A History of Violence, by Y S Lee

A couple of months ago at the launch party for Rivals in the City, I read aloud a scene that takes place outside Newgate Prison. The year is 1860. A wooden scaffold has been built outside the prison gates, as it was before each public execution. The hangman, William Calcraft, is testing the gallows and trapdoor to ensure that they work. And the crowd is eagerly, boisterously, anticipating the day’s entertainment. All this is historically attested.

The human face of Victorian execution, William Calcraft, ca 1870. Image via wikipedia.

In the scene, I add a detail featuring ragged children “playing Calcraft”: taking turns pretending to be executioner and condemned. I invented this game, and have never formally researched “macabre children’s games, past and present” (although now that I’ve typed that phrase, it sounds like a fascinating topic). But the idea of the game rings true for me. Games of the imagination are how children process the world around them, and how they imbibe their culture. In my novel, the game of “Calcraft” has several functions: it’s a means of including children in the Victorian streetscape; a way of shifting and blending perspectives of the execution-day milieu; and, of course, a comment on the idea of a public execution in general.

West view of Newgate Prison in the mid-nineteenth century. Image via wikipedia.

After I’d read this scene aloud, one of my listeners expressed concern about the scene. Was it, he asked, appropriate to explore violence and death in a book that was written for children? Didn’t it glamorize violence and death, to see it represented in fiction? He was talking about the contemporary young adults to whom my book is marketed, but I wonder if the presence of children in the Newgate scene is what triggered his very real anxiety. It was an earnest question and I attempted to answer it with the seriousness it deserved. The party was hectic, though, and I compressed my response into a couple of brief points. Now, I think it’s time to answer the question more fully.

So is it, in fact, appropriate to explore death and violence in children’s literature? My first instinct at the party was to cite historical realism. During the Victorian era, people were much more pragmatic about death and suffering. Infant mortality was much higher than it is now; adult life expectancy was shorter. A death in the household also meant a corpse laid out in the parlour or spare bedroom. And in many cases, the women of the family washed and dressed that corpse themselves. The Victorians were less squeamish about death in general. People didn’t spay or neuter their pets; they simply drowned the unwanted litters. In Wuthering Heights, Hareton Earnshaw famously “hang[s] a litter of puppies from the chair-back in the doorway”. The shocking part of the scene is not the puppies’ deaths, but the fact that their suffering is a form of entertainment for Hareton. But remember: in Emily Bronte’s vision, even Hareton Earnshaw, Animal Sadist, is redeemable. With Cathy Linton’s love and support, it becomes possible to imagine a somewhat happy ending for Wuthering Heights.

Still, the defense of historical realism only takes us so far. After all, history contains an endless amount of truly gruesome detail. How do we decide which of those bits belong in historical fiction for young people? Let’s go back to human developmental principles. Children learn about death in bits and fragments, starting in toddlerhood. By the time they are eight years old, they are “consistent in showing adult ideas of death”. So the idea of death – with variations according to age and circumstance – is a normal part of children’s understanding. I’d go a step further, here: if a novel like Rivals in the City (which is written for teens) deliberately downplays the existence of death, it’s insulting the intelligence of its readers.

Knowing this, perhaps we can agree to acknowledge historically realistic deaths. But what about violence, and the much-feared “glamorization” of violence? Once again, let’s think about real, present-day children. Children understand violence because they are human beings. They negotiate conflict from toddlerhood. They can act violently towards others. They hear about violence on the news. They see instances of injustice all around them. The real question here is, What do they do with all this experience and all this unformed knowledge?

At this point, we must return to the specific scene or image that prompts the question. Is it an image or description of violence on the news, presented without context or consequence? I imagine that would be haunting, confusing, and possibly traumatic. Is it a video game, in which the hero-player is rewarded for acts of violence? In that case, I see how that trivializes the gravity of violent acts. In my novel, however, the threat of violence is mediated by a heroine, Mary Quinn. She is a former victim of violence who understands its impact. She has strong feelings about the uses and abuses of power. She offers readers a thoughtful perspective on the violence of her culture, and how to resist it.

