“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”
L.P. Hartley’s opening line to The Go-Between is so well known that it has become a cliché. But how old does the past have to be before it becomes foreign, and how should we describe the territory when a novelist ventures only thirty or forty years back?
We could perhaps define it as border country, half-familiar country, shifting ground, the near past or, in reference to technology, the analogue past. I prefer to call it “treacherous territory” when looking at it from the writer’s perspective. My novels aren’t historical novels. But I find myself having to research them as though they were, sometimes even more meticulously than if I were writing, say, a novel set in Tudor England or imperial Rome.
With Wolf Hall, for example, there are obviously immense difficulties of historical reconstruction, but anachronism has hard edges. Thomas Cromwell cannot use an iPhone, travel by train or read a newspaper. Writer and reader recognise those boundaries immediately.
The recent past is more treacherous because most anachronisms are plausible. A character could have used a mobile phone in 1990, but what sort, where, and at what cost? If the character is the CEO of a medium-sized company making short calls from a car phone, that’s fine. Put one in the hands of a road sweeper and it becomes totally implausible.
Likewise, a character might use a computer, but what software? What information is accessible through it? How does it appear on the screen?
These were challenges I faced with my most recent novel, A Residue of Murder. The novel is set in 1992–93 and involves computer hackers, wine connoisseurs, a data analyst and a researcher into organised crime pooling their expertise to uncover transnational fraud. But how would you have hacked into a relational database in 1993? What types of wine were being exported from Germany to the UK that year? What business analytics software was available, and to whom? What was known about Mafia operations in various parts of Europe?
A mistake on any of these points might be overlooked by ninety-nine per cent of readers. But I know for sure that there are readers who would pick up on the slightest error, because the truth is part of their lived experience.
Add to this the further complications of location, and the research must be even more meticulous.
A Residue of Murder is divided into three parts. Part 1 is set in Brighton. Rather easier, because I lived in Brighton at the time. Although that can also be a trap: human memory plays tricks. Did I actually visit the Royal Pavilion on a certain day in a certain month, or was it closed to visitors for renovations?
Part 2 is set in Heidelberg. I moved there in February 1995 and woke to find firefighters piling up sandbags in the entrance to the hotel. “The river will break its banks. Happens most years.” But did it happen in early 1993, when the novel is set?
Part 3, and the climax, takes place in Puglia, a region of Italy I have visited recently and of which I have grown very fond. I recall an encounter with a captain of the Carabinieri. But research revealed that the uniform changed significantly in 1998, when the house of Armani introduced a new look: cleaner lines, unpadded shoulders, a tapered waist, premium textiles and, most noticeably, a shift from dark blue (blu turchio) to jet black.
The uniform I saw was not the uniform of 1993, although my English character could nevertheless authentically remark that in Italy, public authority is treated as an exercise in haute couture.
There are many more mundane examples. A shop, road, technology or expression that I vividly associate with “the early nineties” may actually date from 1996.
Slang is particularly dangerous because we rarely remember when we first heard an expression. Once something has been in our vocabulary for twenty or thirty years, it can feel as though we have always known it. My daughter read an early draft of my first novel, Lamb to the Slaughter, and pointed out, quite rightly, that the female characters had too little agency. “It’s a bit of a sausage fest,” she said.
I thought I’d use the term when introducing a new female character in the novel. Fortunately, I checked. Although there is evidence of American use in the 1990s, I could find no evidence that “sausage fest” was in use in Britain in 1989. It certainly wasn’t an expression I could safely put into the mouth of a young woman in Brighton. (Not even among Brighton’s lesbian community!)
Similarly, in my latest novel, I was tempted to use the term “cyber-attack” to describe the activities of my computer hackers. But this was unknown in 1992. At the time, it would more likely have been described as “computer sabotage”, a “computer virus”, a “malicious computer program”, or simply a disruption to computer systems.
Significantly, in the early nineties, finding things out could itself be extremely challenging. How would you have gone about identifying the true beneficial owner of a company in Germany or Italy? How would you have conducted research into economic activity in a small town in Puglia? Would you even have referred to it as Puglia, or Apulia?
Today, everything is two clicks away on the internet. Even as late as 1993, my characters might have had to rely on a two-line entry in Pears Cyclopaedia.
In the more familiar territory of London and Brighton, there are still plenty of snares and booby traps for the unwary. A strong feature of my novels is the depiction of real pubs, restaurants, shops and retail products. This is where the human element comes into play.
I can go online and verify that a favourite pizzeria was still in business at a certain point in time. But only my memory can tell me that I could already detect the distinctive odour of its garlic bread wafting down the Walworth Road when I was within fifty metres.
Tiny details may never be noticed when they’re correct, but can puncture the illusion instantly when they’re wrong. Anyone can verify that the supermarket at the entrance to St James’s Street in Brighton in 1991 was Safeway. But who can remember a particular product unique to the store? The internet will not tell you. A human being might remember, especially if you get the detail wrong.
The challenge is to strike the right balance: surface these details naturally. Let them earn their place in the narrative, or else it will sound pedantic and nerdy.
So what is historical fiction, and how should I categorise my own novels?
The Historical Writers’ Association uses a 35-year threshold, while the Historical Novel Society has generally used a 50-year rule, or a period written about by an author who was not alive at the time. But these are useful conventions rather than literary principles. A novelist writing in 2026 about 1990 may remember how things were and still write what could reasonably be regarded as historical fiction. A novel focused on the fall of Margaret Thatcher, for example, might fit comfortably within the genre.
To be accurate, a novelist writing scenes set in 1990 arguably has to do as much research as one writing scenes set in 1529. Lived experience provides an additional resource, but also an additional trap. You remember the period, so you are tempted to trust your memory. And other people remember it too, so they can catch you out.
Accuracy is one thing; period authenticity is multi-layered.
One must ask at least three questions. With reference to a particular technology, for example: First, could it have existed? Second, did it exist at this precise point in time? And third, could this particular character have actually encountered it?
This third layer is perhaps the most interesting. A technology being commercially available in 1991 doesn’t mean an ordinary person owned it or had access to it. A record existing in a public database doesn’t mean the character could access it — and if he could, he might first have to navigate several layers of bureaucracy. A German wine being produced, and perhaps even exported, doesn’t mean the character could have bought it in Safeway on St James’s Street in Brighton.
This, to me, is considerably more interesting than whether a novel written today and set in the early 1990s technically counts as “history”.
Publishers and booksellers use “historical fiction” rather more flexibly than literary societies do. Wolf Hall and The Name of the Rose clearly inhabit the foreign country Hartley described. My novels don’t.
If I had to settle on a simple label, I’d probably go for “period thriller”. More precisely, A Residue of Murder is a political thriller set in the early 1990s. That tells readers what they’re getting without making a contentious genre claim.
But perhaps the absence of a neat category is appropriate. My novels do not inhabit a foreign country. They involve navigating a path through treacherous territory: territory you think you recognise, where familiarity itself can lead you astray.
That, in the end, is what makes it a minefield.
