27 Jan Eleanor Swift-Hook The Fugitive’s Sword #HistoricalAdventure #HistoricalFiction #BlogTour #TheCoffeePotBookClub @emswifthook @cathiedunn

FEATURED AUTHOR: ELEANOR SWIFT-HOOK

I‘m delighted to welcome Eleanor Swift-Hook as the featured author in The Coffee Pot Book Club Blog Tour being held between January 20th – 31st, 2025. Eleanor Swift-Hook is the author of the Historical Adventure,  The Fugitive’s Sword (Lord’s Learning), released by Schiavona Books on 8^th October 2024 (305 pages). 

Below are highlights of The Fugitive’s Sword, Eleanor Swift-Hook’s author bio, and a guest post entitled, “On Research and Rabbit Holes.”

Tour Schedule Page: https://thecoffeepotbookclub.blogspot.com/2024/12/blog-tour-the-fugitives-sword-by-eleanor-swift-hook.html

HIGHLIGHTS: THE FUGITIVE’S SWORD

The Fugitive’s Sword
(Lord’s Learning)
by Eleanor Swift-Hook

Blurb:

Autumn 1624

Europe is deeply embroiled in what will become the Thirty Years’ War.

A young Philip Lord, once favoured at King James’ court, has vanished without a trace, under the shadow of treason.

Outside the besieged city of Breda, Captain Matthew Rider faces the brutal reality of wintering his cavalry in the siege lines, until he crosses paths with Filippo Schiavono, a young man whose courage and skill could change everything.

Kate, Lady Catherine de Bouqulement, arrives in London prepared to navigate the dangerous politics of King James’ court to ensure troops are sent to her mistress, the exiled Queen of Bohemia.

Within Breda’s walls, a foundling named Jorrit unwittingly stumbles into a lethal conspiracy when Schiavono hires him, supposedly to help sell smuggled tobacco. But Schiavono’s plans go awry and they are compelled to flee the city, only to be captured at sea.

If Schiavono is unable to prove his loyalty and ruthlessness to a savage Dunkirker privateer captain, both he and Jorrit will face certain death.

Meanwhile, in London, Kate is forced to fight her own battle against those seeking to coerce her into their schemes and finds herself trapped in a terrifying and deadly power struggle.

Driven by violence, treachery, and the sea’s merciless tides, their fates collide.

Buy Links:

This title is available to read on #KindleUnlimited.

Universal Buy Link: https://mybook.to/TheFugitivesSword

AUTHOR’S BIO: ELEANOR SWIFT-HOOK

Eleanor Swift-Hook enjoys the mysteries of history and fell in love with the early Stuart era at university when she re-enacted battles and living history events with the English Civil War Society. Since then, she has had an ongoing fascination with the social, military and political events that unfolded during the Thirty Years’ War and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms.

The Soldier’s Stand, book two in Lord’s Learning and the sequel to The Fugitive’s Sword, is now available for preorder and will be released on 25 February, 2025.

She lives in County Durham and loves writing stories woven into the historical backdrop of those dramatic times.

Author Links:

Website          Twitter           Facebook         Bluesky        

Book Bub           Amazon Author Page              Goodreads

GUEST POST BY ELEANOR SWIFT-HOOK
ON RESEARCH AND RABBIT HOLES

I suspect there are as many different approaches to historical research as there are writers of historical fiction. Some are as diligent as historians in seeking to track down primary sources, and will spend months or even years hunting out a scrap of information left unseen or unconsidered in an archive, and take long trips to the places their book will be set so they can absorb the atmosphere. At the other end of the spectrum there are those who give a volume of popular history a quick once over and then dive straight in with their own take on how things were.

My approach is somewhere between those examples, but a good bit closer to the former than the latter. I try very hard to get period details right and to track events through my books as they occurred. Where possible, I aim to weave my characters and their doings through the loopholes of history, those places where there is a historical lacuna, a ‘we don’t know for sure’. But I may also bring them into the mainstream of known events and if they tramp upon the ground of solidly known history, I do my best to keep their footfall light and where it might mislead, mention that in my author’s notes. Above all, my duty as a writer of historical fiction is to write a thunderingly good story, but it has to be one set in as solid a historical setting as I can achieve.

Regrettably, I don’t have the option to physically visit and trawl far-flung archives, or have expensive trips to exotic locations, so I base my initial research in solid secondary sources, academic books written by those who have spent years studying the period. Once I have that foundation I can zoom in on whatever specifics I might need to tell my tale.

For me research tends to be of two kinds: that which I do before I ever set finger to keyboard (that broad foundational reading I mentioned), and that which I do in the middle of a sentence when I realise I don’t actually know how that particular item of clothing was fastened.

The joy of the internet in either kind of research is that it places vast amounts of information before you. Often this is easy to access and with just a couple of mouse clicks you can find lists of the most popular names in the era or the terms used to describe different sorts of woollen cloth, freely available books (thank you Internet Archive and Project Gutenberg) and even academic articles and research papers.

Internet Archive Servers: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Internet_Archive_servers_5034_-_Jason_Scott.jpg

If you wish to ‘visit’ a place you have no chance to travel to then Google maps allows you to get some idea of the landscape, look and feel of the area, and many historical towns and buildings have their own online presence and even virtual tours to add to that. Original sources are reproduced online many in free to access form (Early English Books Online and British History Online to name but two). The issue can become not having too little available, but getting lost in it all for an entire afternoon when one should be writing. I can wind up going down not just a rabbit hole but an entire warren of rabbit holes around a single fascinating point.

Wikipedia gets very poor press for accuracy, but it can be a fabulous gateway to richer sources, and the library of historical pictures it has is immense. Art galleries and museums often offer images and details of pictures and artefacts. Then there are specific sites I keep bookmarked that will tell me what day of the week it was on a certain (pre-Gregorian calendar) day of the year; or the phase of the moon on that day, or whether a specific word was in use at the time or not. And if I just can’t get by without that one specific primary source, be it a map or a letter, most often one can request a digital copy to be made by a friendly archivist and emailed for just a small fee…

With so much available, it is amazing that there are still moments when there is no answer to a question, no description/picture of a specific object, place or person. But history, even of just one small era, is huge, and for all the research one does, the odd detail can still slip through the net. My aim is to be as thorough as I can, to ‘fess up’ when I have shifted something from true, and to use my research to create a solid world for my characters to inhabit, which runs as closely to how the world would have been at the time as I can manage.

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