We All Fall Down: Stories of Plague and Resilience, nine historically rich tales

I wasn’t always a fan of historical short stories. The format seemed too concise to support the world-building and character depth necessary for the genre. But the more I read, the more I grew to appreciate them. Short stories are powerfully concentrated in terms of character, plot, and historical detail. When done right, the length suits the material perfectly.

Several weeks ago, I watched a Zoom panel, “Stories of Plague in the time of Covid,” sponsored by the Historical Novel Society NYC Chapter, over my lunch hour. A collection of international authors who contributed to the We All Fall Down anthology spoke about their stories and took questions. It was one of the best online panels I’ve seen, and now that I’ve read the book, I’m tempted to watch it again.

The book was conceptualized long before the current pandemic, and it’s eerie how well some situations in the nine tales reflect our time. All are set during periods of the Black Death between the 14th and 17th centuries: stories of sorrow, grief, family, love, art, beauty, and the strength to survive after immense loss.

Kristin Gleeson’s “The Blood of the Gaels,” set in Ireland in 1348, follows a young novice as she travels home to her family after getting word of her father’s illness. This unpredictable story has hints of mystery as it showcases the religion, folk beliefs, and laws of the time.

“The Heretic” by Lisa J. Yarde introduced me to a less familiar period, 14th-century Moorish Spain, and to the historical figure of Ibn al-Khatib, personal secretary to the sultan, who observes how the plague is spreading and develops controversial views about how to lessen its severity. I highlighted multiple passages that felt historically relevant and uncannily familiar to today. 

Following a girl as she hawks elixirs with her motley group of faith-healers and fraudsters on their travels through 14th-century Siena, Laura Morelli’s “Little Bird” draws readers into the world of the Lorenzetti painters as the “Great Mortality” lands in the city – perhaps, as was thought, as punishment for its residents’ sins. This was one of my favorites, for its re-creation of the tools of the artists’ workshop and the glories of medieval Siena: “The cathedral is a chamber of echoing footsteps and pigeon wings, lit by dozens of gilded altarpieces shimmering in the candlelight.”

As a reader interested in fiction about little-known royal figures, I appreciated J. K. Knauss’s illustration of the life of Leonor de Guzmán, mistress of Alfonso XI of Castile, and the challenges she faces after he dies of plague in 14th-century Seville.

With the poignantly meditative “On All Our Houses,” set in Gargagnago, Italy, in 1362, David Blixt revisits his character Pietro Alighieri (Dante’s son) later in life. Aged 64, Pietro reflects on his existence and the fearsome inevitability of death as his eldest daughter Betha lies dying of plague.

Moving ahead to Venice (Venezia) in 1576, Jean Gill’s “A Certain Shade of Red,” replete with historical detail and symbolism, is narrated by Death himself as he observes the famous painter, Tician (Titian), dying of pestilence, and at earlier moments in his life. Then, as now, political leaders make choices about public health vs. the economy; these passages hit home.

“The Repentant Thief” by Deborah Swift stars an Irish immigrant boy in 1645 Edinburgh who steals a coin and locket from a tenement he’s broken into and then, as plague spreads, worries he’s brought God’s wrath down on his family. Historical atmosphere, well-wrought characters, realistic dialogue, pertinent themes, and a great ending: they’re all here.

Demonstrating the state of health care at the time, Katherine Pym’s “Arrows that Fly in the Dark” takes the perspective of time-traveling youths who inhabit the bodies of a physician’s apprentices in 1665 London. They find their master’s techniques for protecting against plague distasteful and sometimes ridiculous. 

Lastly, “778” by Melodie Winawer, a tale of regret and resilience, shows how the rapidly shifting political climate in 17th-century Mystras, Greece, affects everyone in a Turkish man’s household. The arrival of plague adds to the heightened tensions.

A wide-ranging, rich collection of human experiences, all contained in a collection of fewer than 200 pages. This was a personal purchase. Hope this post encourages others to check it out for themselves.  You can watch the YouTube recording of the panel below.

Interview with David Blixt (part 1), author of What Girls Are Good For: A Novel of Nellie Bly

It's hard to believe that it's been 11 years since a copy of David Blixt's first novel, The Master of Verona, showed up in my mailbox. This sweeping historical epic of 14th-century Italy was a wonderful reading experience, and it prompted me to arrange for an interview with the author; you can read part 1 and part 2 of the interview here.

David's newest release is another fantastic read. What Girls Are Good For moves over five centuries ahead in time to America during its Gilded Age; the focus is Elizabeth Cochrane, who used the pen name of Nellie Bly for her groundbreaking investigative journalism at a time when female writers were typically relegated to the "women's pages" of newspapers.  It immersed me in Nellie's story, including her family background, courageous ambition, battles against gender discrimination and other forms of social injustice, and her enthusiastic determination to live life on her own terms. She was a woman who set out to change the world, and did. I highly recommend it.

Thanks so much to David for his detailed and thoughtful answers to my questions!

