N.L. Holmes is the pen name of a professional archaeologist who attended The University of Texas but dropped out midway to enter into the antiques business. Two years later, she entered the Discalced Carmelite convent in Texas. She left the convent twenty years later and returned to school to get her B.A. in Classical Studies and then a doctorate from Bryn Mawr College. She has since excavated in Greece and Israel and conducted archaeological artwork for excavations from Lebanon. She also taught ancient history and humanities at Stockton University in New Jersey and the University of South Florida for many years. Her fourteen published novels embrace two series of historical fiction: the Lord Hani Mysteries, set in the Egypt of Akhenaten, and the Empire at Twilight series, featuring life in the Hittite Empire in the 13th century BCE.
The Lord Hani Mysteries center on Neferet, a young woman physician of ancient Egypt, and Bener-ib, the woman of her heart, who just want to help the people of a working class neighborhood of Thebes. But murder victims keep showing up. With the help of Neferet's father Hani and their teenaged apprentice, the two women find themselves launched on a whole new career. In the latest installment, Melody of Evil, a corpse washes up on the riverbank at Lord Hani’s country house, and Neferet, Bener-ib, and apprentice Mut-tuy head for the local village to try to identify it. But they find themselves entangled in a web of murder and lies in the heart of a family of weavers. Can the perseverance of three determined women and the bonds of parental love win out, or will Neferet herself become the next victim?
N.L. Holmes stops by In Reference to Murder to talk about researching and writing the series:
The thing that makes historical novels so wonderful to read — and to write — is the amount of research it necessarily takes to bring a time and place in the past vividly to life. The author needs to have a deep and broad picture of her world in all its details, even if she never uses them, in order for that world to come across as natural and believable and not just a parade of half digested factoids. I've read books (and I'm sure you have too) that crammed such facts down the reader's throat in an inorganic way that seemed to say "Look how much I know." Ugh!
My books are set in the Bronze Age Near East, either in Egypt or in the Hittite Empire. As an archaeologist and professor of ancient history, I had a fair amount of background knowledge before I ever started writing, but I prepped for each series by reading heavily about the time, its historical lead-up, any characters who were real people, and anything I could learn about daily life in all its aspects. The size of my research library testifies to my obsessiveness about this! My principle is that anything we know for certain about a person or period must be observed. If I make any exceptions to this rule (and I have made one or two for the sake of the story), then I'm sure to inform the reader up front. People take seriously what we tell them about the past, and they should be able to trust us. Just because we write fiction doesn't absolve us from being accurate. That being said, there's a lot we don't know about "way back then", and that's a legitimate field for filling in with plausible reconstructions of life. However, the judgment about what's plausible is best made from a place of extreme familiarity with the culture.
Almost all my books are based on real historical events and people. I had to read all references to those folks that turn up in documents and everything sources tell us about how events went down. Then, armed with those few solid facts, I asked, "What actually happened to produce this result? What would the human cost have been? Why might this person have made the choices he did?" I think boring down on the human aspect of history is what make it interesting. I you only know dates and treaties and battles, it's sterile and boring, much the way it's often taught in middle school. Lord Hani, for example, is a real historical diplomat who is mentioned frequently over many years in the Amarna Letters, a happily preserved set of diplomatic correspondences chronicling the reigns of Amenhotep IV and his son Akhenaten, the "Heretic pharaoh." I practically memorized the various references to Hani, then I considered what sort of man he must have been to be entrusted with important missions over twenty years. The king said of him, "Everybody's happy when Hani comes," and that tells us something very important about his human side. This is how research underlies every choice the writer makes about plot and character.
After this initial layer of research, I find there are just little specialized sorts of details to learn about. For instance, each of the Hani's Daughter Mysteries deals with a different profession in ancient Egypt, so I find out whatever we know about each of these worlds to provide the story with lifelike details. There's always the danger that doing more and more and MORE research can take the place of actually writing. It's fun and low-stakes and can become a distraction from ever really getting started on the book. My rule of thumb is do a lot of general background, then just-start-the-heck-writing. Don't wait till you feel sure you know everything. Additional details can be researched as you come to them.
You can learn more about N.L. Holmes via her website and follow her on LinkedIn and Facebook. The Melody of Evil is now available via all major booksellers.
