Why write historical fiction? Let’s review some stats. Regarding genre, mystery and thrillers account for 47% of all book sales. Good news for us crime fiction writers! More great news, historical fiction makes up 20% of total book sales in the United Kingdom. Audiobooks are outselling ebooks by a wide margin, with historical fiction seeing a 17% increase in audiobook sales in 2023.

I have a theory about why historicals are so popular. I believe that the readership of crime fiction skews older This is not based on anything more than anecdotal evidence. I recently returned from Bouchercon, the grand-daddy of the crime fiction conventions, and the attendees skewed older. This has been true for several years at the crime fiction cons I’ve attended. I would say that it is likely that the attendees at any panel are, by and large, my contemporaries, and I’m not young.

So why did I write a historical crime novel? Although research into the slang used in the 1920s is a trip down a delightful rabbit hole, the ins and outs of cell phones, computer code, and the latest surveillance equipment leave me baffled and bored. I use a smart phone, and I was a technical editor for many years and have worked on several textbooks, but I struggle to keep up with the latest in modern sleuthing techniques. I think that is why cozy mysteries have an edge over hardcore thrillers. There is a lot less demand for the more technical aspects of crime-solving. It’s the candlestick in the library with Miss Scarlett as the murderer. The same holds true for a historical novel. There are other facts to pin down, but not blood-splatter patterns or the velocity of an AK-47.

I set my recently published historical mystery in 1930 San Francisco. I’m old enough to remember when you wore white gloves and a hat to visit the City. It was a world where high-end department stores ringed Union Square and where you shopped for clothes you needed for an “event.” When I was ten, we flew back to Ireland to see my grandmother, and my mother bought a suit at I. Magnin’s for the journey. My sister and I didn’t rate dresses from I. Magnin’s, but we wore dresses on the plane! And it wasn’t that many years ago when the department stores tried to outdo each other with their windows at Christmas. That was worth a special trip. I’m a December baby, and one year my parents took me to buy a gift at the City of Paris department store. I remember that amazing rotunda even if I don’t remember the present. When the City of Paris closed and was replaced by Nieman Marcus, I had no interest in crossing their threshold even though they kept the rotunda. Buying something at Nieman Marcus, the bastion of Texas excess, doesn’t have the same appeal.

My point is that with historicals, the reader can enter the writer’s world, and it’s all vaguely relatable, regardless if it’s ancient Rome, Victorian England, or sixteenth-century Tudor England. If you have a Roman Senator riding a horse, well, I’ve ridden a horse—pretty badly and I was stiff for days—but I can relate to someone on a horse. Someone is murdered in a castle? Hey, I’ve been to castles. I know what it feels like to climb up stone steps and feel the chill of the walls on my face. Holding a cell phone in my hand doesn’t elicit any vibes that I can relate to, and the ones I do feel are largely frustration and irritation. Of course, I’m not saying that everyone is as much of a Luddite as I am, but the stats say that I’m not alone. Welcome, my tech-weary peeps!


Claire M. Johnson’s first novel, Beat Until Stiff, was nominated for the 2003 Agatha Award for Best First Novel and was a Booksense pick. Her second book in this series, Roux Morgue, received a starred review from Publishers Weekly. Fog City, her noir crime novel set in Prohibition-era San Francisco, debuted July 2024 from Level Best Books. This book won the Gold from the Royal Palm Literary Award hosted by the Florida Writers Association and is the first in a series featuring Maggie Laurent, P.I. Ms. Johnson is currently President of Mystery Writers of America’s Northern California Chapter.

What comes to mind when you hear the word “occult”? Evil cults that worship the devil? Weird rituals where animals are sacrificed? Wizards with nefarious aims wielding power behind the scenes? If so, you probably got those impressions from Hollywood or from fear-based religious groups. Let’s pull back the dark curtain that shrouds the occult arts to discover how supernatural elements can contribute to a mystery novel’s plot.
 
What Does “Occult” Mean?
           
First of all, the word “occult” simply means hidden, as in hidden knowledge. For centuries, people who practiced the occult arts had to hide what they knew and practiced in order to avoid imprisonment, torture, and murder at the hands of misguided authorities. They formed secret societies sometimes known as Mystery Schools, passed down wisdom through symbols and oral tradition, and wrote in secret code.
 
Yet occult ideas and practices––witchcraft, divination, spellcasting, incantations, and magic potions––continue to fascinate us to this day. Perhaps the most famous scene in literature comes from Shakespeare’s MacBeth where three witches stir a mysterious brew while they prophesy “toil and trouble” for the Scottish king. The Bard’s plays MacBeth and Hamlet also feature ghosts, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream involves faery spells and shapeshifting. More recently, J.K. Rowling’s popular Harry Potter stories have captured the imaginations of millions of young people worldwide and introduced them to some of the tenets of magic work––and its possibilities.
 
