The Best Historical Nonfiction Books

Looking at some of the books you’ve chosen today—as well as the ones that you write—I was trying to figure out what genre they are. I think it’s historical nonfiction—but done in a way that really brings the past alive and takes you to a time and place like a novel does. Is that one way of describing it?

I love books that tell real stories in a way that’s emotional, sensory, suspenseful. They explore ideas, but also evoke a different time and place. That’s what I’m trying to conjure up for myself when I’m looking in archives or researching a place or person. I use facts as my material, but in telling the story I am most influenced by fictional forms: novels, films, television.

But you’re also very interested in history. Or could one of your books be set in the present?

I’m fascinated by the mystery of what went on before us, what’s elusive about it and what’s tangible, what feels as if it can be grasped and can be relived. For me, going backwards into the past is a very rich way of understanding the present, and understanding myself. It feels liberating to see the differences between past and present and to see what chimes between then and now.

Let’s turn to the books you’re recommending. First on your list is In Cold Blood (1965). I imagine a lot of people have heard of it but for those who don’t know, can you say what it’s about?

It’s the story of the murder of a family in Kansas in 1959, written by Truman Capote. It was a bestselling, instantly famous book, which he described as a ‘nonfiction novel.’

I read it in the 1980s, about 20 years after it was written, and I was really astonished by it. I found it amazing that true stories could be told this way. I’ve since learned more about the circumstances of its writing, and I realised that Capote had invented or elaborated some aspects of the case.

So the book’s an inspiration to me, but also a warning about how far one should go in terms of appropriating a story and imagining the feelings of others. In the book, Capote presumes to go inside the heads of his subjects, the murderers, and he invents dialogue. He doesn’t observe the same constraints as most factual writers and historians. In Cold Blood lies right on the boundary between fiction and nonfiction.

I guess if you’re writing a ‘nonfiction novel’ you can make some of that up, if you’ve labelled it as such?

Yes, but this book excited me when I read it because I thought it was true to what happened, rather than to Capote’s imagination. There are also ethical issues that arise from Capote’s relationships with the killers, and his vested interest in when they were executed. In writing about real life, you might not only manipulate the facts of the story, but you might manipulate events in the outside world. Capote sails very close to the wind on that, in a way that’s cautionary.

Let’s go on to your next choice, A Thread of Violence (2023) by Mark O’Connell.

A Thread of Violence is about a man called Malcolm Macarthur who murdered two people in Dublin in the 1980s. He was sentenced to a life term but had been released and was living in Dublin again when Mark O’Connell thought of writing a book about him. O’Connell met him, befriended him and interviewed him over a long period.

It’s an extremely reflective book—about what it means to commune with a murderer but also to translate his life into a story, and whether this is to honor him, to make him more important than he should be or even to exploit him. It’s about the difficulties—moral, emotional, imaginative—of writing a book like this.

It’s extraordinarily acute and thoughtful about all those processes and the dangers as well as the allure of this kind of work.

John Banville wrote a novel, partly inspired by his case, called The Book of Evidence. I’m always interested in the way that violent acts, bizarre happenings and sensational stories are created in part by the culture in which they take place, but then go on to shape that culture: they feed back in and become part of our stereotypes, of tropes, of story arcs. This book explores that, too.

Is it still a page turner, despite the meditative approach?

It is. O’Connell is charting the unfolding of the murders and their origins, trying to trace where they came from, what the motive was, and what shaped this man. But the reader also turns the pages to find out about the relationship between the writer and the murderer. The drama arises partly from the crime story but also from the encounter between these two men. How will it end? What forms of betrayal, regret or intimacy will emerge from it?

Let’s go on to This House of Grief (2014) by Helen Garner, which I hadn’t heard of. What events is it based on?

Helen Garner went to the trial of a man in Australia who stood accused of murdering his sons by driving his car into a dam. He claimed he’d blacked out and that it was an accident, but he was charged with having deliberately killed his children in an act of anger and revenge.