Since your earlier novels have been set further back in the past, did you find it an adjustment to research characters and settings of the late 19th century? Had you had an interest in the American Gilded Age before discovering Nellie Bly?

A passing interest at best. I tend to look at periods by the art they produce, and I’m not a huge fan of Stephen Foster (ironic in the extreme, given he inadvertently gave my lead her nom de plume). But that’s part of the joy of writing historical fiction – discovery!

As for the adjustment, it was a very large one. While I was free to invent dialogue, all of the people in the novel were quite real – no inserting fictional characters into historical settings to fill a gap in the historical record! There is a vast and deep pool of research about the period, meaning endless rabbit holes. What buildings were where, and when? What train lines got her from place to place? I became fascinated with Pullman cars, and also with Newspaper Row in New York. It means there are more mistakes to be made, and for a historical perfectionist, that’s daunting. I don’t like getting my history wrong, so I put two years of work into the research and writing.

What was the experience like, putting yourself in Elizabeth/Nellie’s shoes as she fought against gender bias and the unjust treatment of women, especially on Blackwell’s Island? How did it feel to write those scenes?

That’s the question I’m most aware of, because it’s the thing I fretted over most. Not only am I a man writing a woman’s point of view, I’m a 21st-century man writing a 19th-century woman’s POV. Add to that I’d never written a 1st person novel before, and I had a lot of trepidation.

I’m quite the humanist. I believe deep-down all people experience the same feelings and thoughts. That said, I was acutely aware of not being a woman. So I listened. A lot. I am fortunate in the women in my life, and all of them have experiences that, while awful, were also true. I started this over a year before the #MeToo movement grabbed headlines, but the stories that were coming out at the end of 2017 certainly influenced my writing and revisions. The thing that seems to be resonating the most with readers was that I allowed her to be angry.

The best boon I had was in my subject. Nellie Bly was forever seeing the injustices perpetrated upon her gender, and commenting on it. So it felt right to comment upon them, not by imposing modern values, but rather her own. She’s wonderfully contradictory – she’s this incredible champion for women, but she’s perfectly willing to judge other women by their appearances, and she lied about her age, even under oath.

How did it feel writing those scenes? Thrilling, and terrifying. I was excited by the story I was telling, and how I was telling it. It felt raw and honest. But I was utterly terrified that I would make a hash of it, and that my wife would mock me forever. (I wrote a scene between two women for The Master Of Verona that did not end up in the final version because of her remorseless ridicule. She brings it up to this day). Like I said, I’m fortunate in the women in my life.

Strangely, the scenes on Blackwell’s might have been easier for me because, awful as they were, she had already written them. She didn’t lay them out chronologically, and there’s a lot in other reports that she omitted from her book and articles – it was exciting reconstructing it from several sources at once. But how she felt about it was plain and clear, and one of the reasons 10 Days In A Madhouse continues to be popular today. I just tried to capture it in the context of the life she never shared with readers. There was her Nellie Bly persona, and there was Elizabeth Cochrane. I think the former came out of the madhouse stronger and more dominant. But she never quite lost the Lonely Orphan Girl.

I enjoyed the depiction of Nellie’s relationship with her mother, who is a brave woman in her own right. How did you get behind the scenes to reveal more about these characters and their personalities than Nellie’s own writing did?

I’m so glad you like Mary Jane. As complex as Nellie was, her mother was far more of a puzzle for me. All I had were the raw facts: twice widowed, once divorced, with five children. We have the testimony from the divorce. We have her going to Mexico with her daughter, and living with Nellie on and off throughout the newspaper years. A lawsuit towards the end of her life. That’s it.

author David Blixt

From just those facts I had to extrapolate a woman who would both inspire and infuriate her daughter, a woman who was both guide and a figure to rebel against. Nellie doesn’t want to be her mother, yet in so many ways they are incredibly alike.

It all came together during the trip to Mexico. We have Nellie’s articles from that trip, but she never mentions her mother in them. Yet her mother was there as her chaperone, which allowed me to explore one huge aspect of that experience that her own readers were denied. Putting them in close proximity for months in a strange land led to all the various personal revelations and debates that, to me, are the best part of writing.

Nellie’s narrative voice was one of the highlights for me, since it felt fresh and lively, but also very evocative of the period. What were some of your favorite 19th-century turns of phrase or expressions you came across in your research?

I had the incredible advantage of her own body of written work to draw upon. Her writing is very conversational, likely due to her on-the-job training. Poring through her works, I looked for her particular writing tics, words she preferred, her style of expression. For instance, she likes to begin sentences with conjunctions – And, But– which told me her head was always halfway through the conversation before she opened her mouth. She loves her adverbs – Vehemently, Spitefully, Incredulously– which to me speaks of passion. And she has certain small phrases she likes in inject: Strange to say, Not to mention, Here and there.

I ingested all this information, then let it go. The end result, I think, is that rather than attempting to write in an “oldey-timey” way, I was able to interpret and inject her style without trying to imitate her.

