This article appeared in Shedunnit!, the newsletter of the New England chapter of Sisters in Crime, and in The Third Degree, the national newsletter of the Mystery Writers of America. (c) 1996, 1997, 1998 Sarah Smith. 

When asked why he had written The Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane said, "I wanted to be there"--in the Civil War, fighting with the soldiers; and to be there, he had to write about it. From ancient Rome to the 1950s South, historical periods have lured writers with the promise of events, settings, and above all, characters not available now. The lure of being there is irresistible.

For two years, writing The Knowledge of Water, I lived in Paris as it was in January 1910. Paris is always a wonderful place to be: the Paris of Colette and Picasso, of aristocrats, forgery, and art thieves, the Paris of women in big hats and men in evening dress. But in January 1910 something special happened. The five rivers that feed into the Seine all flooded at once, and within nine days the Seine rose twenty feet, inundating all of central Paris.

It was the worst Parisian flood in 250 years. Two blocks from Notre Dame, the river stood eight feet high in the streets. The Metro was flooded. The Gare d'Orsay flooded so badly it looked "like a giant swimming-bath."

This was a complex historical background to research. It required not only "doing" the Flood but creating Paris before the flood, from several different Parisian points of view.

Here are some strategies that worked for me:

Love your librarian.

Great details come from obscure books. Research librarians can cut days off finding the right books. Librarians know the arcane mantras under which information is filed. They know what books aren't entered in the electronic catalog. Time after time, research librarians have found me great sources I would never have discovered.

Best of all, they can sometimes get you into the stacks, the closed areas of libraries. In the stacks you'll find not only the book you wanted, but the books filed in close proximity to it--the ones you needed but didn't know existed.

Use contemporary sources.

Primary source material gives not only facts but their flavor. Newspaper articles, engineers' reports, and governmental commissions provided facts about the Flood, but their biggest value was the sense of awe that pervaded them. They were reporting an Event.

Manuscripts and letters provide great material. So do newspapers and magazines (Harper's Bazar, Ladies' Home Journal, Le Figaro).

Popular fiction of the period is good on clothes, background and manners. Often the more forgettable the author, the better the detail. James and Wharton are less useful than Richard Harding Davis, Louis Joseph Vance--or Colette.

If you work in the early 20th century, the source to have is the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. (For a good time, look under "Uniforms.") Contemporary criticism and reference (William James's Psychology), contemporary technical manuals such as electricians' or mechanics' manuals, and contemporary travel books give great details. Baedeker's travel guides are wonderful if you can find them.

Mark Sullivan's six-volume Our Times (1926-1935) is pure gold for early twentieth-century America and not bad for Europe.

It is an interesting mental exercise to create a period from contemporary sources alone. For six months once, I read only material on the First World War published in 1914 or before.

They were perfectly right; it wouldn't last until Christmas.

Read later historians

Use later histories of the period to find primary material. Historians who love stories can provide great details. My favorites include Edmond S. Taylor, Theo Aronson, and Dorothy and Carl Schneider. Look at their bibliographies.

Get into specialized libraries

To research American women, start at Radcliffe's Schlesinger Library, one of the Harvard libraries. For medical research, talk yourself into a medical school library.

Many library catalogs are now online, so that you can surf them before taking a research trip. Better yet, you may find resources through them that you can get through your local library or interlibrary loan.

Surf the Web--with caution

The Web is a great resource, and the best Web sources are as good or better than anything in print, but patronize sites run by knowledgeable people, and check your sources.

Ask an expert

Once you can ask specialized questions, experts can provide specialized answers quickly, and they're usually delighted to do so. Respect their time, and always thank them personally and acknowledge them in your book.

Examine photographs

Photographs always say more than the photographer thought they did. There are 3000 different extant postcards of the Paris Flood. They were a huge primary source for me. Go over pictures with a magnifying glass. Note the details in the background. However, many pictures were taken in the early morning; you can count on them for architectural details but not for traffic, and "colored" photos are not reliable for color.

