The Delightful Encounters of Historical Crime Fiction ‹ CrimeReads

One of the joys of writing historical fiction is that you get to meet so many interesting people. And I don't mean other writers, I mean you get to meet people from history-and not only meet them, but recreate them too, and give them your words and introduce them to readers of today.

In my Irregular series of books, I took the hero Wiggins from fiction (he was a street-kid assistant of Sherlock Holmes from the Conan Doyle stories), grew him up but then placed him in real history. He does still interact with Holmes but most of the people he interacts with were real. In his latest adventure, Spy Hunter, he becomes entangled with Mata Hari - the ‘exotic' dancer executed for spying in 1916 - just the latest in a long line of colorful characters that peopled the Europe and America of the early twentieth century.