I was also fascinated by things that were new in 1885. Everyone in the novel compares things to locomotives, or electricity. The scene early on in the roller rink was hilarious to me – roller-skating in January, when you could far more easily be ice-skating outside? But it was all the rage!

I also get fascinated by how language evolves. Today we say, “I fell for him” and it sounds romantic. Not so in the 1880s. To “fall” was to fall from grace, to become a “wanton” woman. Therefore falling for someone is not a phrase used lightly.

(To be continued!  This concludes part 1 of the interview; look for part 2 tomorrow.)

About the author:  

David Blixt's work is consistently described as “intricate,” “taut,” and “breathtaking.” A writer of Historical Fiction, his novels span the early Roman Empire (the Colossus series, his play Eve of Ides) to early Renaissance Italy (the Star-Cross'd series) up through the Elizabethan era (his delightful espionage comedy Her Majesty's Will, starring Will Shakespeare and Kit Marlowe as inept spies). His novels combine a love of the theatre with a deep respect for the quirks and passions of history.

Living in Chicago with his wife and two children, he describes himself as “actor, author, father, husband. In reverse order.”

For more information, please visit David Blixt’s website. You can also find him on Facebook, Twitter, and Goodreads.

During the Blog Tour, we will be giving away 4 paperback copies of What Girls Are Good For! To enter, please use the Gleam form below.

Giveaway Rules:

– Giveaway ends at 11:59pm EST on December 28th. You must be 18 or older to enter.
– Giveaway is open to US residents only.
– Only one entry per household.
– All giveaway entrants agree to be honest and not cheat the systems; any suspect of fraud is decided upon by blog/site owner and the sponsor, and entrants may be disqualified at our discretion.
– Winner has 48 hours to claim prize or new winner is chosen.

What Girls Are Good For

Interview with David Blixt about his discovery of Nellie Bly's long-lost novels

It's not every day that a novelist makes a significant historical discovery. During the research process for his next book about undercover reporter Elizabeth Cochrane (pen name Nellie Bly), David Blixt uncovered the text of eleven full-length novels she had written over 125 years ago, but which had been presumed lost. The Lost Novels of Nellie Bly will be published in book form on March 16th, with new introductions by David and other details that put her work into context. I enjoyed chatting with him recently about this fascinating find.  Please read on.

Could you provide some background to Nellie Bly’s fiction-writing career? For example, why did she switch from reporting to writing fiction, and what was the New York Family Story Paper?

From Bly’s letters, we know that becoming a novelist was a long-held ambition. She often referred to other authors who started off as journalists as examples she wished to emulate. And by 1889 she was famous enough to get her paper, The New York World, to publish her first novel in serialized form through the summer. The Mystery Of Central Park was then released in the fall in book form, just before she left on her race around the world.

What we know now, due to this discovery, is that even as her first novel was hitting the stands she was finishing her second. Eva the Adventuress is clearly based on the scandal that gripped New York in the fall of 1889, the trial of Eva Hamilton, wife of Alexander Hamilton’s great-grandson. (For those interested in the scandal itself, here’s a run-down). Bly interviewed Eva Hamilton in prison, and then had only three weeks to knock out what ended up being her longest novel, more than double the length of The Mystery Of Central Park.

It had to have been finished before she left on her race, because the first chapters appeared in print in late December, in the pages of the New York Family Story Paper. This was a weekly eight-page fiction anthology from her book publisher, Norman Munro. It was aimed at women (he had a detective paper aimed at young boys as well), and filled with adventures and romances replete with melodrama and cliffhangers.

What I wonder—because I don’t know—is if Munro started publishing the story without a contract with Bly. She might have sent it to him before she left, but there’s no evidence of a contract. Yet I can see him wanting to capitalize on the huge publicity her race around the world—her name was everywhere! The first chapters appear with the phrase “By Nellie Bly, who is now attempting to make the circuit of the world in seventy-five days.”

What we do know is that when she got back, he offered her an enormous contract—$40,000 over three years. When you consider that she made at most $5,000 a year at the World, that’s a veritable fortune.

I think the switch from reporting happened for several reasons. First, the money was excellent. Second, her longing to be recognized as an author. Third, she felt she was not given proper thanks for boosting the World’s circulation higher than ever before. Joseph Pulitzer never even offered her thanks.

Possibly the most important reason, I think she was burned out. Three years of “stunt” reporting had taken a toll. By the summer of 1888 she was beginning to speak of headaches (which coincided with her first death threats). By the fall of ’89 she was telling of visiting seven doctors to try and help her past what I imagine were stress migraines. And through 1890 and into ’91 she speaks of severe, crippling depression. I think the novels were her way through. Noticeably, when she returned to reporting in ’93, she refused to do any more undercover or risky stunts. She would only ever risk her life again when she reported on World War One, over twenty years later.

As a librarian, I love hearing about discoveries made through research into primary sources. How did you stumble upon the existence of these novels?

