original cover for the How To

Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson here, today offering another 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.

“Taken to its logical absurdity,” Kim Malo wrote in CTT, “any historical mystery set more than a hundred years or so back and written in modern English is an anachronism,” but using the exact language of the time isn’t usually a good idea. It is better, as Kim put it, to use “comprehensible modern English” and avoid “clear anachronisms, such as having a pair of cavaliers synchronize their watches.”

Short of checking every single word in your manuscript to be certain it was actually used during the time of your historical mystery, there is no way to avoid ever using an anachronistic word. An alert copy editor may catch some, but more often than not, those are words you’ve already checked for yourself and found to be accurate. Check again. There is no point in letting a foolish error slip through. But there will be other words that escape notice. They sound right for the period and it won’t occur to you or beta readers or a copy editor to make sure they are.

Reviewer Steven Steinbock calls word choice a “tricky matter. All too often, while reading a historical mystery, I come across a term that seems so jarringly anachronistic that I dash off to the Oxford English Dictionary to check. I’m often surprised to find that the author was indeed technically correct. But by that time I’ve lost the momentum of the story. I’ve been distracted away from what the author intended. Shakespeare can and did use the word “punk.” But for the Elizabethan reader, it didn’t mean a rude teenage boy on a skateboard. It didn’t mean a boy at all. An obnoxious person might have been called a ‘jerk’ in the 1920s, but encountering it on the printed page might jerk me in the wrong direction. For the author of historical mysteries, it isn’t enough to use words that are appropriate to the period. The writer must choose words that sound accurate for the period.”

There will always be readers (and reviewers) who are certain they know better than the author. Jeffrey Marks has run into “countless readers who want to tell me what I did wrong about the Civil War. In 99% of the instances, what they think they know is incorrect. Trying to write for what readers think they know . . . can be extremely difficult.”

Margaret Frazer encountered this same phenomenon. “For the one series, the main character is a Benedictine nun in England in the 1400s. I always make the story fit the reality, not the other way around. I even try to keep my vocabulary pre-1500, which helps me stay in the characters’ mindsets. And then I get something like one Amazon.com comment about The Sempster’s Tale—that some of the characters have modern attitudes. The attitudes they have may be modern, yes, but those were attitudes held by some medieval people, too, and I found them in my research.” A review of Frazer’s other series, featuring a traveling player, praised how well she detailed how things were done in medieval theater, but much of that she was making up. There is so much we simply don’t know about that period of history that she had to extrapolate.

The words writers need to be especially aware of, since they are sure to be caught by readers if they are used by mistake, are those derived from people’s names and names of commodities. Mesmerism, for example, comes from Dr. F.A. Mesmer, born in 1734. Tea leaves and the word tea did not appear in England before the mid-seventeenth century. Could a character in the fifteenth century know about a drink called tea (though it would be spelled differently)? Yes . . . but only if he had access to information about China.

In some cases the source word for an English word of a later era was in common usage in another language, such as French or Dutch. If your character has contact with people who speak a language other than English, or has traveled abroad, then he or she may have access to additional vocabulary.

Words we associate with murder investigations also need to be checked. How early could one have an alibi? Or a motive, for that matter? And were those words used in the same sense we mean today?

When I was working on Face Down Among the Winchester Geese, I was unable to turn up any information concerning the disposition of unclaimed, murdered bodies in 1560s England. Was there such a thing as a morgue? The OED told me that the word was not yet in use and indicated that there was unlikely to have been a specific place where murder victims were customarily taken. It only seems logical that some procedure was followed, but lacking specifics, I decided to have my sleuth claim the body at the murder scene by saying it was that of a relative.

Consulting the OED to catch anachronisms is a must for the writer of historicals, but the OED cites only the first occurrence of a word in print and in English. Earlier occurrences may have been lost over time. In addition, when books were rare, many words were in use far earlier than their first appearance in print. In addition to the OED, I consult William Brohaugh’s English Through the Ages (1998), where sections are broken down by decade.

current cover

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.