Using the Occult in Plotting a Story
 
Occult practices involve working with forces beyond the mundane, tapping into reservoirs of hidden power, and sometimes interacting with supernatural beings. Therefore, they let writers and readers step outside the ordinary limitations of a storyline. Ghosts and spirits can also expand readers’ knowledge into realms beyond the physical. In Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones, for example, a murdered girl shares a perspective of the crime from her vantage point on the other side.
 
Oracles such as the tarot, astrology, or runes can give veiled glimpses into the future. Is someone destined to die when the Death card turns up in a tarot reading? In my mystery novels What the Walls Know, The Goddess of Shipwrecked Sailors, and Running in the Shadows a tarot card reader sees trouble lurking ahead for the protagonist Lizzie Crane, which adds to the stories’ suspense.
 
Authors can incorporate metaphysical ideas into their novels in various ways. For example:

• Is a character a seasoned witch or wizard, or a novice dabbling with forces she doesn’t understand, like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice?
• Does a character pursue a metaphysical path that leads him to a discovery or danger? How does he grow from this experience?
• If this is a historical novel, what local customs, religious beliefs, and laws affected occultists at that time? Are historical events, such as the Salem Witch Trials of the early 1690s, worthwhile additions to the book?
• Do nonphysical entities influence a character’s decisions, aid her in solving a problem, or guide her into a realm beyond the physical one?
• Does a character conjure a spell that works––or goes wrong––and takes the story in an intriguing direction?

 
Oh, and by the way, writing is a powerful form of magic. When casting a spell, you envision an outcome you want to create. Then you infuse it with color, action, emotion, intention, and passion. You experience it as if you’re living it right now. In your mind’s eye, you see the result as if it already exists––and you’re the Creator who makes it happen. Sounds like writing a novel, doesn’t it?
 
Author Bio:
skyealexander.com/Skye Alexander’s historical mystery novels What the Walls Know, The Goddess of Shipwrecked Sailors, and Running in the Shadows use tarot cards to provide clues. Skye is also a recognized authority in the field of metaphysics and the author of fifteen bestselling nonfiction books on the occult arts including The Modern Guide to Witchcraft, The Modern Witchcraft Book of Tarot, and Magickal Astrology.

Scams and confidence men. From the telephone call that we receive just as we’re about to take that first mouthful of dinner, telling us that we owe the Tax Office $1400, to the message on our mobiles informing us that the bank has inadvertently short-changed us, it seems that scams have become a part of everyday life.

Fake websites, romance scammers, road tolls that we haven’t paid (supposedly), phoney people tried to ‘Friend’ us on Facebook (my latest was Johnny Depp!), Pyramid or Ponzi schemes which make money by recruiting new participants, identity fraud, as well as diets, remedies and treatments that claim to cure all manner of ills, are just some of the hurdles that we must navigate to keep our money (and our mental health) safe.

The rise of social media has highlighted the problem, but when I researched the incidence of  con men and women, and deceptive marketing used to sell or promote fraudulent products, I found a wealth of examples from the past, which served as inspiration for my latest offering in the Reggie da Costa Mysteries, Lies and Deception, which is set in Melbourne, Australia, in 1925.

Jasper Fitzalan Howard is found stabbed to death in his room at The Hotel Windsor. Initially, the police identify him as a wealthy investor and a cousin of the Duke of Norfolk. However, while investigating the murder, Reggie da Costa, The Argus’s celebrated crime reporter, uncovers a web of lies and deception surrounding Howard’s carefully constructed façade. Jasper Howard is not whom he seems. Swindling wealthy businessmen whilst blackmailing their wives, Howard has attracted many enemies, giving Reggie a host of suspects for his murder.

In my research I discovered that it was an American, William Thompson, after whom the term ‘confidence man’ was coined. Thompson would request that the target show confidence in the honesty of a stranger by handing over his watch. Of course, the victim never saw his watch again!

And then there were the consummate salesmen, such as Victor Lustig, who sold the Eiffel Tower twice for scrap metal, and George Parker, who sold the Brooklyn Bridge to a tourist. Britain's most successful serial confidence trickster, Achilleas Kallakis, duped banks out of more than £750 million by pretending to be a Mayfair property baron. In Australia, Belle Gibson promoted herself as a wellness guru, claiming to cure her cancer with a mixture of diet, exercise and alternative medicine therapies.