Writing a follow-up to What Girls Are Good For, I was looking for a very small detail—how much Bly was paid for her first (non-fiction) book, Ten Days In A Madhouse. I tried looking for any contracts mentioning Munro, just to get a ballpark figure. Coming up empty, I dug deeper into Munro, and noticed in a list of books and newspapers he had published something called The London Story Paper.

Now, I knew about Bly writing for his New York Family Story Paper. Thanks to her letters, we’ve long known of two novels she wrote, Eva The Adventuress and New York By Night (which is probably her best fiction work). But only one issue has survived, containing three chapters of Eva. The rest, I knew, were lost to time.

So when I saw the London Story Paper on the list, I thought, “No, it couldn’t be. Munro didn’t make a knock-off of his own paper in London, did he?”

Turns out, he did. I plugged the name into a search engine, and found that the complete archives for the London Story Paper were available at newspaperarchives.com. I bought a subscription and ran a search for Nellie Bly, and hit the jackpot. Not two novels. Eleven novels. More than anyone had ever imagined she had written.

Unfortunately, nearly a third of the pages were illegible. Worse, the microfilm only existed in three locations—London, Sydney, and Toronto. So in the space between Christmas and New Year’s, 2019, I drove to the University of Toronto to get close-up scans of the faded pages. Once I was certain I had everything, I started the work of sorting and transcribing.

Your website mentions that the new versions of the novels come “complete with the articles that inspired the stories.” How did you match up the New York World articles and her stories – did she write about what her inspirations were, or did you have to do original research on your own to figure this out?

Well, her first novel was clearly based on her 1888 exposé of a serial procurer of girls in Central Park. And the Eva Hamilton story was clearly ripped from the headlines of 1889. So I knew from the start that she had drawn on her reporting to inspire her fiction.

With that in mind, I began collecting all her articles (to my amazement no one has ever done that before). With those at hand, I could easily see which articles were used for inspiration in the novels. Most often they’re fodder for a dramatic scene—a visit to the “veiled prophetess,” working in a paper-box factory, a story on women becoming doctors. Blackwell’s Island crops up several times, and in one novel she even names a cruel, murderous nurse after a real one from her stay there.

When I finished, I found myself with all of Bly’s articles for the World, so I’m also releasing them in four volumes. She wrote many, many more articles than most people realize. Most fascinating are her interviews, most often with women. We get our very best interview with Susan B. Anthony thanks to Bly. The first two volumes of Nellie Bly’s World are out now, and I’ll finish up the other two later this year.

Among the novels, are there any that you felt were especially illuminating or told a particularly compelling story?

As I mentioned earlier, I think her third novel, New York By Night, is her best. It’s a fun detective story with a genuine twist. It’s the only one where I would have liked to see the lead characters return. After that there’s much that’s interesting, but she strikes upon a formula that she adheres to pretty strictly. 

In terms of pure wildness, In Love With A Stranger takes the cake. It’s one madcap episode after another. Often her heroines are kinda passive, but not in that one! She’s stalking the millionaire she fell in love with at first sight, and is determined to win his love by any means, disguising herself as a ghost, a medium, a reporter, a boy, an opium addict, a card-sharp, and a marble statue. As I say, it’s wild.

As windows into Bly’s mind, there are two particular repeating trends worth noting. First, the idea of being orphaned. Before she took the nom de plume Nellie Bly, she first wrote under the name Lonely Orphan Girl. Her father died when she was six, and even though her mother lived on, Bly very much sympathized with orphans. She spent the last years of her life trying to find homes for orphans in New York.

The second repeating theme is suicide by drowning. In nearly every novel a despairing young woman throws herself into a river to end her sorrows. Water and drowning come up incredibly frequently, enough to make one wonder if she was grappling with that idea herself.

As an author who’s been writing fiction about Nellie Bly, what discoveries did you make about her as a writer, or as a person, from reading these long-lost works of hers?

On the humorous side, she never met a word she could not turn into an adverb. And she had a gift for names. Ruby Sharp. Dimple Darlington. Merribelle Harleigh. Amor Escandon. Christmas Cherry. I love her names.

On the serious side, I do wonder about her romantic entanglements. So often love, in her novels, is overpowering, leaving both men and women helpless. Again and again her characters justify the worst behavior for “love.” And yet very rarely does what she describe resemble actual affection. Clearly this is something I’m grappling with as I work on my next novel about her.

But that’s a joy, having a unique insight into Bly’s life. Being the only person in the world who has read all of Bly’s work, if only for a short time, is a gift that a writer can only dream of. I am very lucky to have found them—probably as close as I’ll ever come to finding a lost Shakespeare play. And I’m anxious for people to read these and discover a hidden side to one of the most amazing women in American history.

~

For more details on David Blixt and his work, please visit www.davidblixt.com.  

An interview with David Blixt, Part 2

See yesterday's blog entry for Part 1 of the interview, if you haven't read it yet. And apparently, because I said the word "bastard" too much in that post, this blog is now rated R. You've been warned.

