The Historical Novel Society of Australasia’s inaugural convention in Sydney last month proved that.
The response to the event far outweighed expectations. History and books about it - whether fiction or non fiction - has a great future.
I was honored to be invited to give the inaugural address.
There were many fantastic authors, agents and publishers sharing their expertise and experiences. One of the organizers, Elizabeth Storrs talked about her self published first historical novel, THE WEDDING SHROUD, which was so successful it led to a three book contract with Lake Union.
click the link to see the comic!
I was also fascinated with Sophie Masson’s crowd funding the translation and publication of Jules Verne’s classic adventure novel Mikhail Strogoff, which hasn’t been published in English for over a century.
(Well Classics Illustrated did it as a comic. It was the story that made me want to be a writer - I was about 7 years old - long before I discovered that Jules Verne didn’t write comics!)
The convention ended with Kate Forsyth, Jess Blackadder and myself performing a sex scene from Kate’s bestselling novel BITTER GREENS
Well not performing it … we just read the words.
BITTER GREENS shows the health of Australian historical fiction writing - it won won the American Library Association (ALA) Award for Best Historical Novel.
In the process of reading the scene we think we answered the question - how do you write a sex scene?
And we had a lot of fun doing it, too.
I can’t wait till the next convention in 2017 in Melbourne - this one was such a success, two years seems much too far away.
Well done Chris Foley, Elisabeth Storrs, Wendy Jean Dunne, Diane Murray and Greg Johnston. We all look forward to the next one.
LAKE UNION are publishing my ISABELLA worldwide on 21st April and there are 2o copies to give away on GOODREADS.
You will love it or you will hate it … I have never written a book that has divided opinion so much. Make up your own mind - go here to enter the competition!.
In 1938 Louis B Mayer called her the most beautiful woman in the world.
She herself said there was nothing to being beautiful; all she had to do was stand there and look stupid.
But that wasn’t her secret.
Her secret wasn’t even that her name was Hedwig Kiesler and that her husband was one of the Nazi’s major arms suppliers.
So then - what was her secret?
Was it that five years before becoming a Hollywood star she had achieved a different kind of fame for her role in a low budget Czechoslovakian film where she appeared swimming in a lake, naked. Another scene featured a close-up of her face in the throes of orgasm.
The film - ‘Ecstasy’ - was banned everywhere, of course, which made copies of it extremely valuable.
Even the Italian dictator, Mussolini, used all his clout and his contacts to get a copy.
So who was she?
The most beautiful woman in the world was the only child of a prominent Jewish banker from Vienna. At school she displayed a brilliant mathematical mind.
It wasn’t her intelligence but her beauty that caught the eye of the third richest man in Austria, Friedrich Mandl, an arms dealer. He soon became her first husband.
But once he married her, he was less than enthusiastic about his new wife’s past, and tried to buy up as many copies of ‘Ecstasy’ as he could.
Apparently she tried to placate him by insisting that her on-screen orgasm was simulated, achieved with the aid of the director stroking her butt with a drawing pin.
That must have put his mind at rest.
Or perhaps not, because Mandl was a man with many things on his mind. At the time he was developing a new technology for radio-controlled torpedoes for the Nazis.
His wife, cute bottom now drawing pin-free, sat at his dinner parties looking stupid and beautiful while her husband entertained leading Nazis, including Hitler himself, and explained his new invention.
But she wasn’t stupid. She understood everything.
Also, Hedwig Kiesler was Jewish and, unsurprisingly, she hated the Nazis.
So in 1937 she decided it was time to stop being a trophy wife. She sold her jewelry, drugged her maid, put on her servant’s uniform as disguise, and escaped from Austria.
It was a good decision.
The following year the Nazis seized Mandl’s factory. Mandl, who was himself half Jewish, was forced to flee to Brazil.
Hedwig was now living in Paris and it was there that she met Louis B. Mayer, the Steven Spielberg of the age. Mayer was struck by her beauty and promised to make her a star.
The Most Beautiful Woman in the World signed a long-term contract with Hollywood’s Biggest Producer. She went to America and appeared in more than 20 films with stars like Clark Gable, James Stewart, Judy Garland, and even Bob Hope.
But Hedwig soon got bored with just standing there and looking stupid.
Because she was still hiding something that many people, dazzled by her beauty, could not see.
Her secret was that she was smart. Very, very smart.
