Edward Parr’s Tamanrasset:
Crossroads of the Nomad
Blog Post 2
The
Importance of Research to Historical Fiction Writers
Research
is so important when writing historical fiction. Certainly you can write
fantasy fiction that looks like history, something like Game of Thrones
that seems familiar but is actually a fantasy world, if that’s what you like. But
I also recently heard a very popular historical fiction author talk about how
he sits down and writes his books with no research at all – he just writes and
lets his staff come up with the history to plug in later. Aha! I thought.
That’s why his books read like magical realism! He’s literally just making it
up with no grounding in the facts! That is not the way I do it.
I think
most historical fiction authors find something compelling in an era of the past
that they want to know more about, and the benefit of writing a story in such
an era is that the author can imagine being there and experiencing it first
hand. Research is actually one of the fun parts of the writing. And I think
there’s a certain obligation to write history accurately. I’m not a historian,
and I won’t get everything right, but I want my stories to have some “capital
T” Truth to them, and the only way I personally can do that is to understand
what really was going on and try to be respectful of that. I want my stories
grounded in the actual events that changed the world.
When I
wrote my first series of novels, a trilogy about the First World War called Kingdoms
Fall, I did a lot of research on the war and the people and countries that
fought. There were certain events that just spoke to me as being crucial to any
history of the war, and those events coalesced into a story. I had great
history books, documentaries, photographs, even early film recordings, not to
mention countless memoirs all available online. Once you figure out which
particulars you need to know, you can start researching them in depth. I also
like to use Google Earth to plunk the little yellow Pegman down somewhere and
just look around the real place. You can go almost anywhere in the world from
your desk. The one thing you can’t do is travel to the past, so all of these
are just substitutes for what the author has to imagine.
My new
novel Tamanrasset: Crossroads of the Nomad, is inspired by the
French Foreign Legion adventure stories set in northern Africa in the early 20th
century. While I was drawn to the format, I did not want to write anything
pro-colonialist or anti-Muslim – biases which are deeply embedded in many of
the stories written in that time period. My answer was to write a novel based
on the hard facts we know now – that colonialism was doom to failure, that
generations of war would follow, that good guys were not all good, but the bad
guys were also not so good. It turned out that research on that time period was
pretty difficult (much of the source material is written in French, for
example), but I didn’t want be subject to claims that I was white-washing
history or exaggerating the facts or biased. I also knew that I wanted to
include Muslim characters but I didn’t think I could do so appropriately
without a basic understanding of the practice of Islam (on the other hand, I’m
not interested in endorsing any religion). And then I had to figure out what
drew me to the era and what specific events would be relevant to the novel I
wanted to write. It took me several years to prepare to begin writing, but I
think all that research shows in the final result.
Research helps the author to build a real world and create a story faithful to the Truth, and while difficult, it is part of the fun of a writing project and there are many sources of information available all around.
Genre:
About the Book:
TAMANRASSET is historical fiction set on the edge of the Sahara as the ancient world begins to fade and great empires collide. Four strangers—a mature Foreign Legionnaire, a Sharif’s wrathful son, an ambitious American archaeologist, and an abandoned Swedish widow—become adrift and isolated, but when their paths intersect, the fragile connections between them tell a story of survival and fate on the edge of the abyss. Blending the sweep of classic adventure with the horror of a great historical calamities, Edward Parr’s TAMANRASSET is a saga about the crossroads where nomads meet.
Read Excerpt Three:
The Basilica of Douïmès was quite a lovely site (and fairly peaceful considering the dozen native workmen who were lazily taking measurements and digging pilot holes at Ren’s direction) yet it was not a place for great discoveries. Ren thought about the Byzantine necropolis behind the basilica which seemed such a promising site; unfortunately, Père Delattre had reserved it for his own excavations. Ren wondered how much it would cost to drain the flooded marsh in the Salammbô district nearby where the Temple of Tanit was rumored to be located. As he walked about and reviewed the work of the diggers, Ren became increasingly irritated. Ordinarily, he thought, the Tunisian diggers preferred to do anything but work–they showed a greater interest than the professors in the minutest fragment of pottery and would stand around listening in awe to an academic discussion of a thing they’d never heard of before. Their picks moved with a balletic slowness of motion intended to keep even the most delicate relic safe from harm. Ren had to remind himself again that he was lucky to have earned this position: He had no surviving family, his father had been no one of importance, he had been raised on money left for him in trust. He was lucky to have ended up in England after being orphaned, lucky to have worked with Petrie in Egypt, and lucky to be in Carthage. Nevertheless, he chafed at Delattre’s pedantry and the slow pace of the work.
© 2025 by Edward Parr and Edwardian Press (New Orleans, Louisiana)
Edward (“Ted”) Parr studied playwriting at New York University in the 1980’s, worked with artists Robert Wilson, Anne Bogart, and the Bread and Puppet Theater, and staged his own plays Off-Off-Broadway, including Trask, Mythographia, Jason and Medea, Rising and an original translation of Oedipus Rex before pursuing a lengthy career in the law and public service. He published his Kingdoms Fall trilogy of World War One espionage adventure novels which were collectively awarded Best First Novel and Best Historical Fiction Novel by Literary Classics in 2016. He has always had a strong interest in expanding narrative forms, and in his novel writing, he explores older genres of fiction (like the pulp fiction French Foreign Legion adventures or early espionage fiction) as inspiration to examine historical periods of transformation. His main writing inspirations are Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Bernard Cornwell, Georges Surdez, and Patrick O’Brien.
Socials:
Website: https://edwardparrbooks.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/edward-parr-5808b15/
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7369165.Edward_Parr
Amazon Author: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Edward-Parr/author/B00GACO3NC?ccs_id=a023fe74-dd9a-429f-b56a-5cfe148dafc5
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/user/DryCar9119AB/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/edwardparrbooks/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61576965808471
Enter the Giveaway:
One randomly chosen winner via rafflecopter will win a $25 Amazon/BN.com gift card.
Thanks so much for inviting me to post on your blog today!
ReplyDeleteYou're welcome! Happy to have you :)
Delete