But We Know All About Them: Making Historical Characters Meaningful in Fiction

Real people presented as characters in a fictionalized setting: We’re obsessed with them. Biopics are a staple of modern cinema. Mrs. Dickens, Mrs. Hemingway, and Frida Kahlo all feature in recently published novels and the men and women of Tudor England continue to have a time-defying appeal.

(How to Bring a World to Life in Historical Fiction.)

It’s no surprise. Whether they are exceptional or previously overlooked, these people have stood witness to or helped shape remarkable times. Writing about them, however, is not without its pitfalls, particularly when it comes to steering the line between facts and interpretation. Daryl Hannah was so incensed by the way she was portrayed by the writers of the recent television series Love Story, that she wrote a scathing attack on it in The New York Times. The way William Murdoch was portrayed in the film Titanic caused his descendants so much distress, they demanded an apology from its director. Care is clearly needed whatever the medium.

I write novels set in World War Two and the Cold War. The historical figures I include in my stories are no longer alive and—given who they were—no one is likely to spring to their defense if they don’t like what I’ve written. That lets me off one hook, but it doesn’t mean portraying them accurately is plain sailing. So why include real people at all, and how best to do it?

Let’s deal with the why first.

My novels aren’t about the architects of the Third Reich or the Iron Curtain. They are about the ordinary people whose lives were affected by the choices those architects made. But there is a lot of drama to be had close to the innermost circles of power and society, so I often put my fictional characters there. Which means I have to find a way to write interestingly about men—and sometimes women—whose names, crimes, and personality traits are part of our common knowledge. My challenge is to uncover what lies behind their public personas, so that I can put flesh on the bones of a famous—or, more usually, infamous—name and use that person in a way that drives or deepens my story.

So to the second question, the how.

The starting point is always the facts and they are sacrosanct: birth, death, dates of battles and edicts, etc., are ‘tweaked’ at an author’s peril and even the smallest details need to be respected. Himmler was a key figure in my novel, The Secretary, and one of the issues I had when writing him was logistics. He had a private train; he was permanently on the move. I spent a lot of time deep in diaries, checking he was where my plot wanted him to be and altering my timelines where necessary, not his. Hitler loathed Berlin and visited it as infrequently as possible, so again, logistics and timelines and diaries were a massive part of the research behind The Secret Hotel in Berlin.

Diaries are essential reading for a lot of things, not just for dates. We know Goebbels as a master of propaganda, but his diary also reveals him to be a failed writer who was constantly rebuffed when he tried to push his way into the literary and artistic circles which he was desperate to be part of. Understanding his feelings about this rejection and how vindictive that made him when he became Minister of Culture was invaluable to my portrayal of him in The Lost Mother.

Speeches are also a vital research resource. We watch videos of Hitler and see a ranting demagogue, but what isn’t apparent from those clips is how long his performances actually lasted. Hitler’s speeches could run on for hours; they were often dreadfully dull—trust me, I’ve read them. That is the type of detail a disaffected fictional character can react to. Because that’s what I am looking for as I scour the diaries and speeches and biographies: the details which provide a peek under the surface.

Goebbels’ other role was to preserve Hitler’s mystique as an inspirational master of rhetoric, which—to preserve the messianic reputation Goebbels wanted to cultivate—included ensuring as few people as possible outside his closest circle heard the Führer speak anywhere other than on a platform. There is only one recording in existence of Hitler engaged in normal conversation and that wasn’t made publicly available until the 1960s. His voice and his personality are very different in that, something I was able to use in the Secret Hotel in Berlin where my main character needed to be able to exploit the gap between the public and the private man.

There are three real people in my latest novel, The Man She Had to Save, which is set in the Spanish Civil War: Herman Göring, Reinhard Heydrich, and General Franco. All three presented me with writing challenges, particularly Franco who obliterated and altered the history of the civil war so effectively, accurate records aren’t easy to find. They all, however, serve the same purpose: They act as catalysts to the wider story.

Heydrich’s intelligence gathering abilities add a layer of suspicion and paranoia that colors how my characters interact with their world. Göring was the mentor to my Luftwaffe pilot, providing Christian with a very warped version of heroism. Franco’s unrelenting drive for revenge against his Republican opponents shape the book’s conflict arc. And that was why all three were included.

Not because they were the most significant people in the book, I never want historical characters to be that. But because they pull the strings my characters have to pull against. And that, for me, makes them meaningful and worth a place on the page.

Bookshop | Amazon

(WD uses affiliate links)