In 1942, at the height of her fame on the silver screen, she decided to do her bit to help the war effort; she developed a unique direction-finding device that could be used to help torpedoes find their targets.
At the time both the Nazis and the Allies were using single-frequency radio-controlled technology. The drawback was that the enemy could find this frequency and “jam” the signal.
Hedwig, remembering all the things she had learned at Mandl’s dinner parties, collaborated with her Hollywood neighbor, musician George Anthiel, on a system to solve the problem. Anthiel had just found a way to synchronize his melodies across twelve player pianos, producing stereophonic sounds no one had ever heard before.
Applying this same technology they found a way of encoding a radio message across a broad area of the wireless spectrum. If one part of the spectrum was jammed, the message would still get through on one of the other frequencies - in effect making it unjammable.
On August 11, 1942, U.S. Patent No. 2,292,387 was granted to Antheil and “Hedy Kiesler Markey,” Kiesler’s married name at the time.
But the U.S. Navy would not listen. The technology was not adopted until 1962, after the patent had expired, when it was finally used by U.S. military ships during the blockade of Cuba.
So what has this got to do with you?
Well, despite what the US Navy thought back then, it was one of the most important patents ever issued by the US Patents Office.
Today, Hedy’s invention is the foundation of ‘spread spectrum technology,’ YOU USE IT EVERY DAY when you log on to wi-fi or make calls with your Bluetooth-enabled phone. The next generation of cell phones would not be possible without it!
You couldn’t take selfies in Time Square, sext your boyfriend or post Facebook pictures of your cat without the woman still only remembered for being beautiful.
Not bad for a girl who only had to ‘stand there and look stupid.’
So what happened to her?
Hedy was married six times - the last time to her divorce lawyer - and claimed to have made and lost thirty million dollars during her life.
In 2014 she was finally inducted into the National Inventor’s Hall of Fame.
I wonder if you have even heard of her.
Her name was …
IF YOU ENJOYED THIS POST WHY NOT JOIN MY NEWSLETTER?
EVERY MONTH YOU’LL GET NEWS OF MY LATEST BOOKS AND EXCLUSIVE READS!
You cannot blame a hundred years war on a 12 year old girl.
But you could perhaps blame William the Conqueror. When he took the English throne in 1066 he retained possession of the Duchy of Normandy in France.
Under feudal law, this meant that he and all future English kings owed homage to the king of France for their lands on the other side of the Channel.
Really? The situation was always going to be a stone in the shoe of both monarchs.
Two hundred and fifty years later, Isabella’s marriage to Edward II of England was an effort to resolve the problem.
Instead it made it much worse.
Born in 1295, Isabella was the only surviving daughter of the wonderfully named Philippe the Handsome of France. At 3 years old she was already proposed as the bride for the King of England’s eldest son, Edward, to smooth negotiations for the Anglo-French truce of 1299.
Phillipe was not just a pretty face; he was thinking ahead. His own dynasty was secure - after all he had three healthy sons.
And if his daughter married England’s son, then his grandson would be King of England one day.
It must have seemed like a good idea at the time.
Edward was ten years older than his bride when they married. He was the youngest of fifteen children and his mother had died when he was 6. He had endured a miserable childhood and his father, the formidable Longshanks, took little interest in him.
But with exquisite irony, Edward was the only son to survive.
He lived in his father’s shadow then and always would, for despite his strapping good looks he just wasn’t king material. In fact he has been described by some historians as one of the most unsuccessful kings ever to rule England.
He was certainly outfoxed by Isabella.
In 1325 she left England to conduct delicate negotiations with France over Gascony. She returned with a mercenary army and threw him off the throne.
By then her father was dead and two of her brothers soon after him.
Some blamed the curse laid at her father’s door by Templar Grand Master Jaques Molay when Phillip burned him alive outside Notre Dame cathedral.
When her other brother Charles died as well in 1328 there was no clear successor to the throne of France. All three had died without a male heir.
Well done, Jacques.
Isabella transferred her claim to the French throne to her eldest son, Edward, and actively encouraged him to pursue it, as the closest living male relative of the late King Charles and the only surviving male descendant of the senior line of her father’s Capetian dynasty.
By the English interpretation of feudal law, it made Edward III the legitimate heir to the throne of France.
Yes, well - the French didn’t quite see things this way. Under French Salic law, males descended through the female line were disqualified from the succession.
Besides, the French didn’t want an English king. So they crowned the dead king’s cousin, Charles of Valois, as their new monarch.
