Three days ago, I said “I’ll talk about Documentary Historical Fiction another time.” Well, this is the time.
The online Britannica defines historical novel as a novel that has as its setting a period of history that attempts to convey the spirit, manners, and social conditions of a past age with realistic detail and fidelity to historical fact. The definition is good, but that is rarely what we find.
That presents a problem for truly historical fiction writers because readers may not know whether our writing is credible or not. Allow me to introduce Dr. Maier.
Dr. Paul L. Maier (https://www.paulmaier.com) is the Russell H. Seibert Professor of Ancient History at Western Michigan University and a much-published author of both scholarly and popular works.
Relating to his works of historical fiction, Dr. Maier said in the preface of The Flames of Rome, “I have not tampered with known facts in retelling it – unlike almost all historical novelist – nor invented characters that could never match the kind who actually lived in this area…. But here as elsewhere in ancient history, yawning gaps in the original sources prevent any telling of the full story. I have tried to fill these in by devising a genre which I call the “documentary novel,” resorting to fiction for such connective material as well as dramatization, dialogue, and sub-plot to flesh out the story and bring its characters to life.”
Every person Dr. Maier named was a real person, but every character he created received no name in his books. Unless noted in the appendix otherwise, every event he described was actual. He constructed “history” only where there was no evidence for an event, but he remained true to life in that time frame.
I’m adding documentary historical fiction to my favorite genre list. That will help me to …
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