You've drawn on many sources: Shakespeare, Dante, early 14th-century Italian history… All these elements seemed to come together very well, but surely there were times (probably many times!) when this information was in conflict. Can you give an example of a time or two when this happened, and how you resolved it in the plot?

Actually, it was all fairly fortuitous. Starting with the initial idea from Shakespeare, I took the historical events and worked the Shakespeare into it. Since Dante was a part of the history, it was a matter of choosing which version of his life’s story best fit my needs.

The hardest part was not mixing Shakespeare with history, but Shakespeare with Shakespeare. There is some overlap, intentional and otherwise, between the Bard’s plays. There are three shows that mention Verona prominently – R&J, Shrew, and Two Gents. Petruchio and Lucentio are mentioned in R&J, giving it a relationship to Shrew. And Mercutio is said to have a brother named Valentine, who is the lead in Two Gents. There’s a servant named Launcelot in both Two Gents and Merchant. Meanwhile, Benedick from Much Ado is said to be from Padua, while the Prince of Aragon is mention in Merchant as well as Much Ado. On top of it all, the Prince in Measure For Measure is an Escalus, making him related to the della Scala clan. So all of these interlocking plays allowed me to toy with the crossover, and that wreaked a little havoc with my history – who was the Prince of Aragon when? What was going on in Vienna? These are problems I look forward to resolving as the series goes on.

On the topic of historical accuracy, here’s a story my wife wants me to tell: a month ago, while finishing the sequel, I was doing research on a family from Ferrara when I discovered a death-date for Cangrande’s eldest sister. It drove me mad, as I had looked for it ages ago and come up blank. It also made me furious because she appears in MV. So I called Keith, my editor at St. Martin’s, and begged him to change the two passages that mention her, wiping her out. To my amazement, he was able to do it. I’m sure there are other mistakes in the book, but that one would have had me tearing out my hair and apologizing to strangers on the street.

I feel like I haven’t answered the question. I'm certain there's a great story about combining Shakespeare and history. But for the life of me, I can't think of it. The resolutions of conflicting storylines aren’t nearly as interesting as they should be, because whenever the solution came along, it did so without much help from me. History was always the answer. Whenever I’m at a loss, I return to the research. The solution to any dilemma always lies in events or facts I haven’t paid enough attention to.

I learned a number of things from the novel, and it refreshed my memory about others, such as Shakespeare, which I hadn't read for years. Also, the expression "giving someone the fig" has found its way into my vocabulary, which, hmm, may not be such a good thing. What are some especially interesting or surprising things you learned while researching?

There were revelations, and like the fig, most of them were small but fun. Take the word Carnival. I studied Latin in high school, but it never occurred to me where that word came from until I was researching Venice, and found out it was the festival that marked the beginning of Lent – Carne Vale, “Meat Farewell.”

Another example – while we were in Verona in 2002, our friend Rita Severi showed my wife and me "death doors." Maybe I had just missed it in other works, but I was not aware that the living and the dead were not allowed to pass through the same doors. So all the houses had these waist-high doorways called death doors. Creepy, but neat. I didn’t have cause to use it in MV, but I plan to make use of it soon.

The research took me all over the place. I learned about horses, pharmacology, falconry, fresco painting, cooking, numerology, and a dozen other subjects. Since I wasn’t raised Catholic, a great deal of practice and belief was new to me. And, of course, I learned a ton about astrology, since the great unifying theme is that Cesco is “star-cross’d.”

One big revelation was Dante. I had never read his Commedia before this, and because it was the Harry Potter of its time, I knew I needed a deep understanding. So I read a couple of different translations and a lot of footnotes (as or more informative than the translation choices). Then Jan and I were able to meet Dante’s descendant, living on the estate Pietro bought in 1353. After an afternoon of discussing his family history, he invited us to a reading in the Piazza della Signoria, with actors doing dramatic interpretations of Dante’s works. I was blown away.

That same week, Jan and I were taken around the city by a woman named Daniella Zumiani, who showed us the Roman ruins beneath the current city. They’re public property, but they’re underneath all the shops and restaurants in the main drag. So she would take us into a shop, brazenly stroll past the proprietors, and lead us to the basement to view the ruins, preserved beneath plexiglass. That was the inspiration for the Roman baths beneath Cangrande’s palace.

As far as the fig goes, there’s a character in the Inferno who gives God the fig. How spitefully, horribly wonderful. I’ve taken it back to Shakespeare, making the fig the insult that starts the opening brawl in R&J. And my world turns full circle…

What scene(s) did you find the most enjoyable or easy to write, and which the most difficult?

The scenes I struggled with most were the scenes I never wrote. I often found myself with an idea for a scene, but resistant to actually writing it out. I’d move on to something else, planning to circle back later. But whenever I did try to return, I decided to make something entirely different happen. If I was bored by what I had in mind, how could my audience not be? Far better to change direction than force a scene I didn’t want to write.