Garner documents the trial in great detail, but she’s also documenting the shifting currents of her own feelings about the case, about the man on trial, about his family, his marriage. She seems to almost uncannily intuit the changing moods in the courtroom. It’s very rigorous and very moving. You sense the inadequacy of a court to deal with these kinds of morally fraught and highly charged emotional stories—but the necessity of there being this process of justice.

She teases all that out, and you are with her in the courtroom, witnessing what’s happening and interrogating your own feelings about it as you go along. The suspense of the book is about what will happen in the trial. Will he be found guilty? Did he murder them or was it manslaughter? But it’s also about how you feel about the individuals in the case. It’s incredibly candid and intense.

Presumably, at the end, we find out which way it goes.

Yes, we get a verdict, and then the reactions to the verdict. There is resolution, but it’s a resolution in a court of law. The emotional resolution, what this all means and what we feel about it, rests with us as the readers.

Let’s go back in time to the 18th century now and a book called The Wager (2023) by David Grann. I saw someone describe this as the best nonfiction they’d ever read, which is quite a strong endorsement. For those who haven’t come across it, do you want to say what it’s about and why people rate it so highly?

It’s about a voyage on an 18th-century British ship, the H.M.S. Wager, which ended with shipwreck and mutiny on a remote island, and about the betrayals and feuds among the survivors. It is tremendous. You learn so much: about maritime history, the world of the sea, the workings of Empire. It’s a fantastic, dark adventure story with heroes and villains.

It’s also an incredible work of archival research—Grann has translated what he found in the archives and in printed materials from the 18th century into this very live, vivid story. It reminded me of how transporting it can be to read old papers and documents. In nonfiction, some of the drama or mystery that you feel when you’re researching can be recaptured on the page in the form of an adventure story or a criminal investigation. It made me think how these things are not dissimilar—although one takes place in your head as you sit in an archive. The book captures that thrill.

So yes, it’s a very powerful work. I believe Grann traveled to the island in the course of his research, and his book has a very strong sense of place. One of the exciting things about researching the past is that though you can’t travel in time, you can travel in space, and visit the scenes in which your story took place: the house in which a murder was committed, or the fields through which somebody escaped, or the island on which people were stranded.

With your most recent book, The Peepshow: The Murders at 10 Rillington Place, about a 1950s serial killer, the house is no longer there, is that right? It has been demolished.

Yes, I did go to the neighborhood and worked out where the house would have been. It was an extraordinarily notorious address after the murders, not least because Christie’s victims had been found in the seams and crevices of the building. He’d put bodies under the floorboards and behind a wall, and it attracted a lot of ghoulish tourism for years afterwards.

Immediately after it was demolished in a slum clearance in 1970, an enterprising local mocked up a different house in the street as number 10 Rillington Place and charged people for entry. And even now there’s a reconstruction of one of the rooms in the Chamber of Horrors at Madam Tussauds. It’s almost as if we want to hang on to these places, as if they might divulge some secret or offer some explanation. It’s a very strange impulse, the desire to enter places where terrible things happened, but it’s very strong. In a way, writing a book about a place is a version of that.

What I really enjoy about your books is that the story takes you along, but then, when I put them down, I feel like I’ve been taken to Victorian England or 1950s London. I find the minutiae of daily life really fascinating to read about.

Yes, I suppose when I’m researching, the gleanings that I gather up and keep are the things that make it vivid for me. And I think, ‘Oh, that’s what you would have had for breakfast, or where you would have shopped. This is what things smelt like or sounded like.’ All that feels like treasure, finding the details that allow you to really imagine yourself back there.

It’s funny, my subject matter is usually quite lurid and outsized and unbelievable—an extraordinary thing that happened that seems almost fictional, beyond the normal, and yet, in writing about it, the things that I’m really drawn to are the things that root it again, that ground it, that are to do with the banalities of everyday life. The quotidian stuff is compelling to me. The sensational, explosive event is the premise, but where I want to go is to be there in that moment, to imagine that place and time.

And is it the sensationality that leads to there being enough evidence to explore the quotidian?

