I’ve heard that when writing fiction, anything goes.  You can kill a character off in one book, bring him back in another.  You can change locations, character occupations, family history, personality traits, hair color and even their choice of Ben and Jerry’s, from one page to another.  Easy.

But what happens when you take (inconvenient) historic events and twist them to fit your story?  Unless you explain your deviation from fact as an afterword to your book, you might engender reader outrage.

Anne Perry writes mysteries of Victorian England in which the Pitts, a policeman and his wife, a clever sleuth in her own right, solve crimes.  Perry makes it clear that the wife, Charlotte, must face myriad obstacles to insert her ideas into the case.  After all, except for the society columns, women weren’t even allowed to read the newspapers.  Perry gives us a true picture of the attitudes of the times.

Several other books come to mind that portray history authentically.  The Sharon Kay Penman Justin De Quincy series of mysteries is well-researched (like her other historical novels) and you get a true, albeit, grim sense of the medieval English times.

In my own mysteries, I used actual events in real times to create a fictional story.  In TIME EXPOSURE, I fashioned a tale woven around Civil War photography.  The characters were real, the battles were real, the locations were real.  The killer was not.  Plus, I created an alternative ending to history as we know it.  I did add an author’s note at the end, however, to own up to my fiction vs. fact.

Authentic history can lend atmosphere, suspense, and incredibly interesting real characters to a novel.  It can give readers a feeling for the time, a revelatory understanding of people of the time, and a sense of how we’ve come to be who we are as a culture today.  This is why some books do us a disservice in this area.  They portray a time period as something other than it was.  I know some of you will be horrified by my suggestion here, but, to me, GONE WITH THE WIND, is just such a book.

GONE WITH THE WIND, while in some ways, an engrossing read, is not the true story of the Civil War.  First of all, less than one percent of the southerners portrayed owned plantations.  Even fewer than that treated their slaves as depicted (all one big happy family).  There were other inconsistencies with historical fact that I will not go into here, but I was sadly discouraged when I got a note from a reader on a Civil War site in which he claimed that he learned everything he knew about the Civil War from Margaret Mitchell’s book.

When I talk about twisting history in a novel, I’m not referring to fantasy books like the OUTLANDER series, or ABE LINCOLN, VAMPIRE SLAYER.  These books, while they may use history as a backdrop, have a more fantastical story to tell.

Nor am I thinking of books like THE DAVINCI CODE, or NATIONAL TREASURE.  These are thrillers that use bits and pieces of history (true or not) to build a suspenseful, action-packed story that makes a great movie.

Novels can give us an authentic feel for the past.  Here are a few great books that I believe stay true to history:  PILLARS OF THE EARTH, LONESOME DOVE, THE OTHER BOLYN GIRL, and COLD MOUNTAIN.  Please share others.  Ideas always welcome.