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William Dietrich is the author of 17 books, both fiction and nonfiction, including the Ethan Gage series. His latest is The Barbed Crown (Harper, $26.99), sixth in the series, set when Napoleon Bonaparte was crowned emperor of France. Gage, his wife, his son and fellow spy/aristocrat Catherine Marceau end up in France to overthrow Napoleon's plans. Gage, an American, ends up working for both the British and the French. The Barbed Crown, like the previous Gage novels, is an adventure that thrills while remaining accurate in historical detail.
What are the challenges in writing a historical novel like the ones in the Ethan Gage series?
Well, I assume my readers probably don't have a lot of knowledge of the period and so I've got to keep them informed as to what was going on in the world at that time. At the same time, I'm trying to keep them interested. I do a lot of research on oddball details, and I try to make the era come alive. It's a very colorful period. That's why I like to set books there, in terms of a lot of political upheaval. The uniforms were gorgeous, the dresses were gorgeous, the ships were gorgeous... and so, for a novice, it's a fun place to be. That's one challenge.
Another challenge is trying to bring a contemporary eye to the story. Ethan Gage is an American hero back in 1804, but at the same time, he's looking at the world in service of the reader. So he's got a little bit of an irreverent take on things. And it's really my attempt to explain both the similarities between the two time periods as well as the differences.
How do you research these books?
I start with general histories of the period and do kind of a timeline. You know, what was going on in such and such a year, because the series is chronological; the next book starts roughly where the last one left off. I try to find something interesting going on in that year where I can put Ethan, and so I've moved him around on the map quite a bit. And then I start reading biographies of some of the real-life people involved, looking for people who are interesting: Are there things I can quote, are there things I can take from their life? I look for memoirs of a period, different accounts of people who lived then who wrote about what was going on. I travel to the places I'm talking about.
For The Barbed Crown, for example, we spent some time in Paris going to some of the sites that were described in the novel. I went over to England and went to the Nelson ship Victory, which is still in Portsmouth Harbor, to get a feel for a warship of that time. And then I try to pull all those details together. I remember at the shipyard, I went to the restroom and over the urinal was a poster explaining what the seamen used for toilet paper--I was determined somehow to fit that into the book in one place or another.
What about the Napoleonic era inspires you?
The evolution of that is kind of interesting. I had enjoyed other series set in that period, like those of Bernard Cornwell or Patrick O'Brien or Forester with the Hornblower series. And so my idea was to have an American hero; the initial idea was that he was going to interact with the British side, because that's usually what I had been reading in these books, but that wasn't working. And I decided then to switch him over to the French side, and I had always been fascinated with Napoleon's invasion of Egypt (which is the subject of the first book in the series, Napoleon's Pyramids). I thought that would be an interesting backdrop. And it was the same time coincidentally that we were getting involved in the second war in Iraq. So I found it timely as well, because there were a lot of parallels between what the French experienced and what we did. Once I got into the era, I got more and more interested in it; then the characters seemed successful, people were willing to read another book about them. And so the thing has grown since then.
I had intended to write a stand-alone novel, but now my ambition is a little bit greater. I'm trying to tell these good, entertaining adventure stories but I'm trying to slowly create a portrait of the entire world at that time. So Ethan has been in Europe a lot, but he's also been in North America, he's been in the Caribbean. In future books, maybe we can send him some other places as well and create this broad overview of what life was like then.
I see it as the time the modern world was invented. Napoleon was the one who really broke the mold of hereditary monarchy and started us on the path to present-day leadership. Our modern economic system, our industrial system, our military system--all of those things were kind of started in this period and so it's interesting to go back and see those beginnings and learn more about our own era.
What role did the Barbed Crown play in the crowning of Napoleon in real life?
What's factual is that Napoleon crowned himself when he named himself emperor. That story itself is interesting, because of course the French revolution had overthrown the monarchy, and it was a radical revolution, every bit as radical as the Russian Revolution. And then the people reacted against that and so this military dictator came along, Bonaparte, and they were ready for stability. The irony, then, was the revolution had produced a whole new emperor and royal family.
But then the mystery in history has been, "Why did Napoleon go through the bother of inviting the pope to Paris to attend the crowning?" The conventional way was that the pope would put the crown on his head but, at the last minute, Bonaparte decided to do it himself. Napoleon never really left an account of that himself, so it allows the novel a little bit of room for invention.
So in researching the book, I ran across the fact that there is a crown of thrones that's kept at Notre Dame that by legend was the original crown of thorns that the Romans put on Jesus's head. This thing actually exists, and it's still brought out once a month and displayed, and I thought, "Well, how fun to somehow pull that crown into my story." And as you know, it plays a key role in this coronation incident, but putting the two crowns together was solely my invention. But I have a lot of fun in suggesting that it could have happened this way. --Rob LeFebvre, freelance writer and editor