Absolutely. I first realized when I researched The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher what fantastic sources crime stories generate. The police gather their evidence, most of which turns out to be irrelevant to the criminal case and is not heard in court. But in the files, if they’ve been preserved, there are witness statements from neighbors, friends, family, shopkeepers, employers. There are clues throughout these testimonies to how people lived, what mattered to them, their habits and views and feelings and their language, the phrasing they used. The files are so rich in this material about everyday life which doesn’t get recorded in the history books, on the whole, because it seems too ordinary to be interesting.

But accidentally, in the records of a crime, it’s all preserved and so you get a chance to minutely recreate people’s everyday lives and to know what they wore and what they ate and drank. The archive offers you glimpses of the terrible suffering and emotionally intense events that lead to a crime, but also of all the other stuff that was going on around it.

Some of your earlier books weren’t particularly related to crime, is that right?

I’ve also written books about a poltergeist in south London, about a scandalous divorce, and about a cross-dressing motorboat racer who ruled an island in the Bahamas and was devoted to a small leather doll. That was my first book, and grew out of an obituary I wrote for the Daily Telegraph, where I used to work. Like many of my books, it originated in old newspapers: I started by reconstructing the subject’s life from yellowing cuttings in the Telegraph’s library. Old newspapers usually provide much more detail than contemporary news reports. I also love reading them for the attitudes they reveal, their different and similar curiosities.

We’d better get to your last book. This is Ghosts of the Tsunami (2017) by Richard Lloyd Parry.

Richard Lloyd Parry was a foreign correspondent in Tokyo at the time of the Japanese tsunami in 2011. In telling the story of that disaster, he focuses on one village primary school where almost all the children lost their lives, and the long investigation into whether their teachers were partly to blame for their deaths. It turns into a rich and moving story about the attempts of the parents to seek justice, and the traumatic effects of the tsunami not only on the communities most immediately affected, but on Japanese society as a whole.

The fact that so many of the shrines to ancestors were swept away in the tsunami was a cause of real pain and suffering to the survivors. Many felt that they’d lost their forebears as well as their descendants. It was not just the children, but also the dead who were obliterated. Some turned to supernatural beings to sustain them—spirits and ghosts.

Lloyd Parry talks about the stoicism of the Japanese, which can amount to a ‘quietism’, a tendency to submit to fate rather than to fight back and respond. In some ways, the parents of the children who died bucked that trend and embodied a new way of being.

He conveys all this very richly and sensitively. It’s beautifully written and gives you an understanding of Japanese culture as well as this specific event.

It sounds incredibly sad.

Tremendously. But it’s not a depressing book. It’s so attentive and tender.

And is a resolution possible in stories like this?

I think the writers of these accounts of sadness and suffering are skilled enough to supply a satisfying shape to the story, but scrupulous enough to also leave something open at the end. Aspects of these violent events have to remain a mystery, and their legacy is still unfolding.

One of the challenges I find with books about true crime is that because I read and watch a lot of crime fiction, it all starts blurring. I start forgetting that this really happened to someone. 

Yes, and you can start blurring as a writer and researcher, too. On one level, you’re aware that this is all true because you’re trying to be accurate, faithful to the facts. But as you put it together, you start to treat it as your story, and the facts as your material. And then you get little, intense jolts of, ‘Oh my goodness, this really happened. This is a real person.’

Right at the end of The Peepshow, you mention contacting someone—I can’t remember exactly who—about the murders, and she said it would cause the family too much pain to speak about it.

When I got in touch with the niece of one of Christie’s victims, I was startled to be reminded of how raw the emotions might still be for people directly connected to the case. I was reminded of how intrusive and painful it can be to revive these stories. Even 70 years on, there are still living people who have been hurt and changed by what happened.

Kate Summerscale will be speaking at Cambridge Literary Festival on Saturday 26 April. Buy tickets here: Hallie Rubenhold & Kate Summerscale | Why Do Men Kill Women? – Cambridge Literary Festival