The easiest scenes for me were the ones that were purely dialogue. By the time I was into chapter four or five, the characters were so clear in my head that they practically spoke. All I had to do was transcribe their words. Which made that final scene so surprising, and so enjoyable. It’s all dialogue, and I wrote it in a day, it came out so fast. I never saw it coming.

Historical novels set in 14th-century Italy are few and far between. Do you feel that this was an advantage or a disadvantage in the writing/publication process –or some of each? What finally convinced St. Martin's Press to buy it?

I’m really not sure why it’s an under-mined era. Bernard Cornwell hit it with his Grail Quest series, and everyone loves Edward II, but the rest of the century seems to leave people cold. Is it the plague? Is it that we were forced to read Chaucer in high school? Or is it that the next couple centuries are so rife with potential that we look on the 14th as mere backstory? I don’t have an answer. It’s certainly not a lack of exciting information – look at Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror!

This was actually a help in the writing, because I had very few preconceptions about the era, and could create with impunity. As opposed to another series I have in mind, where I'll be setting foot on some very well-trod boards...

But this lack of interest in the period was definitely a hindrance in selling the book. However, there were so many other obstacles that I don’t know how big a part it played. Time and again, publishers passed on the novel. I was told that historical fiction wasn’t as big a seller as it used to be, something I don’t believe. My first agent kept trying to sell MV as a romance novel, which it isn’t. Shakespeare and Dante were considered too scholarly for mass consumption (mind-boggling, but true). And then there’s the size – not long compared to what I like to read, but longer than most editors want to buy. My favorite rejection was from a large company who said the book was too popular for their high-brow press, but too high-brow for their popular press.

When Michael Denneny became my agent at the beginning of 2004, he sent it around to many people, including his old cohort at St. Martin’s, Keith Kahla. But after reading it, Keith decided to give it a pass.

Then, eighteen months later (!), the two of them were at lunch when Keith said, “Hey, is that Shakespeare novel still available? I haven’t been able to get it out of my head.” Needless to say, it was. By then, I had cut a third of the book, trimming it down to a lean, mean 192,000 words. Keith read the new draft, really liked it, and guided me through the process of getting it sold. All in all, it was twenty-three months from the time he first read it to the actual offer. And it will have been another twenty months from the offer to publication, a time that saw another 28,000 words added and a few significant changes. I doubt I’ll ever have the luxury of that long ramp up again, so I’ve tried to enjoy it.

What can you tell us about the forthcoming second book in the series? How many novels do you have planned in all?

Ah, the sequel. Funny story.

I’ll start with the basics. It picks up eight years after the end of MV, and covering five months in the year 1325. The narrative follows both Pietro and Cesco, with a little Antonia [Pietro's sister] as needed.

Now, the story behind the story. I finished the first draft of the second book – originally entitled IL FALCO (meant to follow IL VELTRO) – over two years ago. But after doing a production of Merchant of Venice, I realized I could do more overlapping with that show. So last fall I went to rewrite it, and I realized I simply had too much story. Details and characters were being denied their full potential. So I cut the book into two parts. Fine. Had a good sucker-punch for the ending of each, I was happy.

Then the contract arrived from St. Martin’s. And there, on the page, in cold black and white, was the devil in the details: they had imposed a word limit. 175,000, no more.

Why? It’s simple. They were having trouble with MV. Advance readers are daunted, a major foreign market doesn’t want to spend the money on translation, and the audio-book folks are balking at the size. So they want the second book to be shorter.

(Let me pause for a moment to express my pleasure that St. Martin’s bought the sequel in the first place. They could have waited until MV was out to see how it did, but they have enough belief in the series – and in me – to commit to the next book. Cheers to you, St. Martin’s Press, and thanks!)

The only trouble was, I was four chapters from finishing the first of the two IL FALCO books, and I was already at 177,000 words.

So I chopped it in half again. IL FALCO is now books two, three, and four.

It meant finding a new ending where one did not exist before, but that was a lot of fun, and a great challenge. And I was able to find some events and develop some characters, as well as include one major historical plot point, that I had been glossing over until now.

As far as how many books, it was originally six. Then nine. Then I did this splitting, which takes us to, what, eleven? But I honestly have no idea. I know the timeframe, I know where Cesco is going and what is going to happen. But how each book breaks down is still an undiscovered country.

What I can say is that certain historical figures are going to crop up, including: Roger Mortimer, Isabella, Edward III, Orhan (son of Osman), Emperor Ludwig IV, Pope John XXII, Petrarch, Gil Álvarez Carrillo de Albornoz, William of Ockham, and many more.

All this will culminate in the events laid out in Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet – though I may be tempted into writing a coda novella. It’s just difficult when most of your leads are dead.

It’s very strange to think about, but I’m writing a series that everyone already knows the end of. So it really is the journey, not the destination, that matters to me. That, and a few surprises waiting along the path.

Thanks for letting me play, and forcing me to think about the forest as well as the trees. Cheers!