Though Isabella’s reign as regent of England was short - her son removed her and executed her lover when he was just eighteen - she continued to have great influence at court and kept up a healthy correspondence with all of Europe’s leading figures.
She persuaded Edward to pursue his claims with full vigour. In 1337 Edward refused to pay homage to the French king for his lands in Aquitaine - so the French confiscated them.
In modern parlance - hostilities escalated from there.
The dispute led to the Hundred Years War, (although the name is actually a later invention of historians; it was actually three separate wars divided by periods of truce.)
From it grew the legends of Joan of Arc, Agincourt and the Black Prince.
The war had consequences Isabella could not have foreseen for her beloved France. The country was devastated - it lost half its population. It also brought about the fall of the French tongue in England, which had served as the language of the nobility and trade from the time of the Norman conquest.
Yet it had all started with a marriage that was supposed to bring a lasting peace.
It was inevitable really, from that day in 1066 when Harold caught the arrow in his eye.
Or was it the Templar curse laid by Jacques de Molay?
The tangled webs we weave; it is ironic that the woman who so prided herself on being a daughter of France should bear the son that started the war that brought her country to its knees.
ISABELLA, Braveheart of France.
And also available as POD from COOLGUS publishing
I’D LOVE YOU TO SUBSCRIBE TO MY EMAIL LIST – IT’S DIFFERENT TO SUBSCRIBING TO THE BLOG, YOU’LL GET THE CHANCE TO GET FREE BOOKS AND OFFERS.
YOU WILL NOT GET SPAMMED – JUST NEWS ABOUT MY BOOKS EVERY 3-4 WEEKS THAT I AM NOT PUTTING HERE ON MY BLOG.
You are Colin Falconer, the author of Isabella, Braveheart of France.
That’s right. It says so on the cover.
Yes, let’s start with the cover. You call Isabella ‘braveheart’. History has rather called her a she-wolf. In his testimony, her husband the king substantiates that.
Well, she was brave. She might have been a she-wolf as well, people are never black or white.
Because I call her Braveheart does not mean I am taking her side. I did choose to tell the story from her point of view.
How can you take her part in this? She committed regicide! She murdered her husband!
Giving her point of view doesn’t mean I’m taking her part. Besides, her degree of her complicity has never been proved. There were even rumors that he didn’t die at all. But even if she was complicit, she wasn’t murderous when she first came to England.
She has a compelling story to tell. I tried to tell it.
No, I think she believed she was justified. She was far more complex than people thought.
I think she was underestimated by her contemporaries because she was a woman. What people saw was not necessarily what they got. In fact it certainly wasn’t - look what happened later.
When she invaded England she was living in exile in France, her brother Charles, the King of France, had washed his hands of her and she had just five hundred men and her wits to turn the tide against her.
No matter what you think of her, it was a remarkable thing to do.
But you’re a novelist, not a historian. How can you presume to know what she was thinking and feeling. How can you know what anyone was thinking and feeling?
I don’t presume to know.
I’m speculating on the facts, trying to understand why she and Edward and everyone around them acted as they did. It may or may not be true.
Historians deal in facts and only facts. Historical novelists try to learn the facts and then imagine what might have happened in the background.
But you have surely presumed too much. How can you know what Edward really felt about Hugh Despenser the Younger, for instance?
Well no one knows, do they?
We know Edward was defeated at Bannockburn in 1314. That’s a fact. You can’t tamper with that.
But other things are not certain. We don’t know, for instance, if he had a physical relationship with Hugh Despenser. If not, what other reason might he have had for raising him so high above everyone else? It’s an intriguing question and one I chose to speculate on.
But by taking Isabella’s viewpoint you have made her the heroine of your story.
this guy doesn’t like me
Well, we see the story through her eyes.
But it’s a much more complex story than that.
For instance, Edward was a very bad king but then good kings can also be very bad people. It’s your judgment not mine.
If there’s anyone who’s unsympathetic it’s probably Hugh Despenser. But then in this storyline we don’t have the chance to get to know him, we just know what he does.
But after Mortimer and Isabella took power they only lasted four years. Her own son kicked her off the throne and executed her lover. How can she be other than how history painted her?
But all that came later. My purpose was to look at a moment in history before that, what led to it. There are no cartoon villains here. Despenser was ruthless but he didn’t drive the plot, he was an effect of it.
Did Edward allow himself to be manipulated again by his lover - or could there have been another, more interesting, reason?
