Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson here, today offering an excerpt from my 2008 Agatha-Award-winning non-fiction book, How to Write Killer Historical Mysteries. Unlike most how-to books, mine isn’t just my take on writing. It also includes numerous anecdotes and bits of advice from other published historical mystery writers and touches on several topics that came up over the course 2005-2007 in the Crime Thru Time (CTT) online discussion group.

 A topic that was addressed more than once on the CTT listserv concerns how people told time in past ages. One discussion started with a question about the accuracy of referring to the quarter hour in a monastery in the 1530s. This struck a good many people as anachronistic, myself included. How would this person know the time to that degree? Clocks were rare, weren’t they? And expensive. Weren’t most people still telling time by the sun or by cock crow? Or perhaps, by the ringing of church bells? But how often did those ring, and how accurate were they?

a water clock

It didn’t take long for members of CTT to chime in with the results of their research. It turns out that sixteenth-century people were familiar with the concept of minutes and that most monasteries in the 1530s probably had water clocks. Simple, inexpensive versions of these had been available since ancient times. Is there a great deal of evidence of this in period writings? There is some, but I couldn’t recall coming across any reference to water clocks in over thirty years of research into everyday life in the era. Why not? The answer, when I thought about it, was simple. People don’t mention the commonplace. You wouldn’t necessarily mention how your character knew it was ten past six if you were writing a mystery set in 2008. Your reader would assume your character glanced at a watch or a clock.

Omitting similar information in a historical mystery, however, can result in a true fact being questioned by readers. It must have bothered some of them quite a bit or they wouldn’t have posted on CTT. So, if you have a situation akin to this one in your novel, what do you do? Do you make some reference to the water clock—or a sundial, or whatever means of telling time is appropriate—to prevent readers from wondering how the character knew? Or do you follow Joan Blos’s test (cited in Chapter Eight), and leave it out because “the equivalent detail” would not be mentioned in a contemporary novel? The only answer I have to offer is that you will have to decide on a case-by-case basis.

How to Write Killer Historical Novels: The Art and Adventure of Sleuthing Through the Past (2008) was also a finalist for the Anthony and Macavity awards. Reviewer Marv Lachman, in Deadly Pleasures, called it “the best book about writing mysteries that I have ever read.” It is available in a slightly revised and updated 2022 edition in both e-book and trade paperback formats.

Kathy Lynn Emerson/Kaitlyn Dunnett has had sixty-four books traditionally published and has self published others. She won the Agatha Award and was an Anthony and Macavity finalist for best mystery nonfiction of 2008 for How to Write Killer Historical Mysteries and was an Agatha Award finalist in 2015 in the best mystery short story category. In 2023 she won the Lea Wait Award for “excellence and achievement” from the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance. She was the Malice Domestic Guest of Honor in 2014. She is currently working on creating new editions of her backlist titles. Her website is www.KathyLynnEmerson.com.