And thanks for your willingness to do the interview - it's been very informative, not to mention lots of fun!

To recap: The Master of Verona will be officially released today in hardback from St. Martin’s Press ($27.95, 608pp, 978-0-312-36144-0). Visit http://themasterofverona.typepad.com/ for more information.

An interview with David Blixt, part 1

David Blixt’s first novel, The Master of Verona, begins a generation before Romeo & Juliet, positing a reason for the deadly feud between the Capulets and Montagues. However, it’s much more than just a prequel to Shakespeare’s classic tragedy. It brings together elements from Shakespeare, the life of poet Dante Alighieri, and the political scene in early 14th-century Italy to form a sweeping historical epic replete with adventure, intrigue, betrayal, and star-crossed romance.

Let's look back in time to the year 1314. The scene is set, of course, in Verona. Dante Alaghieri (the spelling is deliberate), the infamous Florentine poet, arrives at the court of his patron, Francesco della Scala, who is widely known as Cangrande: “the Great Hound," or, perhaps, “the Greyhound.” Attempts have been made against the life of an infant nicknamed Cesco who may be Cangrande’s bastard son; rumors fly about the child’s origins, as Cangrande has no heir from his marriage.

Pietro Alaghieri, Dante's 17-year-old son, quickly gets caught up in Verona's longstanding wars with Padua, following Cangrande into battle to defend his interests. He also becomes best friends with Mariotto Montecchi and Antonio Capuletti, two young men of Verona. But when Mari and Antony both fall in love with the same young woman, it rekindles an ancient blood feud between their families.

David Blixt is a Shakespearean actor and director from Chicago currently starring in the title role in the Michigan Shakespeare Festival’s production of Macbeth. His swashbuckling tale is a perfect read for those who love Shakespeare, know Dante, and want to know how their stories might have fit together. But even if you know nothing about either one, The Master of Verona will make you want to find out.

The novel will be officially released tomorrow, July 24th, in hardback from St. Martin’s Press ($27.95, 608pp, 978-0-312-36144-0). Visit http://themasterofverona.typepad.com/ for more information.

In the afterword to Master of Verona, you mention that there isn't much information about the historical Pietro. After you did the research on him, how did you fill in the blanks?

Honestly, Pietro became what the story needed him to be. The first time I sat down to write, I started from Mariotto’s point of view. But that felt like taking sides right from the get-go. I needed a third party to witness the implosion of the Mari-Antony friendship. Dante’s son, who was new to Verona and pretty much a tabula rasa as far as the audience was concerned, seemed a perfect choice. Then, suddenly, he was drawn into a whole new level of intrigue, and we were off to the races.

As far as coloring him in, there are a few clues from his later life that I could draw upon. Pietro goes on to become a judge of sorts, have a large family, and write a commentary on his father’s work. So young Pietro became interested in the law and justice, owned an instinctual liking for children, while at the same time he was grudgingly familiar with poetry.

Like most of the story, Pietro took shape during the writing. Looking back, I can see how interacting with Mari and Antony made him take on the role of a Shakespearean best-friend, the voice of reason, like Horatio and Benvolio. Here, however, that person was front and center – Pietro is the one fighting duels and making hard choices. I didn’t want my lead narrative voice to be a passive watcher.

But, unlike Cangrande, Pietro is not meant to be a lead in a Shakespearean tragedy. If he has any flaw, it’s his need for approval from authority – something he developed living in his father’s shadow. But that flaw is not Tragic, it doesn’t lead to his destruction. Just his disillusionment.

It seems clear that you're an admirer of the historical Cangrande. Why do you say he's one of your heroes? (And, given that you're also an admirer of Dorothy Dunnett… maybe I'm mistaken, but is there a touch of Lymond in Cangrande's character?)

I feel guilty about the historical Cangrande because I haven’t quite done him justice. I don’t admire him the way I do, say, Caesar or Wellington. But I do feel that he’s been given short shrift in the history books – I certainly knew nothing about him before I started researching the history of Verona. His career is astonishing, his exploits as full of daring as any popular hero’s. As a patron of the arts, he really did help start the Renaissance. So, while far from perfect, he was regarded by his contemporaries, friend and foe alike, as the ideal man.

As far as Lymond goes, I was in the midst of Checkmate when I sat down to write, so I absolutely had him in mind. Cangrande is taller, less acerbic, but just as witty and skillful and sly. Then, in a single chapter, he went from Lymond to Graham Mallett. I was as surprised as anyone.

Dunnett is, to me, the pinnacle of the genre. I have never felt an emotional punch the like of hers. The character that will interest Dunnett fans is Cesco. In MV he’s the object of many plots. In the sequel, he’s old enough to be a participant. If anyone ever wondered what Francis Crawford was like as a child, before he was wounded by life, they should pay attention to Cesco. His wounds will be quite different, causing him to grow into a very different man, but the twinkle in the eye is the same.

