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The Shenandoah Spy: Interview with Author Francis Hamit
July 27, 11:39 AMLA Books ExaminerFrank Mundo



Francis Hamit, author of The Shenandoah Spy at LA Books Examiner
Photo courtesy of Francis Hamit

Francis Hamit, an internationally-recognized trade magazine journalist, author, and playwright, has been writing professionally for more than 40 years. Hamit, who earned an MFA in Fiction from the famed Iowa Writers Workshop, has written hundreds of articles, reviews, and essays for newspapers, magazines, and Internet publications throughout his long career. His other works include the non-fiction book Virtual Reality and the Exploration of Cyberspace, the stage plays MARLOWE: An Elizabethan Tragedy and Memorial Day, which was showcased at the Masquers Playhouse in Richmond, California in 2005.

A few years ago, Hamit decided to refocus his career on Fiction and Drama, completing his first published novel, The Shenandoah Spy, a historical fiction novel, which was published by Brass Cannon Books in 2008. In the book, Hamit shares the story of one Isabelle “Belle” Boyd, a fascinating young woman in Martinsburg, Virginia who would become one of the most famous personalities of the U.S. Civil War – in fact, the first woman in American history (only a teenager at the time) to be commissioned an Army officer.

Hamit, a member of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers and the National Military Intelligence Association, was a member of the U.S. Army Security Agency during the Vietnam War. In Shenandoah Spy, the first of five novels Hamit plans to write about Civil War espionage, his insider knowledge along with his extensive and ongoing research makes for a satisfying blend of fact and fiction for Civil War buffs, historical novel fans, readers of Feminist literature, or anyone looking for a good summer read.

The Shenandoah Spy by Francis Hamit at LA Books ExaminerThe Shenandoah Spy by Francis Hamit is available at Brass Cannon Books.

Also check out, Belle Boyd and the Confederate Secret Service, a free podcast of a speech given by Francis Hamit at the West Coast Civil War Roundtable Conference in Clovis, California in 2008.


I met up with Francis Hamit recently and had a few questions for him about his work:

Q. Historical fiction has become extremely popular lately. For those readers who don’t know much about it, what is historical fiction? It seems like a contradiction in terms.

A. Historical fiction is often called a sub-genre of women's fiction or romance fiction, and that's true when a made-up tale is set in the past. When characters are based upon real people and follow a narrative line that closely follows known events, then it's a sub-genre of history or that new animal, "narrative non-fiction". Some straight biographies in recent years crossed the line by fictionalizing interior dialogs for their subjects. That one on Ronald Reagan (which I have not read) is a case in point. That author found the real Reagan mysterious and added some heavy interpretation. The novel disguised as a personal memoir is another "innovation" that has gotten a lot of attention.

In The Shenandoah Spy, which is set in the American Civil War, an author has a unique problem: there are hundreds of thousands of "experts" out there who are not shy about telling you when you've got it wrong, so you have to research intensively and think deeply about the story you are trying to tell. A regular historian can do a data dump and throw everything into the mix, with appropriate footnotes at the back. A novelist cannot, and can become a prisoner of the research, allowing the facts to overwhelm the story line. I've read many such novels where the set up just took too long and the reader becomes bored and uninterested.

Point of view is also another issue that has to be considered. First person narratives have the advantage of focus, but they limit the facts to what can be observed by that character, and you lose the things said about that character by other characters to each other.

This kind of historical fiction is actually a search for a deeper truth that surpasses the written record, and, where the American Civil War is concerned, the written record is always suspect. Memoirs seldom do damage to their subjects; everyone is the hero of their own autobiography. Letters are a very good source, but limited in scope and self-edited. Official Records, the reports of actual battles, often turn out to have been written weeks or months after the actual events by third party staff officers who were not present. The reports attributed to Stonewall Jackson were actually written by Charles Faulkner, who was not in the Confederate Army at the time. (Henry Kyd Douglas mentions this in his memoir -- which was published decades after the war's end and has been criticized by regular historians for its own inaccuracies. I heard one at a conference call him "a congenital liar", which was a bit harsh. He simply remembered differently than others.) And then there are the Southern Historical Society papers, edited by Confederate general Jubal Early, which created the myth of "The Lost Cause". This was nothing less than a long-term attempt to rewrite history, a post-war disinformation campaign. That leaves the newspaper accounts of the time, which were always attached to one political cause or another, on both sides, and slanted to that end. These accounts and the Official Records disagree in many places. Finally, professional historians often get it wrong because they rely upon the authority of more senior historians who are quoting other historians and not these primary sources.

So, it's a mess, and much of it is fiction to begin with, which is where a novelist has a real advantage. We can pick and choose to produce a clean narrative line, as long as we don't do things which the "experts" will object to. And we can make up some of this to fill in and smooth out the narrative. This does require great attention to craft, and you keep going back to the research to better define minor characters. What does it matter that Robideaux Wheat, of the Louisiana Tigers, wore a red sash and was obsessed by his own death in battle, and kept a cook from the best restaurant in New Orleans? Nothing to a historian and nothing to the outcome of the battle, but these are the kind of character defining details that make for great fiction because they put the reader in the moment. I spent ten years on this book and some parts went through 15 drafts. Overall most people would not see much difference between the first and the last drafts, but this kind of effort is essential if you want people to not just read the book, but tell others.

