to a diverse readership in the millions—is the literary genre with the power to go to the deepest parts of the human condition, encompassing everything from humor to grief, joy to despair, and love to hatred amid the madness of a world torn asunder, however small or expansive that world might be. It’s why mystery has worked for me.
I have always seen mystery as that archetypal journey through chaos to resolution—or not, as the case may be. It’s a journey, a pilgrimage that I push my characters to take through the fire of experience until they reach safety. And it’s fair to say the foundation of my experience of writing about mystery and crime goes beyond reading books. I have many tales of crime tucked up my sleeve, and I am speaking not simply from having researched the subject but from what I look back upon as a certain innate understanding based upon family experience. That probably caught your attention—but no, I’m not related to the mob!
The postwar London my parents left to live in the country was one hallmarked by a flourishing black market—it was, after all, a time when the rationing of food became worse than during wartime, and rationing did not “officially” end until the latter part of 1954, with many foods in short supply for a good while thereafter. In southeast and east London, in particular, there was a dramatic rise in organized crime—it was something my parents still talked about even years later, I suppose because everyone knew someone who knew someone who was involved in a shady deal. Not many people would turn down a two-pound bag of sugar to keep quiet about something untoward they’d heard or seen while walking down the street. And later, to add to my worldly understanding of crime, there was my mother’s job.
When I was in my midteens, she stepped onto the first rung of a new career ladder when she became a clerical assistant at a boys’ detention center—a “correctional facility” for young offenders aged sixteen to twenty-one who were not on their first crime (that usually landed just a probation order). She began to work her way up, moving to a men’s prison as assistant chief administrator and after that to a women’s prison, by which time she was chief administrator of the facility. Then she was pegged to become the first woman chief administrator of one of Britain’s most notorious high-security prisons, which was a few hundred miles away from home and pretty much in the middle of nowhere—nowhere is usually where you’ll find a high-security prison. The Home Office (the government department overseeing prisons in the UK) paid for my parents to travel to the area for a week so they could get to know the region and look at houses and so my mother could visit the prison. They did the tour, viewed a few homes, and could imagine living at the edge of the nearest small town—but then came my mother’s visit to the prison, and she turned down the job. “I felt the hair on my neck stand on end the minute I walked into the place and the gates slammed shut behind me,” she said. This was a woman who had faced down a mob during a prison riot, so I knew it must have felt bad.
She returned to her job at the women’s prison and was also involved in management training within prison administration in the UK, often traveling to prisons in other parts of the country to train new staff. Then one day she’d just had enough, and she resigned, having decided it was time to retire. But over those years from my teens until my early thirties, I heard many stories of crime, both run-of-the-mill and quite extraordinary, especially when she worked at the boys’ detention center and later the women’s prison. Her role was never disciplinary, but she had a lot of interaction with the prisoners and would talk to them because she was interested in their lives and what events had led them to commit a crime. Perhaps if she’d had the opportunity at a younger age, she would have made an excellent probation officer.
I remember one occasion when she arrived home from work, and after I’d made her a cup of tea, we sat down to talk. She seemed weary. I asked her why she thought most of those young lads in the detention center ended up with a prison record—one that would remain with them forever. She looked out the window, and it was as if a certain sorrow had enfolded her. She turned back to me and said, “Somewhere along the line, someone didn’t care enough. So they end up with the wrong crowd or in the wrong place at the wrong time with no opportunity—and the next thing they know, they’re inside, doing time. And that’s when they really learn how to be criminals.”
Perhaps that’s why I’ve always been more interested in the events leading up to and the emotions behind a crime than in just sorting out who did it. To be honest, I have never really been too concerned if a reader guesses the “who” halfway through one of my novels—I usually guess before the denouement when I’m reading a mystery, but it doesn’t spoil the story for me. The “why” is both the journey and the destination—that, to me, is the real mystery; the dynamics of our human condition revealed in story. And, as I realized while listening to all those “true crime” stories my mother told—because she had to get them off her chest, I suppose, and we certainly never repeated the stories beyond the house—the most baffling thing about character is often the life journey of a person and who they become as a result.
WE WHO WRITE ABOUT WAR, WHETHER IN OUR FICTION OR nonfiction, all have certain personal experiences to blend with our research, so what we’re really writing about is that pilgrimage to the human heart—which remains a mystery no matter how many writers embark upon the journey. And if we write fiction, it’s why we test our characters, as if we’re daring them to endure a terrible time of upheaval. We want to see what they’re made of. We want to know who sinks and who swims. War brings out the very worst and very best in people. Chris Hedges writes, “War exposes a side of human nature that is usually masked by the unacknowledged coercion and social constraints that glue us together. Our cultivated conventions and little lies of civility lull us into a refined and idealistic view of ourselves.”
Ah, now we get to the nub of why war is so compelling a subject—it throws who we think we are into the air, and when our tightly held notions hit the ground, they fall apart. Such is the essence of story—especially, perhaps, the mystery. As writers, our curiosity and desire to make sense of madness through the creative act of storytelling prevail. But that madness we encounter in our research and writing can leave a mark on us. I know I have had some very dark days when deep in my research or in the bottomless well of the story, and sometimes it feels as if a veil has been lifted when I finish a manuscript and return to the world, so to speak. In 2018 I turned to writing a comedic short story to shake off the weight of wartime experience I had been delving into for years. As Jeff Shaara kindly shared with me, “I’m working now on a story about the Japanese assault on Pearl Harbor. But I just don’t know how many more times I can do this. I keep thinking there might be other stories I could tackle… moving completely away from war. Time will tell.”
Without doubt, that emotion has enveloped so many of us who write about war, yet we finish our manuscript and, having told our story, leave the territory of conflict, perhaps maintaining that we may never go there again. Yet we return for everything it offers us creatively—as writers we’re always looking for that next vast canvas that Kate Atkinson talked about. Whether we like it or not, we submit to our fascination with war, and perhaps without realizing it, we’re searching for that nugget, a tiny piece of historical fac
t connecting the personal to the universal in a way that inspires another story within us. And we go to work, digging in for another journey across war’s landscape, ready to venture to the deepest horizon as we explore the darkness and light, the good and bad in humanity—and arguably, more than anything, reflecting where they meet.
WORKS CITED
Hedges, Chris. War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. Public Affairs, 2002.
Lamb, Christina. “Stabbings in London.” Sunday Times (London), December 30, 2018.
Parsons, Martin. War Child. Tempus, 2008.
Wicks, Ben. No Time to Wave Goodbye. Bloomsbury Publishing, 1989.
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