History is dotted with examples of confidence men and ‘snake oil’ salesmen who have exploited people’s trust, their gullibility and sometimes, their greed.
 
Just a moment … I’ve received an email. Apparently, I’ve won $1,500,000 in a lottery. How’s that for good luck!!! I can claim it if I click on the link. Here goes …

Laraine Stephens lives in Beaumaris, a suburb of Melbourne, Australia. She worked as a teacher-librarian and Head of Library for over 35 years. After retiring at the end of 2013, she became a writer of historical crime fiction. Apart from writing, she is an avid golfer, loves travelling, going to the football and playing Mahjong, and enjoys reading, restaurants and films. For five years she worked as a volunteer guide at the Old Melbourne Gaol.
 
She is a member of Writers Victoria, Sisters in Crime (Australia), the Australian Crime Writers’ Association, the Historical Novel Society of Australasia, the International Thriller Writers and the Crime Writers’ Association of the United Kingdom.

Laraine has a six-book contract with Level Best Books (USA). She has published four novels so far in The Reggie da Costa Mysteries: ‘The Death Mask Murders’, ‘Deadly Intent’, ‘A Deadly Game’ and ‘Lies and Deception’.
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https://larainestephens.com
https://www.facebook.com/crimewriter3/
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Writers, especially beginners, are often advised to “write what you know.” Everyone has a story to tell––maybe two or ten––and for many people, writing a book isn’t quite so daunting if you can draw on the huge body of knowledge and experience you already possess. Although that’s good advice, I find it much more interesting to write about what I don’t know. In the process of researching my books, I dig up a wealth of unexpected booty that fills my stories with riches I never imagined.  
 
I write traditional, historical mysteries in the Agatha Christie vein, set in the mid-1920s. I confess, I never liked history when I studied it in school because most of it centered on rulers, wars, and politics rather than the lives of ordinary people. But once I started researching this colorful period for my Lizzie Crane mystery series I got hooked. I realized how much I didn’t know, and I was determined to rectify that deficit.
 
For example, while doing research for my second novel What the Walls Know, I discovered that the first automatic gate was invented by an Egyptian guy named Heron about 2,000 years ago. He also invented a coin-operated dispenser for holy water. How cool is that? I also learned that some of the world’s great pipe organs have more than 30,000 pipes and seven keyboards, and this incredibly intricate instrument dates back to ancient Greece. Because the book features a cast of mediums and other occultists, I also delved into the Spiritualist movement at the early part of the 20th century––séances, Ouija boards, tarot cards, etc.–which turned out to be fascinating.
 
For my third, recently released book The Goddess of Shipwrecked Sailors set in 1925 in Salem, Massachusetts, I had to bone up on the clipper ship trade between New England and the Orient. In the process, I found out that these beautiful sailing vessels not only brought precious tea, spices, teak, ivory, and silk to the U.S. in the mid-1800s, but also opium (which was legal at the time). The Chinese goddess Quan Yin, sometimes considered the Buddha’s feminine counterpart, is said to have protected seafarers and ferried shipwrecked sailors to shore––hence the title for my book. Many of the ship owners whose clippers made it home safely didn’t want to pay taxes on the valuable goods they’d risked bringing from halfway around the world, so they slipped them past the revenuers via a series of smuggling tunnels built beneath the city of Salem by the country’s first National Guard unit.
 
Because my series is set in the Roaring Twenties and my protagonist, Lizzie Crane, is a jazz singer from New York City, I had to familiarize myself with the jazz musicians of the period. Before I began writing this series, I wasn’t a big fan of jazz but that’s changed as a result of hearing the greats such as George and Ira Gershwin, Bix Beiderbecke, and Louis Armstrong play. YouTube is a valuable resource for this. If you’ve never listened to “Davenport Blues” or “Rhapsody in Blue” I urge you to do so. For my fifth book in the series, When the Blues Come Calling (not yet published), I learned about the rapidly developing music recording industry, how records were made in 1926, and even a portable record player called a Mikiphone that could spin a 10-inch disc yet folded up small enough to fit into a good-sized purse.
 
For me, every day is an exploration into worlds unknown. During my journey, I’ve learned about jigsaw puzzles, merry-go-rounds, rose windows, ladies’ undergarments, Jell-O, New York’s subways, voodoo veves, and so much more. I never know what tidbits of trivia or historic fact I’ll stumble upon and how they’ll influence the direction of my stories. It’s so much more fun that simply recapping what I already know.


