I recently
read Stephen Hunter’s, The Third Bullet,
which is a novel about the John F. Kennedy assassination. Through the years, I
have read a half dozen nonfiction books on the assassination. Although I didn’t
completely accept the conspiracy motivation presented by Hunter, I think he
made a better case for a second shooter than any of the other books on the subject.
Hunter clearly sees the incongruities in the official portrayal of events,
imagines alternative scenarios, and then figures out what most likely happened
given the existing record. He does an exceptional job while presenting a
standard Bob Lee Swagger suspense thriller.
The Third Bullet made me think: Do novelists see the
past better than historians?
I’m
prejudice, but I believe so. Historians search for facts, facts that can be
verified with attributable sources. They need those tiny footnotes for credibility.
Novelists naturally go to the character of people, especially if those people are
orchestrating events. Novelists search for motivation. The novelist looks for
the thread of a story, which will always be about people and what drives them. They
focus on why, not what. Historians at times engage in
conjecture, but good historians put plenty of qualifiers around anything that
cannot be proven with hard evidence.
Everything
that happens in the world is not documented. Worse, much of what is recorded is
inaccurate. Politicians, businessmen, and luminaries dissemble, obfuscate, and
sometimes outright lie. But if someone of importance spoke it or wrote it and
it becomes old enough, it takes on the stature of a documented fact. This is
where a good novelist has an advantage over the historian: what historians see
as documentation, the novelist looks at with a skeptical eye. The novelist
imagines the circumstances that might have caused that particular piece of
evidence to be created. And the novelist does not always come to the same
conclusion as the historian.
My book, Tempest at Dawn is a dramatization of
the 1787 Constitutional Convention. Although George Washington was president of
the convention, he only spoke one time at the very end. Since there is no
record of Washington being engaged in the proceedings, most historians dismiss
him as a figurehead. I looked at Washington’s character and knew he would never
sit on the sidelines, especially when it looked like the entire nation was
about to collapse. Once I came to that conclusion, I found ample evidence of
him working behind the scenes. Why would he work secretly? My guess is that he didn’t
want to appear to be architecting the new government he would undoubtedly lead.
I could be wrong … but I don’t think so.
I believe a
good novelist can digest facts, get to know the character of the players, and draw
respectable conclusions about what probably happened. The novelist can make
leaps of logic that would tarnish the reputation of an academic scholar. It’s
true that many novelists throw facts to the wayside and tell the story the way
they wanted it to happen. Stephen Hunter is not one of those types of authors.
His books are fictional, but grounded in solid research.
Here’s the
bottom line, authors can’t write novels about historical events without
historians, but historians can get along quite fine without novelists. So,
thank you to all the historians who have helped me write better books.