Author2Author: Edwin Thomas & C.C. Humphreys
When St. Martin’s sent me two historical adventure novels, Treason’s River by Edwin Thomas and Jack Absolute by C.C. Humphreys, I thought teaming the two authors up for a chat was a natural. Turns out they were way ahead of me: Thomas and Humphreys have been friendly for years. That set a great tone for their conversation here.
Edwin Thomas: Most historical authors (certainly including me) start with a historical period or person, and then fictionalise it. You’ve gone the opposite way and ‘historicalised’ a fictional character (Jack Absolute was originally a character in Sheridan’s The Rivals). Does that alter the process of writing the books?
C.C. Humphreys: Writing Jack is a bit different, I suppose, than writing my other novels where it all comes purely from my head. I did have something to go on with Jack Absolute, both Sheridan’s play and, especially, my performance in the role twenty years ago. So part of the fun of writing him—and he is huge fun to write!—is taking some of the situations that Sheridan’s Jack, my acting Jack and indeed, Sheridan himself would have encountered and inventing whole new stories around them. To take a couple of examples: the love of theatre and of theatricality; the duelling (Sheridan fought a famous one, I’ve fought dozens). His family: one of my favourite characters, who appears in the second and third novels is Jack’s father, Sir James (the play’s Sir Anthony) Absolute, and my ‘Mad Jamie’ is every bit as bellicose as the play’s Sir… only more so!
So fun, yes, to use some of the play’s ideas as springboards—but they are only that. The joy is to take them to realms as yet uncharted—and then the novel writing process returns to normal: invent something, then the next something, then join them together!
When you first conceived your novels, did you have a character in mind and then seek a period to place him in? Or were you determined to write about the Napoleonic naval era and found a character to fit?
Edwin Thomas: I’d been wanting (and trying) to write about Nelson’s navy for a number of years. In fact, most of my early attempts focussed on a character not a million miles away from Jack Absolute: a doughty, dashing, unstoppable hero who thrived on adventure, Errol Flynn and James Bond and Horatio Hornblower all rolled into one. He was meant to be extreme, to affectionately send up the heroic conventions of the genre, but he only really worked in an extreme (and extremely unrealistic) context. As I decided I wanted to be more historically faithful in the stories I told, I found he didn’t really fit my needs any more. So I jettisoned him, and went to the other extreme of the heroic spectrum: Martin Jerrold.
26 February 2007 | author2author |