If anything, I’d argue that this kind of ethically grounded violence is essential to children’s literature, and to the project of learning about the world and about oneself. I’m proud to be part of a long tradition of children’s authors who imagine the world as fully as possible, as humanly as possible, as respectfully as possible.

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Y S Lee blogs every Wednesday at www.yslee.com.

Author Maths, by Y S Lee

The US/Canadian cover (Candlewick Press)

One of the things I find consistently surprising in historical fiction is how very long it takes to get from one place to another. My Mary Quinn Mysteries (called the Agency series, in North America) are set in London between 1858 and 1860. They’re too urban to make use of the railways that criss-crossed the country and a shade too early for the first intra-city underground trains (the Metropolitan Railway opened in 1863). Most of the travel in my novels takes place either on foot or by horse-power: carriages, cabs, and of course, simply riding on horseback. By 1858, there were also horse-drawn omnibuses that, like our present-day buses, plied regular routes through the city. 

The UK/Australian cover (Walker Books)

The climax of Rivals in the City features a fair amount of running around between locations in central London. One of the first things I did when plotting it was create a chart showing the different sites, the distances between them, and how long it would take to move from one point to another. In order not to spoil the plot (Rivals will be published next week in the U. S. and Canada; it’s already available in the UK), I’ve renamed the locations after four of my favourite North American cities. This, of course, is a fiction upon a fiction; the real locations are London landmarks. Otherwise, here’s what my chart looks like:



Timing the final action

Locations	Distance in miles	Walking (in mins)	Running (in mins)	Horseback (in mins)
Vancouver to Toronto	2.7	54	27	22
Toronto to New York	3.2	64	32	25
New York to Montreal	1.9	41	19	16
Montreal to Vancouver	1.9	40	19	16
New York to Vancouver	1	20	10	8

I assumed an average running speed of about 6 miles/10 km per hour - a pretty fast clip for a woman burdened with heavy clothes on slick, inconsistently paved, and poorly lit urban streets (it’s after dark). But I’m talking about the women of the Agency, an elite detective firm. Not only are they are in excellent physical form, they are responding to an emergency.

I assumed a horse trot of 7-8 mph, since poor road quality and night-time visibility again make it impossible to canter. With horseback, I also needed to allow tie-up time and the need to rest or change horses. Riding turned out to be not much faster than running, but riding made it possible for a character to arrive at an important location looking respectable.

As it worked out, the time elapsed for a series of important messages to be relayed was:

- 57 minutes: for a character to run from Vancouver to Toronto and back again

- 41 minutes, plus delays while tying-up a horse: for a character to ride from Toronto to New York, and then from New York to Montreal

- 30 to 35 minutes, plus time for marshalling and instructions: for a large group to walk quickly from Montreal to Vancouver

This left me with a space of 2 ¼ hours, the minimum period during which my heroine, Mary Quinn, would be alone in “Vancouver” after sounding the alarm. It turned out to be the perfect window of time to allow her to take action, imperil herself, yet receive help at just the right moment.

I love this kind of concrete plotting, and wonder if any of you do the same. How do you work out timelines, near-misses, and rescues?
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Y S Lee is the author of the award-winning Mary Quinn Mysteries (Walker Books/Candlewick Press), a quartet of novels featuring a girl detective in Victorian London. Rivals in the City, the last in the series, is published in the US and Canada on March 10.

Freddy Spencer Chapman, by Y S Lee

Now that I’ve wrapped up the Mary Quinn Mysteries, my quartet of novels set in Victorian London, I’ve begun researching a new book. This one’s set in Malaya (now called Malaysia) during the Second World War and it’s been a bracing change. One of my favourite historical figures so far is that of Freddy Spencer Chapman. I’d never heard of him before, and now I can’t stop talking about him or recommending his memoir to everybody I meet.