I normally find battles hard to follow in novels, maybe because character development often takes a distant second place to the action; I have trouble distinguishing between the people involved. However, I never had this problem in Master of Verona. I particularly enjoyed the early scenes where Pietro follows Cangrande into battle against Padua. Given your experience as an actor and director, how do you choreograph action scenes?

Thank you for the compliment. I do have a peculiar advantage here. Having spent the last decade choreographing fights for the stage, my approach to action is very theatrical, almost cinematic. I’m not interested in relating tactics, but in conveying the story of the battle.

There are a lot of bad fights in theatre, and most of the badness can be attributed to one of three things: the actors are bad fighters, the fight is happening faster than the audience can follow, or the choreographer is showing off a bunch of cool moves with no regard to the story. In a book you can easily control the first two. It’s the last one that can kill you.

A good stage fight tells a story. In essence, combat is desire and denial. The desire is to kill, the denial is the need to stay alive. I like to take the weapons away from my actors and have them work it from an emotional perspective. The stabbing becomes reaching, the parry becomes an emotional refusal. So it’s just another relationship, only played out with weapons. Which makes each fight unique, and intensely personal.

The best example of what I’m talking about is, ironically, from Romeo & Juliet. In that show there are two duels back-to-back – Tybalt/Mercutio and Tybalt/Romeo. These are very different fights. The first one is fun, playful, a pair of guys showing off, not actually trying to murder each other. The second is vicious and brutal, with kicks and bites and desperate lunges, surging the action this way and that all over the stage, ending in death.

How do I know this? It’s all in the characters’ motivations in the moment. What do they want? Mercutio wants to humiliate Tybalt. Romeo wants him dead.

That’s what I tried to bring to the battle sequences. While it’s fun mentioning fancy fighting terms and techniques (Roversi! Mollinello! Passado!), they’re only tools to move the story along – and story is all about character.

The Greyhound ("il veltro"), as quoted from Dante's Inferno in the novel's beginning, is enigmatically prophesied to be a mystical savior of Italy. Many characters believe Cangrande to be this person, as do many Dante scholars today. Yet, as the novel reveals early on, "il veltro" has another meaning. How did you discover this interesting fact, and, later, decide to use it in the story?

It was one of the first things that popped up in the research, though not from any book. Back when I started this, in May of 2000, I was living in Ann Arbor. I had a brief Italian history of Verona that I needed translated. Sylvia Giorgini at the University of Michigan was recommended to me, and she took about a week to pull out highlights from the short text. As she handed me her notes, she said, “It’s funny about Il Veltro. They keep saying the Greyhound, but you know that it also means the Bastard, right?”

When the story stopped revolving around the Mari-Antony feud and became about Cesco, this little tidbit was a delightful play on words that I couldn’t resist. Because bastard has just as many meanings as veltro does: 1) born on the wrong side of the sheets; 2) a true hardass or malicious character; 3) a sword that can be used as either a one-handed weapon or two.

As you know, it was actually the original title for the book – in a perfect world, it still would be. But the irony and charm of IL VELTRO doesn’t translate unless you know colloquial Italian, so it was quickly dropped. Sigh.

You talk on your website about Lady Montague's offstage death in Romeo & Juliet, and how that line inspired you to make her the catalyst for the Montague-Capulet feud. I loved the scene from the novel where she's introduced, as a young woman - it's incredibly vivid and dramatic. (I won't quote from it, though, so readers can discover it for themselves!) Given that she's nearly absent in Shakespeare, but looms so large in Master of Verona, was her character a challenge to create?

It was and it wasn’t. She’s actually a character who is a delight to write, and whom I thoroughly despise. Maybe I’m just a guy who's lost too many friends because of girls, but man, she makes me mad. Which is great. It was also surprising, because I had intended her as the ideal woman – another Julia. But instead she became a Guenivere (a comparison that would no doubt delight her).

In terms of her character, it was a fairly simple proposition. She started, as you point out, as a catalyst for the feud, inspired by a single line of text at the end of the play. The only words she utters in Shakespeare’s text – a mere three lines! – are all about Romeo, and how she’s worried about him. And the end of the play tells us she died because Romeo was exiled. That’s all we know.

But she’s Romeo’s mother, and Romeo is a character in love with love. Where did he learn that? Why not from his doting mater. And based on my interpretation of that single line, she breaks her engagement to run off with Mari, her true love. That’s the act of a romantic. So I made her the uber-romantic.

I find it amusing that St. Martin’s promotional tagline for MV is “Romeo & Juliet is the greatest love story ever told – and every story has a beginning!” To me, a great love story is where the lovers live! It’s this idea that love has to be tragic in order to be “great” that horrifies me – and fascinates Gianozza. She buys it, really believes that only untimely death can make a love live on for all eternity. She doesn’t understand that while drama is and must be conflict, love doesn’t have to be. She’s interested in love as drama, and so she will always seek out the conflict.

Watch for Part 2 of the interview with David Blixt tomorrow!