The villain anyway is the world Edward and Isabella were born into - they are both victims of it and it is never going to let them go unless they find a way out - and when you’re king and queen of England getting out poses a big problem.
You changed the ending! Everyone knows Edward was killed with a red hot poker up his …
Edward_II’s_cell at Berkely Castle photograph: David Stowell
You’d like that, wouldn’t you? No, he wasn’t. But you can understand how the story came about. Look, everyone has their own opinion about history, and for most people it’s set in stone. Fair enough.
But Bernard Cornwell said in a recent interview: “If you are wanting to write historical fiction I always say, you are not an historian. If you want to tell the world about the Henrician reformation, then write a history book - but if you want an exciting story, then become a storyteller. Telling the story is the key.”
I’ve tried to tell her story as well as keep to the facts. It’s what novelists do.
You are Isabella Capet, daughter of Phillip Capet, King of France, and queen consort of Edward II of England.
I am.
You are charged by History with deposing the lawful king of England and then having him murdered. What do you say to that?
I did depose him but I did it for the good of all England. Not a man stood against me when I arrived on the shores at Harwich, what does that tell you?
As to Edward’s murder, I would say: bring me the proof. Others did that, I had no part in it.
But you knew they were going to kill him?
Edward_II’s_cell at Berkely Castle photograph: David Stowell
We offered him retirement, the same concession I was offered when my time came. I lived to a ripe age, I thought he should too.
You knew that couldn’t happen! He was a focal point for rebellion.
If he was a man others would rally behind how was it that I walked in to England with barely five hundred men and marched to London without meeting resistance?
Besides who should they rebel against? I was regent for my son, who was rightful heir to the throne. You’re wasting my time here.
You had an affair with another man while you were still married to the King of England. This man was ruthless and ambitious and he used you to gain power for himself. You allowed it to happen!
You mean Mortimer?
There were others?
Don’t be impudent.
Answer the question.
If he used me, or I used him, it did neither of us any good in the end, did it?
Why did you do it? You had a comfortable life. He provided for you. It was your duty to obey. He was king by divine right.
I was born to be a queen also, not to be shut up like a nun and play no part in affairs.
Was it your pride that was hurt then? … Madam?
How would you have felt then, in my situation? How much humiliation was I supposed to stand?
What would your father have said? He taught you to obey, did he not?
He taught me to obey him.
And what about your son? How did he feel when he discovered what you did to his father?
What about what his father did to his mother?
Which was what?
A woman was not born to be so neglected by her husband. I had a right to his company and …must I say it? To physical comforts. Am I not supposed to say this, because I am of a different time, because I was a queen?
He embittered me. He also underestimated me, didn’t he?
It was revenge, then?
Imagine what we might have been, if he had not been so weak. If he had been … a real man.
Isabella, did you ever love your husband?
How dare you ask me that. They buried me in my wedding gown at my express wish. The casket I carried with me to my grave had in it Edward’s heart. Does not tell you something?
“I awake full of you. Your image and the memory of last night’s intoxicating pleasures has left no rest to my senses.”
Napoléon Bonaparte will be remembered as one of history’s greatest generals; yet the one victory that seemed always to elude him was the battle for the affections of his own wife.
She was born Marie Josèphe Rose Tascher de La Pagerie, the daughter of a wealthy Creole sugar baron in Martinique.
But after hurricanes destroyed the family plantation, she was married off to the Vicomte de Beauharnais in Paris in October, 1779, in order to preserve the family fortune.
It was an unhappy marriage, but it produced two children, Eugène and Hortense.
During the Reign of Terror, in 1794, her husband was arrested as an aristocratic ‘suspect’ by the Jacobins; Joséphine herself was imprisoned a month later. Continue reading
Her mother is remembered by history as a modest and heroic woman.
photograph: MrArifnajafov
Agrippina the Younger isn’t.
She was born at a Roman outpost on the Rhine, near present day Cologne.
She came from a line of Roman bluebloods; her father was a popular general and politician, while on her mother’s side she was great grand-daughter of the Emperor Augustus (the one who defeated Cleopatra) and the adopted grand-daughter of the Emperor Tiberius.
When she was 13 she married her second cousin Domitius who, although wealthy, was - according to Suetonius - “a man who was in every aspect of his life, detestable”
When she was 21 the emperor Tiberius died and her only surviving brother, Caligula, became the new emperor. A man who was, in every aspect of his life, degenerate. Continue reading