In late 1941, the English naturalist, mountaineer, teacher, explorer, and writer Freddy Spencer Chapman was sent to the British colony of Singapore. Freddy (I’m following the example of his biographer, Brian Moynahan, in calling him so familiarly) was a veteran of two polar geographical expeditions and a British mission to Tibet. Now, in wartime, Freddy taught “fieldcraft” (how to read tracks, navigate by the stars, shelter, find food, and generally survive in the wilderness) to Allied soldiers, first in Switzerland and then in Australia. With British concern mounting about Japanese aggression in southeast Asia, Freddy was the obvious choice to help lead a new Special Training School, 101 STS, in Singapore.

As sometimes happens, the British grossly miscalculated their defense against the Japanese Imperial Army, which conquered the entire archipelago in a matter of weeks. 101 STS was abandoned and the British, soldiers and civilians alike, fled the colony. As also sometimes happens, Freddy and two companions, Sergeant John Sartin and civilian volunteer Bill Harvey, got cut off behind enemy lines and left behind.

For one “mad fortnight”, Freddy, Sartin and Harvey blew up railway bridges, destroyed Japanese military vehicles, severed telegraph lines, and killed roughly 500 Japanese soldiers. According to biographer Moynahan, “the Japanese deployed a regiment to search for what they believed was a squad of 200 Australian commandos”. Sartin and Harvey were both captured; Sartin survived the war in a Japanese POW camp, while Harvey was decapitated for attempting to escape.

At home in England, Freddy was reported “missing believed killed”, until the day in 1945 when he swam out to a submarine off the coast of Malaya and, as Moynahan says, “came back from the dead”. In fact, for three years, Freddy survived in the jungle, training Communist guerrillas who resisted the Japanese occupation and later helping to plan the British attack on Malaya. His exploits sound like the purest fiction, an irresistible, real-life, Boy’s Own Adventure.

Without detracting from these astonishing accomplishments – Freddy deserves Field Marshal Wavell’s praise as “the jungle Lawrence” – I’d like to redress a consistent inaccuracy that seems to permeate the conversation around Freddy. He’s frequently described as a “one-man army”, with the suggestion that he was entirely alone in the tropical jungle. As the last few paragraphs show, this is inaccurate. And from a practical perspective, such a feat would be superhuman. Yet even Moynahan, at one point, succumbs to the sole-superhero rhetoric.

In truth, Freddy was sheltered, fed, supplied, doctored, protected, guided through the jungle, and fêted by hundreds of Communist guerrillas, and indirectly supported by tens of thousands of local civilians who quietly resisted the Japanese occupation. It’s this part of the story – the less glamorous, unfilmic aspect - that’s sometimes glossed over. Hearteningly, this isn’t something in which Freddy participated.

When he returned to England, Freddy published The Jungle is Neutral, a memoir of his time in wartime Malaya. He explains the title in this way: "the jungle is neutral. It provides any amount of fresh water, and unlimited cover for friend as well as foe - an armed neutrality, if you like, but neutrality nonetheless. It is the attitude of mind that determines whether you go under or survive". In this memoir, Freddy writes extensively about his time with the guerrillas, including brief portraits of his closest friends among them. The Jungle is Neutral might be my favourite work of nonfiction, ever, and much of this is because I really hadn’t expected to like Freddy so much.

Before reading it, I was braced for a man of his generation (born 1907): a social snob, an unself-conscious racist, an unapologetic colonialist. This isn’t the case at all. Freddy was immensely curious about the world, entirely willing to judge people on their individual merits and flaws, and endearingly passionate about food, even while suffering from bullet wounds, pneumonia, chronic malaria, ulcerated legs, blackwater fever, tick typhus, dysentery, and I-don’t-know-how-many-other ailments. Here’s how terrific this memoir is: while reading it, I followed my partner all around the house, subjecting him to excerpts. Another measure of how much I love it: before I was halfway through, I was already mourning the fact that it must end.

I joke about Freddy as my historical boyfriend, but I do think of him as singular and special in most ways. Fieldcraft and wartime exploits aside, he remained open to new experiences, new people, new ideas. He clearly valued intelligence, marrying a woman, Faith Townson, who worked for the Special Operations Executive, and whose wartime records remained sealed until this year. And it doesn’t hurt that he was excessively handsome! (Many images of Freddy remain under copyright, but click here for some examples.) For a vivid and pulse-quickening experience of a lesser-known facet of World War II, I couldn’t recommend more highly The Jungle is Neutral.

