The Costco Connection - September 2017

A Column of Fire (Item #1182131, 9/12) is available in most Costco warehouses.

Journalist-turned-novelist Ken Follett has written both series and stand-alone novels, including

The Century Trilogy

and Whiteout. This month the third book in the

Kingsbridge series,

A Column of Fire, will be published. It begins in ;;;; and follows the star-crossed romance between Ned Willard and Margery Fitzgerald over half a century. In the meantime, Europe turns against England when Elizabeth Tudor becomes queen and finds herself beset by plots to dethrone her. The measures taken to protect her prove to be the beginning of the British secret service.

In this Connection

exclusive, Follett writes about the research that fueled the rich details of

A Column of Fire.

—Stephanie E. Ponder

BY KEN FOLLETT

THE NOVEL I am most known for is Pillars of the Earth, a story set in the Middle Ages about the building of a cathedral. Many years later I wrote the sequel, World Without End, which is about the Black Death, set in Kingsbridge ;;; years after the building of the cathedral. It’s been ;; years since I published that book, and this September, Viking will publish the third book in the Kingsbridge series, A Column of Fire, also set in Kingsbridge, but during Queen Elizabeth I’s tumultuous reign.

Readers enjoy transporting themselves to another time and place, to get lost in a world of queens and knights, heretics and heroes. But these stories would crumble if I didn’t get the history right. And that does not come easily. I used ;;; books in my research for A Column of Fire. Many were just for reference, but I read about half—more than ;;; books—all the way through.

I started with the monumental Oxford History of England—;; authoritative volumes. The eighth volume, titled The Reign of Elizabeth, gave me the rigid factual framework of names and dates, battles and assassinations and massacres, within which I had to construct my story.

The books most relevant to A Column of Fire are the ones about spymaster Francis Walsingham and the organization of secret agents and code breakers he created for Queen Elizabeth, especially the three-volume Mr Secretary Walsingham series, by Conyers Read. Everything they did was secret, of course, so it is difficult to ferret out the details, but several historians with a leaning toward detective work have uncovered a great deal of information.

I was surprised to find out that so many his-
torians of this period have a religious bias, either
Protestant or Catholic. H. Noel Williams made
no pretense of objectivity about the powerful
Guise family from Lorraine when he titled his
book The Brood of False Lorraine. My friend
Antonia Fraser seems partial to the subject of her
Mary Queen of Scots, an affectionate biography
of a monarch who really never made a good deci-
sion in her life.

Often the hardest facts to find are the more commonplace details of everyday existence— underwear, cutlery, coins, toilets, hairdressing, shops, booze—and for these, The Time Traveler’s Guide to Elizabethan England, by Ian Mortimer, is quite marvelous.

Novels of the period can be helpful with this kind of thing, but unfortunately there are no ;;th-century novels: The form had not yet been invented. Happily, we have the plays of Shakespeare, who was writing during the time of A Column of Fire. For example, he gives a useful list of horse illnesses in The Taming of the Shrew—lampas, windgalls and spavins. And Falstaff’s gargantuan appetites tell us about eggs with butter, fat capons (chickens) and sack, a strong wine from Spain.

How far can a horse be ridden in a day? I found out from Horse and Man in Early Modern England, by Peter Edwards. (Answer: It depends on the horse.) What were guns like in the ;;th century? See Firearms: A Global History to ;;;;, by Kenneth Chase. What kind of tableware did they have—had forks been invented then? I found a French book, Festins de le Renaissance: Cuisine et Trésors de la table (Renaissance Feasts: Cookery and Treasures of the Table), by Élisabeth Latrémolière, with lots of pictures.

Part of what readers enjoy is the interesting background detail, but it has to be accurate, and I couldn’t manage that without history books. Hundreds of historians have toiled all their lives to make it easier for me, and I raise a glass to them in gratitude for their work. C