The Historical Novel Society UK 2024 conference

Rebekah Simmers has been interviewing writers who are presenting at the HNS 2024 UK Conference

RS: We are so thrilled that you will be joining us for the HNS 2024 UK Conference! What are you looking forward to about the conference? Can you share a teaser for your presentation?

JJ: I lead a fairly hermit-like life in the far west of Cornwall, with the added complexity of being clinically vulnerable, so if you see me wearing a mask, don’t be alarmed – I still love to chat and I’m looking forward to meeting everyone!

My talk on Sunday is Real Life to the Page: Breathing Life Into History. Some will know the romantic circumstances that propelled me into writing historical fiction – I’ll be talking about that extraordinarily dramatic dark night of the soul stranded on a ledge high up a Moroccan mountain, and about my long career in books.

As a publisher and an author and as one of our Final Round judges for the HNS First Chapters Competition – thank you! – I’d love your opinion on what makes the opening of a novel special. What tends to grab you when you’re reading those first pages? What is one of your favourite openings to a novel that either you’ve simply read or one you’re represented?

Reading a book is like taking a journey in the company of the author. I know very quickly from that intangible thing I call ‘the voice’ whether I’m likely to enjoy that journey. It might be the tone, or a quirk of humour, or a conversational style or interesting character that draws me in.

Here’s the opening from one of my all-time favourite novels (can you guess it?): “Lest anyone should suppose I am the son of a nobody, sold off by some peasant father in a drought year, I may say our line is an old one, though it ends with me.”

I am immediately pulled in by this first sentence – there’s so much going on here: a society sketched quickly, a young man fallen into perilous circumstances, maybe about to die (or worse). I want to find out who he is, what has brought about the peril; why his line ends with him. A grand opening to what is, for me, the greatest historical love story ever written. It’s always with me, and echoes have certainly sounded in my COURT OF LIONS and SULTAN’S WIFE.

You’ve worked with some incredibly well-known authors, spent forty years in publishing, and have written several books yourself. What’s an unexpected joy that came into your life from such a successful career?

I’ve made some of the best friends in my life among the authors I’ve worked with. Being a writer myself means I understand their tribulations, struggles and insecurities: it’s made me a much better editor (and I do line edit my authors – even George RR Martin and Dean Koontz) and conversely, I’ve learned universes of wisdom from them.

Unexpected joys? Walking with wolves with Robin Hobb and artist Jackie Morris; petting a vast tiger cub at the launch of Bernard Cornwell’s SHARPE’S TIGER; being taught to fish by Aragorn on location in New Zealand for the Lord of the Rings movies…

From following you on SM, you frequently offer (much appreciated) valuable and varied writing advice in your posts. Looking back on your own writing career, what would you say was the most influential writing advice you received from another author? How have you made that work for you?

Actually, the very best advice I was ever given was by legendary literary agent Ed Victor when I had just been promoted to editorial director at HarperCollins. He took me to lunch at a swanky restaurant, and at the end of it, reached across the table and patted my hand.

“Publishing will chew you up and spit you out. It’s that sort of industry. Find your own satisfactions in the job, maintain your own ethics and standards and…” he paused for effect, “write that story you told me about. Writing will give you the greatest joy and the greatest pain. And you will never look at authors in the same way again.” He took a long swallow of wine. “But don’t give up the day job,” he told me with a twinkle.

So here I am 30+ years later with 17 published novels under my belt, still working, still writing.

Of the wide cast of characters in your novels, who has been your most surprisingly challenging character to write? Why? What strategies did you / do you use for these types of characters? 

The most obviously challenging character to write should be Nus-Nus, the charismatic Black eunuch harem-slave at the heart of THE SULTAN’S WIFE – since I am not charismatic, Black or a eunuch. But really, I didn’t find him hard to write at all: I loved inhabiting his character. Harder to get fully into the head of young Hamou Badi in THE BLACK CRESCENT – within living memory, but in another culture, another country: Morocco in the 1950s, as Hamou tries to balance precariously between the demands of his job for the French regime and his heart and conscience as his people start to rise to overthrow their oppressors. And then again, writing Olivia in THE SEA GATE – as a cantankerous old woman on the edge of dementia, and in flashback as a passionate girl of sixteen as WWII breaks out around her, drawing so much on my mother’s recollections of 1940s Cornwall: she died while I was finishing the book, and she never got to read it.

Where do you typically begin your research? Do you have a go-to resource? Has there been anything that you’ve researched for your writing over the years that made a huge impact on you or a novel or series that you were writing? That changed how you write or what you write? 

My go-to resource is quite often my husband Abdellatif, a born storyteller: a brilliant sounding board for ideas, and an endless source of mystery. When we were living in his mountain village in southern Morocco, he once brought me a chunk of rock while he was clearing out the family house. I thanked him, bemused to be handed a bit of old quartz, before he explained it was desert salt, from the Sahara, and that his great-grandfather had been a Tuareg salt-trader. So that was of course the beginning of THE SALT ROAD – we spent 3 weeks trekking with desert nomad family members for my research. What an experience that was.

As a historical writer, if you could stand witness to a historical event or walk through a specific time / scene / building or have a frank discussion with one historical figure, which would you choose and why?

I would love to stand beside Sultan Abu Abdallah Muhammad XII, known in Europe as Boabdil, on that fateful day in 1492 when he surrendered the last Moorish kingdom to the Catholic Monarchs – Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile – bringing about the Fall of Granada, and heralding in a new dark age. I’d ask him if it truly was because he loved the beauty of the Alhambra Palaces so much that he couldn’t bear to see them destroyed by Ferdinand’s canons, or if he was just so heartsick of war.

What was the last great book that you read?

NIGHT SOLDIERS by Alan Furst.
A novel set in Eastern Europe, in Moscow, the Spanish Civil War and in Paris under Nazi occupation as our protagonist Khristo traverses a world that is falling in blood and fire around him. What a stunning novelist he is – on a par with John le Carré in scope, characterisation, elegance of writing.

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Online tickets for the conference are available:

https://historicalnovelsocietyuk.regfox.com/online

Rebekah Simmers is a member of the HNS UK 2024 conference organisation team. Find out about her novel, The King’s Sword, on her website.