Ahistorical Fiction by Y S Lee

What am I doing here, amongst the History Girls? After all, my title isn't a typo. I really mean "ahistorical fiction" and for the purposes of this post, I'll define it as a subset of historical fiction that includes elements which stand apart from mainstream history. I'm not talking about fantasy (set in an imagined world that may or may not straddle our own) or speculative fiction (which includes fantastic, supernatural or futuristic worlds). Neither do I mean fiction that is broadly anachronistic (Napoleon with a smartphone!) or counter-historical (undermining the very idea of history). Today, I'm here to defend the use of ahistorical elements in otherwise realist historical fiction.

The obvious, reflexive objections are:
1. Doesn't that undermine historical fiction as a genre?
2. Why bother with ahistorical fiction at all? Why not write something else?

My short answers:
1. No, it enriches it.
2. See answer no. 1.

Are you ready for my longer answers? In the afterword to Code Name: Verity, Elizabeth Wein explains some of her plot choices and acknowledges that her first priority is not perfect historical accuracy. Instead, she says, her goal is simply to tell a really good story. I like that justification; it's at the core of my writerly impulse, too. And Wein makes it sound so clean and easy. But I think it skims over some of the tricky decisions and border-drawing that happens when writers carefully include ahistorical elements in their work.

When we use ahistorical elements, we're being selective. We're not haphazardly inventing conveniences to rescue a stalled plot or sprinkling in some cute embellishments. Instead, we're trying to open up our understanding of historical relationships. For Wein, this is having an English girl pilot crash-land in Nazi-occupied France. For me, in the Mary Quinn mysteries, it's the creation of a women's detective agency in 1850s London. In both cases, the ahistorical element is technically possible (just about). For my detective agency, I'm leaning on two historical precedents: the beginning of progressive girls' education in the mid-nineteenth century (Bedford College was founded in 1849) and the career of Aphra Behn, the eighteenth-century playwright and spy. (The Agency is also an affectionate homage to Miss Climpson's "typing bureau" in Dorothy L Sayers's Peter Wimsey novels.) These specific historical leaps allow writers a different way of asking the big question at the heart of historical fiction: what if?

When I began to write A Spy in the House, the first Mary Quinn novel, I wanted to focus on an orphan girl without any advantages of money, social status, or education. I quickly realized that such a novel would be a swift, bumpy descent from poverty to prostitution to prison and, almost inevitably, early death. (This last sentence basically gives away the plot of Emma Donoghue's Slammerkin, which I highly recommend. It's a gorgeously excessive tragedy not the least bit diminished by its inescapable ending.) Yet I wanted to rescue my protagonist, not sentence her to death. I decided to play with ideas of power by giving my orphan, Mary, a quasi-realistic opportunity to make her own way in the world: a handful of allies, a good education, a job that was more than underpaid drudgery. She would carry with her the baggage of her childhood suffering, but she would have a second chance. It was my way of using fiction to right an ongoing injustice. It was also a way to, in David Copperfield's words, make Mary the hero of her own story.

Ahistorical elements in historical fiction are a way of rearranging the furniture. They're also a bit like social history's quarrel with the great-man narrative of history: what about everybody else? What if we shift our focus away from what's always been there, and ask a different question? The use of ahistorical elements is born of love and respect for history and historical fiction. As in any relationship, though, sometimes you bump up against its limits. Sometimes you crane your neck, trying to see what exists outside its bounds. Sometimes, a fresh idea knocks you breathless. And once you've considered it, it helps you to see your old love anew.


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Y S Lee is the author of the award-winning Mary Quinn mysteries, published by Walker Books (UK) and Candlewick Press (USA). Rivals in the City, the fourth and final book in the series, is now available in the UK and will be released in North America in February 2015. Ying blogs every Wednesday at www.yslee.com.