Q. What inspired you to write about Isabelle “Belle” Boyd? Was it really the result of a writing job you had with Encyclopaedia Britannica?

A. Yes. I did 93 articles for the Britannica, and Belle was one of 13 figures from the intelligence field I did biographies on. I thought at the time it was a great story, and that someday I would do something with it. This is also where I found the story for my stage play MARLOWE: An Elizabethan Tragedy, which is about Christopher Marlowe, the Elizabethan poet and playwright whose day job was a secret agent for the early English Secret Service. That, too, took a lot of research. The play was done in Los Angeles in Equity Waiver in 1988, but it has too many characters and costumes, so there hasn't been a follow-on production.

Q. In your 40+ years as a writer, you’ve written over a thousand articles, essays, reviews and columns for a wide variety of publications. Was it hard making the switch to writing fiction? What are the biggest challenges of “creative writing” versus journalism?

A. Journalism is a totally different "head" than fiction, and I find switching back and forth difficult. Back in the 1990s, my editor Leigh and myself used to produce, on average, a major magazine article every week. We had a whiteboard to keep track of them all since I was writing for as many as five magazines at a time. We never missed a deadline. We made a living. I started doing research for what became The Shenandoah Spy in 1998, after my father died, and started serious writing in 2001. At that point I had to let the journalism go and focus. But I was returning to my creative roots. I started out to be a novelist and I have a MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop. I ran an Army newspaper before that and did journalism from 1975 on to make some money. After Dad died, it was this feeling of "now or never". And I finally didn't have to sweat the rent anymore.

Q. Why have many of us never heard of “The Confederate Cleopatra,” this remarkable woman and her role in the Civil War.

A. Belle's reputation suffered because of her secret service. One reporter accused her of being "an accomplished prostitute" and others discounted, as a made-up tale, her account of her run across the battlefield under fire at the Battle of Front Royal to deliver fresh intelligence to Stonewall Jackson, but there are two eyewitness accounts in the literature. She was also on the losing side, and the people writing the history were not just Union, but male. At that time a white woman in the South suffered many of the same disadvantages as an African-American woman, especially if she married. So there was this other war, between the sexes, and there were Southern women who hated slavery even though they benefited greatly from it. If you look at the decades immediately before there were a lot of things going on that they never teach in high school, or the usual college-level survey course. The Underground Railroad barely gets a nod, and the rise of the feminist movement is usually dismissed as an aberration, if mentioned at all. There were free-love colonies and an early version of RenFair called "Tournament" which affected the relative strengths of the cavalry at the beginning of the war. Southern gentlemen modeled themselves on Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe and other novels and were expert horsemen anyway. Belle was part of that, a bit of a tomboy, and could ride and shoot as well as a man. One later historian dismissed her as "A circus rider who played the game of Flirt." It was not until the 1930s that Louis Sigaud, a former military intelligence officer, wrote a fair biography of her. There are also huge gaps in the records since all the Confederate Secret Service records were burned at the end of the war to protect those in the North who were its agents.

Q. In The Shenandoah Spy, you create a solid cast of believable supporting characters, including African-American characters. How did you fill the gaps between what is known and what you created with these important characters?

A. Well, I have relatives in the South and have lived there from time to time. I spent four years in military intelligence, in Vietnam and Germany. I have been a reporter, worked for a Private Investigator, and am generally a close observer of people and their actions. I have a lot of friends who are African-American and worked with many when I was in the security industry, so I have some understanding of that culture. But most of it came from reading sources and using my imagination to fill in the blanks. The relationship between Belle and her personal servant Eliza Corsey is a case in point. Long after the war, the two women remained friends and Belle would visit her and bring presents for her children. So obviously there was a family connection that overrode the racial barrier. Belle was world famous for a time, but she never forgot her friend and fellow agent. Having grown up in the military and served there myself, I also understand how such organizations work and what makes for good officers and bad ones. The fact that Turner Ashby would not drill his men and wrote few reports, and may have committed a war crime, tells me that he was a particularly bad officer, certainly not worthy of the general's rank he aspired to and held for only two weeks before he was killed in battle. A death caused by his habit of leading the charge; something real generals never do. It's glorious, but poor tactics.

Q. What books are you reading right now? Which writers in your genre or others do you think aren’t currently receiving the attention they deserve?

A. I read widely. The research continues, of course, because this is the first of five books about the Confederate Secret Service and the women who were its most effective agents. I read novels, and some non-fiction because I have other projects, and I read and sometimes write for various blogs. As for writers, I've noticed that most writers of historical fiction are, in some way or another, self-published. Traditional agents and publishers aren't much interested. Self-published books are considered, per se, badly done. That's just not the case and the Historical Novel Society reviews them. Some of them win awards now. Carol Buchanan's book, God's Thunderbolt: The Vigilantes of Montana is another Civil War tale, and it won the Spur Award from the Western Writers of America for Best First Novel this year. If you're talking about the people in New York, everyone in historical fiction is being ignored because the last best-seller was Cold Mountain, and that was a long time ago. The industry is not about producing literature, but best-sellers, these days.

Q. What’s next for Francis Hamit?

A. Another book tour next month. (Details on BookTour.com). We put off the second book on the advice of our distributor and have to keep beating the drum for this one. Word of mouth is not built overnight, especially in this economy.

The Shenandoah Spy (Brass Cannon Books; 2008, 436 pages: ISBN: 978-1-59595-902-7).