I Heart Research!

It’s no surprise that when writing a book (or three!) set both in the past and in another country, some research must be done in order to successfully place your book in its time and place. I think it’s important to give enough detail and information so that readers find your story authentic and believable. My three books, all part of my gothic romance series, Disfigured, are set in France in the 1870s, a time period which happened to be very volatile.

I honestly don’t know what writers would do without Google! I am so thankful that so much information is at my fingertips, because I don’t have the luxury of tracking down history books in a library or traveling to Paris to visit the cemeteries or the Catacombs. Of course you have to be sure your information is accurate, so only use trusted sources. Because my books dipped into the Franco-Prussian War and its political aftermath, I did a lot of research on that. I was fortunate to find someone had published their dissertation on this very topic. Basically, it was a history book, and very helpful indeed. I learned a lot about French history that I’d been ignorant of before. I found it quite fun, to be honest.

As readers of my series already know, my protagonist is Sylvie, a professional cook, and her difficult and irascible client, who happens to be the Phantom of the Opera. The books begin with Disfigured, which works its way through all the events at the opera house and beyond. The other two, About-Face and Spirit of Revenge, follow these two characters as they attempt to navigate love, marriage, and a baby.  In About-Face, I delved into what New York City was like in the 1870s, and the primitive plastic surgery operations performed on injured soldiers in the Civil War. Not to mention the clothing styles, how to send a cable across the Atlantic, and what kind of ships took people across the Atlantic. Fascinating, and all historically accurate.

But here’s my favorite bit of research: in Spirit of Revenge, Erik (the former phantom) and Sylvie, his wife, have been to a fancy dress ball in Paris. On their way back to their hotel they are attacked and must flee on foot through the streets of Paris. There is a curfew in the city due to all the political unrest at the time, so the streets are empty. Someone is shooting at Erik, so he locates a secret way he knows of into the underground tunnels under the city and they hide there. On their way, they wander through the Paris Catacombs, a place where thousands upon thousands of skeletal remains have been stored. You can visit the catacombs and walk there yourself, when you visit Paris. But I had never been there, and I didn’t have a clue what they were like. So I did what any self-respecting writer would do – I googled them.

Besides learning why and how all those skulls and femurs ended up stored in the catacombs, I made the lucky find of a YouTube video someone made on their own walk through those dark and mysterious corridors beneath the streets of Paris. Bless the man who did this, because it became the same walk Erik and Sylvie take as they try to find their way back out of the catacombs. Now, a visit to them is on my bucket list!

If I write a fourth book in the Disfigured Series, I already know Erik and Sylvie will travel to Australia in the late 1870s and end up trying to solve a murder there. Just think about all the research opportunities that will give me!