Skye Alexander is the author of more than forty fiction and nonfiction books. Her stories have been published in anthologies internationally and her work has been translated into more than a dozen languages. In 2003, she cofounded Level Best Books with fellow authors Kate Flora and Susan Oleksiw. The Goddess of Shipwrecked Sailors is the third in her Lizzie Crane mystery series. Skye is also an astrologer and tarot reader, and has trained as a medium. She’s best known for her many metaphysical books including Magickal Astrology and The Modern Witchcraft Book of Tarot.

If you want to know if your house is infested with demons, place fine ashes around your bed and in the morning the demons’ footprints will appear like chickens’ footprints, in the ash. If you want to see the demons, take the afterbirth of a firstborn female black cat, born to a firstborn female black cat, burn it in the fire, grind it and place it in your eyes, and you will see them.

That advice might sound like something out of the Brothers Grimm but it’s actually from the Talmud, the ancient, encyclopedic compendium of Jewish knowledge. The sages of nearly two thousand years ago clearly accepted demons—and more—as real enough to be the subject not just of lore, but of law. For example, putting out a light on the Sabbath was forbidden—but exceptions were allowed for one who was fearful of heathens, robbers, or an evil spirit. The distance one could walk on the Sabbath was also proscribed, with a limited extension allowed for one who was forced beyond the standard limit by factors including evil spirits. And one was forbidden to enter ruins because they were often inhabited by demons.

Discovering all this during my continual study of Jewish texts was a revelation. I’d long loved fantasy – I’m old enough to have grown up not on Harry Potter but on The Lord of the Rings – and I’d also long identified with my Jewish faith. But the idea that these two, fantasy and Judaism, might mix seemed to me as unlikely as mixing chocolate and peanut butter (which is why I’m not today a multimillion-dollar candymaker). Of course, they do mix. Publishers have recently given us The Golem of Hollywood by Jonathan Kellerman and Jesse Kellerman, The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker, and The Frozen Rabbi by Steve Stern, for example.

Armed with this insight, I continued to read Jewish folktales (Howard Schwartz is the master reteller of these tales, if you’re interested) but in a new way: as rich ground upon which I might build a modest contribution of my own. That’s how my novel of Jewish fantasy, The Hidden Saint, came to be, inspired by bits of Torah and Talmud, rabbinic legends, folktales, and more.

I knew I wanted my novel to be something other than a typical fantasy clothed in a veneer of Jewish characters and settings. That would have been mere costume Jewry. So I first had to answer another question: what makes Jewish fantasy Jewish? That took me back to those ancient Sages.

What makes their acceptance of evil spirits, ghosts and demons so remarkable was that theirs was not a pagan world with competing supernatural forces, but a monotheistic world. They had to find a way to make a world governed by an ethical, benevolent God consistent with a world of demons and evil spirits. So did I. It’s a puzzle quite similar to the question of why evil exists. A traditional Jewish answer is that the presence of evil is necessary for man to choose good—and that free choice is central to the tradition. Demons and evil spirits also can be looked upon as a mechanism for evil, much as are disease, hurricanes, and wild animals.

But the Sages didn’t just tolerate these supernatural creatures. They used them to validate principles that are linchpins of Judaism (and, in many cases, have become universal values). For example, the Sages say that one is not permitted to allow the ritual fringes of his shirt to drag along the ground in a cemetery, so as to avoid insulting the dead, who can no longer honor God by performing the commandment to wear them. That in turn leads to a discussion as to whether the dead are indeed aware of the living.

To prove that they are, the Talmud relates a series of ghost stories. But these aren’t horror tales. The most elaborate of the set validates the important Jewish values of justice, care for orphans, and honor to parents. A trustee of orphans’ money has died and the money can’t be found, leading to accusations that the dead man stole it. His son goes to the cemetery to ask his father’s spirit what happened. The father assures him that he didn’t steal the money; he buried it for safekeeping and tells his son where to find it. The son also learns that his childhood friend, also deceased, has been denied entrance to heaven because of sins committed in this world. When the proud father tells his son how highly the son is regarded by heaven, the boy replies that on the strength of that regard, heaven must allow his friend to enter. And that’s what happens. It’s a ghost story, but a very Jewish one.
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It also inspired one of the set pieces of The Hidden Saint, a scene in a cemetery about spirits with very earth-bound grief to overcome.
 
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Mark Levenson is the author of The Hidden Saint (Level Best Books, 2022). His Jewish-themed fantasy writing has won honors from The National Foundation for Jewish Culture and the American Jewish University, as well as a Union Internationale de la Marionnette-USA Citation of Excellence, an award founded by Jim Henson.