Look at early newsreel films. There is a big selection at the Eastman House in Rochester, NY, at the Cinematheque in Paris, and at the Library of Congress. Web sites such as Google Video are now posting early films.

Read "forbidden literature"

Many contemporary issues are discussed only in whispers. Read "scandalous" books, books published later, underground literature. Victorian pornography is a good source for many underground details of common life. Memoirs published posthumously are a great source.

Use period objects

Objects and environments give a good sense of the period, but be careful about the idea of the period they give. Things of prosperous adults last better than those of the poor, especially poor children. Small local museums and historical societies preserve ordinary life better than fine arts museums do. Think about how period objects were made and used. What do they tell you about the people who made them?

Wearing period garments is a way to "feel" the period. Take care that you wear proper undergarments and shoes; they are the most unfamiliar parts of the costume and will give you an uncomfortable sense of authenticity. For that really authentic feeling, give up taking showers and don't wash your hair or change your clothes.

Once you have all this material, what do you do with it?

Write details down.

Michael McDowell kept notebooks of nineteenth-century details and slang. I have a database, organized by date and annotated with its source. I also keep a specialized database on each book; otherwise I'd forget. I use Lotus Agenda to keep track of things.

Give your characters distinctive historical ways of speech and thought.

Historical characters speak differently from us. For upper-class characters, I use Fowler's Modern English Usage to create a pure speech. (There's also a Modern American Usage.) To check words, the Oxford English Dictionary is reliable for anything except obscenities and women's terms. There are several good dictionaries only of obscenities. Eric Partridge's A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional Usage is the leading slang dictionary, but look in 19C sources as well.

Use a piece of period writing to create a character's voice.

The voice of Charlie Adair in The Vanished Child is based on Lewis Carroll's in the introduction to Sylvie and Bruno. Milly Xico in The Knowledge of Water speaks like Colette's character Claudine but thinks like Colette. (As far as I could do it; I am not worthy...) In books of this period, nonwhite, nonmale, and lower-class characters are usually portrayed unrealistically. Model from living contemporary people but "age" them by taking details from manuscripts and memoirs. (Use manuscript sources or scholarly editions whenever you can. Popular editions are often abridged or changed.)

Use all the senses: taste, touch, smell.

How does a Victorian home smell? Sniff at the back of any unrepainted Victorian closet. How does Paris smell in 1910? Garlic, French bread, unwashed bodies, dog manure and horse manure...but no auto fumes; the first recorded description of Parisian gas-smog dates from the Great Flood. How do Edwardian pianists and singers sound different from modern ones? There are many, many recordings of people singing, playing, and speaking. What did people of the period eat? The Schlesinger Library has recipe books. Use your imagination. Many people don't consciously notice textures and smells; describing the ribbing of corduroy or the sharp scent of marigolds makes your book feel authentic, but don't notice more than your character would.

Use a variety of people, places, and periods to create one period.

A historical background isn't just one set of people doing one set of things; it's not homogeneous. Paris in 1910 contains bits of 1870, 1789, 1600. One 1910 aristocrat's house is furnished only in things made before the French Revolution. (Her refusal to install electric light did something nice for the plot.)

Use people from different walks of life; use their ideas to reflect on each other. The most dramatic scenes can come from clashing points of view.

The more things change...

...the more they stay the same (at least in the quieter neighborhoods). In a well-known place like Paris, you have to be careful to make your city not too different from the present-day city. I combined things everyone knows, like the Eiffel Tower, with a selection of Belle Epoque survivals; these actually still exist, and people can find them if they look.

The best time machine is your imagination.

The idea isn't to know everything (and certainly not to tell everything you know), nor to know just enough to fake it, but to see the period as the characters do; to make them simply individuals experiencing their world, out on a spring morning sniffing the air or huddling in the rain on a January day. That is the mysterious fun of historical research, to see the characters and events step forward from the woodwork you have so carefully researched, and walk through living streets; and when they do, you see with them. You are there.