Bernard Cornwell had one of the most original spurs to a writing career we've ever encountered in PW. The English-born novelist, now the leading practitioner of dashing military historical fiction in the world, had just met and married an American girl and moved to the U.S. with her. But he couldn't get a green card, and in order to support himself here without a job, began to write.
That was 23 years ago, and the writing, once he got started, came so easily that it's now 43 books later; he's written at least one book a year, often two, since 1980, and his long-running series centering on Richard Sharpe, an English rifleman in the Napoleonic Wars, has given him the kind of cachet on land that the late Patrick O'Brian's Master and Commander series has enjoyed on the ocean wave.
PW caught up with Cornwell at his home on Cape Cod—he's long been an American citizen—a couple of days after a huge snowstorm had blanketed the Cape, and his driveway, he told us on the phone, had only just been plowed. Still, it had been a good time to work. "I guess it's God's way of saying, 'Get down to it,' " he joked.
Not that Cornwell seems to have much trouble getting down to it. His latest, The Last Kingdom,a stirring epic tale about the struggle in the 9th century by people who would eventually become the English to fight free of the ferocious Danish invaders, is just out from HarperCollins, and its successor, in what is destined to become another major series, is already written.
Harper was his publisher from the first in the U.K. (with Sharpe's Eagle) and it wasn't even Harper then, but the unmerged Collins: "I remember having lunch with Lady Collins." He has stayed there ever since, except for a few years when his editor, Susan Watt, moved to Michael Joseph and he moved with her; then they both came back. Here the Sharpe books have also been done in recent years at Harper, where Dan Conaway has been his editor for a decade.
With someone so prolific, though, there is always the problem of too much product, and Cornwell's much shorter Arthurian saga, the Warlord Chronicles, was published at St. Martin's. (There's also the Grail Quest series and the Nathaniel Starbuck Chronicles.) It's a problem that faintly puzzles him: "I think it's foolish when a publisher says he can only do one book a year. As a reader, I would seek out every book of a favorite author, no matter how many there were, and who published them." He also prefers that the English and American editions come out simultaneously, and is sorry that that seems to have slipped a bit with The Last Kingdom.This appeared last October in the U.K. and, spurred partly by Christmas sales, was a big bestseller there (his U.K. editions generally outsell the U.S. ones by three to one), "but of course it's a subject that particularly appeals to the English." He is careful to stress "English" because Alfred's success in holding onto the kingdom of Wessex, the only one of four the Vikings had not overrun, enabled him to found a dynasty that eventually came to rule England (notBritain, which came later with the addition of Scotland, Wales and eventually Northern Ireland).
It's a stirring subject, and one considerably neglected in fiction since the premature death in 1964 of Alfred Duggan, whose province it was. "And the wonderful thing is that it all happened, and nobody knows much about it." Another spur to this shift in Cornwell's time frame was a personal one. As an infant born in 1944, the "war baby" son of a Canadian airman and an Englishwoman, he had been adopted by a family belonging to a peculiar religious sect, and suffered an unhappy childhood. University liberated him, he became an executive at BBC-TV, and while working in Northern Ireland for Thames TV met Judy, his wife now for nearly 30 years.
Cornwell had always had information about his birth parents, but it was only recently, on a whim and while on tour in Vancouver, that he decided to see if his father was still alive. Amazingly, he was, at 84, and there was an emotional meeting. His family name, Cornwell discovered, was Oughtred, and it was an ancient family indeed, tracing back to Bebbanburg Castle in Northumbria (still there, and now known as Bamburgh). Out of these circumstances Cornwell created a Northumbrian hero, Uhtred, who was also adopted—forcibly, by the Danes, and who grew up among them, learned their fighting ways and eventually came to help Alfred defeat them.
As always while researching a book, Cornwell traveled extensively to all the scenes he describes, doing his best to recreate a landscape and weathers that, despite the lapse of 12 centuries, have not essentially changed. Such journeyings have taken him all over southern Europe for the Richard Sharpe novels. "A real hardship!" he laughs. "You're wandering around in all these great settings and can say you're working."
In fact he is an exhaustive researcher, claims to have at his Cape Cod home one of the most considerable Napoleonic libraries in the world, with thousands of volumes, and a desk always covered with books and notes. "I never stop researching, but when I get bored with it I just start to write," he says, acknowledging that he'd rather be writing.
PW, whose knowledge of early English history is sketchy, couldn't resist inquiring whether King Alfred, as legend has it, really burned some cakes he was watching for some soldiers in the field. "I'm not sure it really happened, since it wasn't reported until 400 years later," he laughs. "But of course, for readers like you, I had to make sure to get it in." The incident will duly appear in the next volume about Alfred's dynasty and doings, The White Horse. Perhaps by then the two Harpers will have pub dates together again.
