The recommendations I was going to make have all been made, so I’ll offer a couple that haven’t:
Lempriere’s Dictionary, which is a conspiracy plot/murder mystery set in 18th Century London. I’ve seen it compared (favorably) to the Name of the Rose. Norfolk’s descriptions are so vivid that, at times, it’s close to watching a movie. One of my favorite books ever.
Another (and one I’m surprised hasn’t been mentioned yet) is The Alienist by Caleb Carr, which is set in late-19th Century New York City. Clever murder mystery in which a psychologist uses then-new techniques to catch a serial killer.
And, finally, a shout-out to From Hell, Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s take on Jack the Ripper. You may not agree with Moore’s theory (and I don’t think that even he believes it), but it does a treat job of piecing together a taut narrative based on the known evidence. And it’s annotated!
I recently read the last three of these, and I can’t say it would surprise me, but also that I don’t think it makes much difference. The plots move along briskly, the characters of the cast have already been introduced and are developed as they get old (except for one amazing lapse by Aramis), and so on. The historical characters are more-or-less just plot devices, but still interesting as characters. Even Charles II manages to come to life. So I still recommend them.
Roddy
I’d like also to put in a few words for Sir Walter Scott. Most of his works (Ivanhoe aside) take place in the lowlands of Scotland in the 17th and 18th centuries.
If you can manage to wade through the lowland Scots vernacular dialog, you will come away with some wonderful, almost seminal, stories. He was a favorite source for plots for bel canto operas (I Puritani, Lucia di Lammermoor, Lady of the Lake, maybe others).
Roddy
Mary Renault is my number one all time favourite historical writer, so even though she’s been mentioned over and over in this thread I’m going to go on and do it again. I will go slightly out on a limb though in giving my pick for “best novel” - I love The Last Of The Wine, which spends a good chunk of itself teasing out the psychological implications of the practise of infant exposure, and gives a very gritty and realistic description of what it would have been like to live in a beseiged city being slowly starved out. Also contains Socrates, which can never be a bad thing.
Gillian Bradshaw is another brilliant writer, working in a slightly later period (she tends to concentrate on the mid-late Roman empire). The Bearkeeper’s Daughter is written from the POV of an illegitimate son of the Empress Theodora (who may or may not have existed in real life - the son, that is, not the Empress) and is brilliant - I have also recently enjoyed Render Unto Caesar and Cleopatra’s Heir (despite a very unrealistic happy ending to the latter). Bradshaw’s characters tend to be powerless citizens trying to find justice in a culture where it’s pretty much accepted that justice is something that you buy. She’s very good in her descriptions of slavery, which is completely accepted as normal by almost all her characters, but nonetheless she works hard to display all the different nuances of behaviour between masters and slaves, and the web of mutual obligation that can grow up even between people of very disparate social status.
I loved The Alienist but it very much suffered from “presentism” - all the main characters are far too modern in their attitude to women, blacks and gays (I don’t believe there’s any way Cyrus wouldn’t have ended up swinging from a lamppost IRL after killing a white policeman, to name just one example.) Ditto The Stress of Her Regard - very enjoyable book but there’s something a bit off about it historically.
I’ve recently begun enjoying A Free Man of Color by Barbara Hambly -set in New Orleans in the 1830s. She seems to have done her historical research very thouroughly, though not knowing much about the period it’s hard for me to judge. A very enjoyable read though
Read this only as a bad example (how NOT to do it):
The Last Days of Pompeii, by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. The guy who has a bad-writing contest named after him. With good reason.
This book was a blockbuster in its day, inspired a lot of artwork you can still find in museums, and was later adapted for film several times. And it probably commits every sin historical fiction can commit, except the ones involving sex scenes, because B-L was far too proper a Victorian to write anything remotely resembling a sex scene. He could do food scenes that ran on for pages, though, for no reason except to show off all he’d learned about how Romans ate.
And it’s one novel where even a dim reader can spot the backwards projection of modern beliefs–because the “modern” beliefs are B-L’s then-Establishment views about women, Italians, non-Christians, the dark-skinned, servants, and so on. (Yes, Italians. The novel is set in a Roman city, but the good guys are all expatriate Greeks, because Italians weren’t as “noble” or interesting as Greeks.)
Plus the guy uses a well-timed minor earthquake as a plot device. He must have liked the idea, since he also did it in Vril, the closest he got to writing SF (and pretty poor too, but in different ways).
Many of my favourites have already been named. But I’ll put in a word for my all time favourite author, Georgette Heyer. She wrote historical novels as well as historical/regency romances.
I love Desiree by Annemarie Selinko. I’m not sure if she wrote anything else.
I remember reading historicals by Jean Plaidy. She appears to be out of print now, so you may have to try secondhand book shops. My local library has a copy of Madame du Barry.
I don’t hate Phillippa Gregory the way the other posters seem to - but the Queen’s Fool is a terrible book. Georgette Heyer usually pulled it off, but generally it doesn’t work having 1 fictional character in the midst of real ones.
