Ever pick up an historical novel, leaf through it, and fast enough put it back? It wasn’t so much the style of writing that turned you off, but the believability factor. You’ve been around long enough to know the writer neither knows nor cares much about the historical setting.

There’s a reason historical literature doesn’t generally sit next to its poor cousin, the mass-market bodice-ripper, on shelves. One presents a narrative of plot and resolution in its historical context. History is always central. Will Geoffrey save his family during the 1666 Great Fire of London; can Jerzy and Katarzyna make it across the Vistula during the Polish Uprising; will Chao-xing succeed in hiding from marauding Japanese troops during the Nanking Massacre?

The other, well, history is incidental to romance, heaving bosoms and beefcake bodies.

It’s not only bodice-rippers. I once opened a novel written by an Englishman. We follow an American patrol in Italy during WWII. One of the characters calls someone an “arsehole.” Now, no one in North America uses that word. Small thing, yes, but I gave up on it.

Equally, in another story set in the golden age of Egypt, the author describes someone as “a teenager.” Odd that, given the word didn’t come into use until the early 1920s.

I’ve picked up novels where 18th century British sailors swore with a vengeance, especially using religious metaphors. Not believable. Why? In that time, high seas or not, you could be whipped, or worse, for taking the Lord’s name in vain.

These aren’t picky things. They stand out, are obvious, especially so to readers of historical fiction.

Novelists aren’t scholars who study and write about history. Historians write with a macro view. If winter hadn’t come earlier in 1941, Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, might have been a success.

Maybe.

Historical novelists write with a smaller view, the micro. Comrade Captain Gigory Sokolov took another look through the open vision slit of his BT-7 tank. Everything told him they’d have no chance against the vastly superior Panzer III. Unconcerned if his men saw him, he crossed himself, right shoulder first, then the left.

If I write about, say, Doughboys in the trenches of France in WWI, I not only have to write about sight, sound and smell, but about language, idioms. I can, for example, use “bullshit.” It basically meant the same then as it does now. Not so, basket case. Today we throw it around to suggest someone is a bit of a nut bar. To soldiers in WWI, it to mean someone so badly hurt or damaged, he had to be removed from the battlefield in a wheelbarrow or basket.

And last, I’ll address the matter of historical revisionism—I don’t mean, Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter. That’s just silly and maybe good fun. I’m talking about commenting about historical events from a modern point of view. Yes, everyone knows, for example, slavery was calumnious in the worst kinds of ways, but not everyone thought so in other centuries. Even many abolitionists of civil war times didn’t hold to equal rights for all. It’s important then, not to moralize, and put words into a character’s mouth that don’t ring true.

So, the task of the historical novelist is to bring a time alive, set the character(s) in that time, and make them engaging. If everything comes together in a well-constructed way, an historical novel will have, to cite the cliché, readers reading into the night.

Happy reading.