NEW VOICES Drama, detailed historical fact, and a desire to entertain their readers can all be discovered in the debut historical fiction works of Jody Hadlock, Colin Holmes, Peter Mann, and J. P. O’Connell.
knew exactly what their clientele wanted: comfort and familiarity, enlivened by the merest dash of local colour. The fictional Ainsworth family in my novel Hotel Portofino have settled in Italy to escape their demons and realise wife Bella’s long-held ambition to open just such an establishment, never mind her husband’s reservations and the increasingly difficult political situation…” However, as O’Connell points out, “As everyone knows, closed worlds of wealth and privilege are magnets for drama. And in a hotel, as in a country house, you can go high and low, upstairs and downstairs, out into the grounds and then back inside into the most intimate of spaces - the bathroom and the bedroom.”
Jody Hadlock
Colin Holmes
photo credit: Trey Houston
Jody Hadlock found it more challenging to find a place, people, and a time that she wanted to write about. “I’d always wanted to be a novelist, but I didn’t know what I wanted to write about, what I wanted to say. When my husband and I were dating, we went to his hometown in East Texas to meet his parents, and while we were there, we drove over to Jefferson. We both love history and visited the town’s historical museum, where there was a full-page article on display about Diamond Bessie, published by a Dallas newspaper in the 1930s.”
Peter Mann
J.P. O'Connell
J. P. O’Connell has worked as an editor and writer for newspapers and magazines including Time Out, the Guardian, the Times, and the Daily Telegraph. His novel Hotel Portofino (Simon & Schuster UK/ Blackstone, 2022) is set against the backdrop of Venice’s Lido in the 1920s. As he relates: “In the early 20th century, there was no more fashionable place for well-heeled Brits to holiday than Italy. For some the attraction was austerely cultural: improving oneself by exposure to paintings, churches, and views, as Eleanor Lavish does in E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View. Others just wanted to have fun. Arriving at the Excelsior Palace hotel on the Venice Lido in August 1926, society photographer Cecil Beaton was thrilled to find a raucous, debauched world straight out of F. Scott Fitzgerald. He particularly loved the way all the women lounged around ‘in the most expensive pyjamas (with designs of dragons and birds of prey hand-painted in brilliant, sickening colours) and no shoes.’” O’Connell couldn’t help but be captivated by the time and place. “Along the strip of coastline known as the Italian Riviera, fun-seekers and culture vultures collided. Small fishing towns like Portofino and Santa Margherita expanded into resorts where grand hotels like the Imperiale Palace competed with smaller guest houses—what we now call ‘boutique hotels’—to attract the wealthiest, most glamorous visitors, from elderly ladies seeking a ‘change of air’ to athletic young flappers taking advantage of the abundance of local tennis courts; and from artists entranced by the dramatic scenery to gamblers who had won (and lost) fortunes in the nearby casinos at Sanremo and Monte Carlo. “Some of these hotels would have been run by English expats who 4
In Hotel Portofino O’Connell has, he says, “tried to make the most of this tantalising access and, hopefully, shine a revealing light on the Golden Age of 20th-century travel before the Second World War brought it to a close.”
COLUMNS | Issue 100, May 2022
The result was that the seeds of her novel, The Lives of Diamond Bessie (SparkPress, 2022), were planted because she “was immediately intrigued, partly because of the time period.” She explains, “I’ve always been fascinated by the 19th century—and I thought, ‘Why was this paper interested in a story that happened sixty years earlier in a tiny town three hours away?’ I had another question too, but I don’t want to give away the plot!” Hadlock embarked on her quest to uncover more. This took her, she relates, “down a years-long path of research and writing. I initially thought I would focus on telling Bessie’s story within the limited world of her occupation of prostitution and her relationship with the antagonist, but important things were going on in the background. One of them was the women’s rights movement.” When Hadlock learnt how Susan B. Anthony had given “a lecture on ‘Social Purity’ in Chicago in March 1875, during the same time that Bessie was living there,” she continues, “I knew I needed to expand my novel to address society’s view of prostitution. It was incredibly taboo, especially for a woman, to talk about such a topic in public. Prostitution was referred to as the ‘Great Social Evil,’ and women were solely blamed for entering the world’s oldest profession, when it was actually the lack of rights and opportunities that forced the vast majority of women into brothels.” So Hadlock “fictionalized Bessie’s attendance at Ms. Anthony’s lecture,” she says. “There’s no proof she heard it—but I like to think that Bessie was there, listening to the famous reformer stand up for members of the unfortunate class.” Colin Holmes, in Thunder Road (CamCat, 2022), chose an environment and period that he felt suited his main protagonist. As he points out, “Every good detective is insightful, curious, and hopefully a little brave. But one thing that shapes their journey in the