I’ll second the Flashman novels and The Name of the Rose, and I’ll also throw in another Umberto Eco novel called Baudolino, and Ken Follett’s Pillars of the Earth.
A lesser known book, but a real gem is a novel called If I Never Get Back by Darryl Brock. It’s about a guy who finds himself transported back to 1869 and ends up playing with the first professional baseball team. This one is especially great if you like baseball, plus it has Mark Twain in it.
ETA, I also want to mention Gore Vidal’s Creation, though most all of Vidal is pretty good.
I love love love Indu Sundaresan’s The Twentieth Wife. I wanted it to never end. The sequel, The Feast of Roses, is equally well-written IMO, but I don’t like the story as much (the two books tell the based-in-real-life story of Nur Jahan, one of the Mughal Empresses). These books create beautiful, richly-colored images in my mind – they’re just wonderful.
I’ll add my whole hearted vote to the Aubrey/Maturin, *Flashman *and *Falco *series. I also enjoyed McCullough’s *Masters of Rome *but I was never entirely sure why. My preference runs to a fictional hero in a contained plotline set against a real historical background - not to the life story of historical characters with the action spread over years and where we know what is going to happen to them!
I would also vote for Clavell’s Shogun. Maybe not the greatest literature (and definitely not absolutely accurate history :dubious:) but brilliant at taking the reader inside an alien culture - of course ritual suicide makes perfect sense…
A couple of series not been mentioned before:
Malcolm MacDonald’s Stevenson family saga, The World from Rough Stones, The Rich are With you Always, Sons of Fortune, and (not so good in my view) Abigail. another author who takes you inside a different period - in this case mid-Victorian Britain as the railway age takes off.
Dorothy Dunnett’s *Lymond *and *Niccolo *series. The most incredibly detailed and beautifully written depiction of 16th and 15th century Europe (and Africa) taking in areas of history I had never thought to study before - the seige of Malta, Constantinople in the early years of the Ottoman Empire, Trebizond, Timbuktu, etc, etc.
Genghis - Birth of an Empire. I picked this up in a grocery store as a time-waster, and ended up devouring it and the sequel. If you don’t mind getting him hooked on a trilogy, this is a great start, and part III comes out in March (already preordered!).
I remember being enthralled while reading Ivanhoe as a fifteen year old. For a while, it even invaded my dreams. I reread it a couple of years ago and was disappointed how poorly it held up. The writing and characterization seemed so unsophisticated to my jaded eye. I still didn’t mind the anachronisms, though.
Some excellent recommendations here. Below are a few that I enjoyed that I don’t think have been mentioned yet:
[ul]
[li]*Ragtime *(early 1900’s) and The March (Civil War) by E.L. Doctorow. Superb characterization.[/li][li]The Angle of Darkness (1987) by Caleb Carr. If you enjoyed The Alienist, I think you’ll like this one. It continues the series with the same protagonist.[/li][li]*Storyville * (turn of the century New Orleans) by Lois Battle. I haven’t read it, but my wife swears by it. [/li][li]The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters (Victorian) by Gordon Dahlquist. I don’t know if you could really classify this as historical, but if you’re into steampunk, I think you’d love this.[/li][li]ETA: The Quincunx by Charles Palliser (19th Century England). Reminiscent of Dickens in that it draws you into the time.[/li][/ul]
It has one or two spots of mysticism in it, but nothing to make it hard-core fantasy. It is about Brian Boru one of Ireland’s legendary kings. I haven’t read it in years, but it is a good read.
Burgess’s NOTHING LIKE THE SUN was a fun interpretation of Shakespeare’s missing years.
For more recent periods, there’s Joseph Kanon’s book about the A-Bomb (forget the title) and THE GOOD GERMAN. David Lodge’s AUTHOR, AUTHOR is a novel about Henry James (and Du Maurier) and is excellent.
Tim Powers does a remarkable job with fitting his fantasies into known historical events. I’m not as certain about the accuracy of his characterizations. I believe that his The Anubis Gates is also a good view of the same period of history, though admittedly through the eyes of a time traveler - so there’s a lot less cognitive dissonance there with attitudes.
It’s a very enjoyable book - I’m just not in a position to state it’s completely accurate from a historical perspective.
In addition to Barbara Hambly’s Free Man of Color books, she also did a mystery set in ancient Rome (About seventy years after the Flavian period of Lindsay Davis’ M. Didius Falco books.) titled Search the Seven Hills also previous published as The Quirinal Hill Affair. Obviously, it’s a bit hard to find, now - but I think it’s a fun book to come back to, and it does work hard to show contemporary views of slavery, and the brutality of the Roman Games.
I’d also suggest her Bride of the Rat God. The cover and title are both deliberately evocative of the silent movie era and the outre and over-the-top nature of much of the films of the time. Which seems to have hurt the sales of the book. But it’s completely proper to evoke that, since it is set in 1920s Hollywood.
