Júlia: Welcome to the Ringwood Publishing Podcast. I'm your host, Júlia.
Annemarie: And I'm your host, Annemarie. And each week, we are joined by a series of authors, colleagues, and guests to talk about all things books and publishing.
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Annemarie: Hello, everyone, and welcome to Season 3, Episode 2 of the Ringwood Publishing Podcast. My name is Annemarie Whitehurst and I’m one of the co-hosts this season, along with fellow intern, Júlia Pujals Antolin.
Júlia: Hello.
Annemarie: Our second episode of the season is dedicated to Ringwood’s latest release, Revenge of the Tyrants, by L.A. Kristiansen.
Júlia, can you tell us a bit more about today's episode?
Júlia: Sure. So today we will be interviewing Lynda Kristiansen about the second book in her eight-part series following the Scots Wars of Independence.
It’s an honour to have Lynda here today, especially as she had to travel all the way from Norway to attend the launch of her book in Glasgow.
Set at the beginning of the 14th century, Revenge of the Tyrants follows the characters that readers fell in love with in the first book of the series, Raise Dragon. Written from alternating points of view, the story opens as four Scottish knights flee from Geoffrey De Charney on a treasure barge. Following what they feel to be their duty to restore Scotland to its true king, the four characters find themselves in the middle of a network of lies, betrayal, and espionage, woven by centuries of greed from those who want to claim Scotland.
As the story takes us throughout Europe, we follow the plans of Kings Edward I of England, Philip IV of France, and Haakon V of Norway to destabilise each other and become the dominant force in Europe.
I’d now like to introduce L.A. Kristiansen. Lynda, thank you so much for being on the podcast with us today.
Lynda is a writer, originally from Glasgow, but she now splits her time between Scotland, France, and Norway. She honed her research on Scottish history after uncovering her own family ties with many of the leaders of the wars of Scottish Independence like Bishop Wishart, Robert the Bruce, and William Wallace. The masterful intertwining of fact and fiction in Revenge of the Tyrants, and previously in Raise Dragon, is due to her commitment to recount the bravery and courage of those involved in the lead-up to the acknowledgement of Scotland’s sovereignty in 1328, and Bruce’s death in 1329.
So, let’s get into Revenge of the Tyrants! You want to start with the questions, Annemarie?
Annemarie: Sure! As mentioned, Revenge of the Tyrants is the second book in an eight-book series on the Scottish Wars of Independence. And for our listeners who haven’t yet had a chance to pick up the first book, Raise Dragon, Lynda, could you talk a little bit about the events of this first book and how they set up the story readers will see in the second?
Lynda: Ok. Delighted to do that. Thank you very much for the wonderful introduction.
Yeah, Raise Dragon covers a period of 1291 to the middle of 1306. It starts off with an escape from Eaker with the fall of the last Crusader Templar stronghold in the Holy Land. And we find that, as with many of the world history events, these random Scots just happened to be there. And one of them is a character that didn't exist in real life called John D. Wishart. I had to make up several characters to fit around Bishop Wishart, because obviously, he was a man of the cloth and whilst he had relatives, he didn't have any children, so I had to manufacture a sort of extended family for him.
But yeah, with many of the events that are in Raise Dragon, such as the fall of Eaker, such as Bishop Wishart, these were people who actually existed and most of the events that I describe in Raise Dragon actually happened.
So just to cover some of those, those events, it's 1291 to 1306, there's a, there's an element of French history and an element of Norwegian history and a large part of Scottish and English history. So the years between 1291 and 1306 there's a lot of things that are setting up the future books. So Raise Dragon kind of, is an adventure in its own right, but it also sets up the themes and the threads for the other seven books that follow. So, starts off with the fall of Eaker. We then have, I think the next event is the French wandering around France, Italy, basically trying to conquer parts of Italy and looking for, and they were looking for some treasure. The treasure ship that is running through all the books actually is found, this starts off in Acre. And John D. Wishart just happens to find it, so that, that gives him the ownership that gives him the permission to participate in the subsequent adventures that happen and Bishop Wishart gets involved as his brother. So, the French are looking for the treasure in 1300.
They're also looking for a crown for another character that appears, who did exist, a guy called Charles de Valois, who happened to be the younger brother of the French king, who was called Philip IV, “Philippe le Bel”, Philip the handsome, and he again, another character that existed. And many of the events that are described in Raise Dragon, in Revenge of the Tyrants, a lot the other books, actually happened. So, he was a very big character in medieval politics and in France, from around about 1285 to when he died in 1314.
The next key thing, I think, as we move to 1306, and the next event is really the murder of John Comyn by Robert the Bruce in Greyfriars Abbey in Dumfries. And that's a major, a major part of what happens to Bruce and to Wishart, because Bruce went there to speak to John Comyn, and one of them ended up dead. So, Bruce would be excommunicated. There was a short period from February of 1306 to his crowning in mid-March 1306, that they had to crown him, and it was always Bishop Wishart’s intention to crown him. But it wasn't his intention to crown him under the circumstances of an assassination in the church.
And then the next event that actually happened is Methven, the Battle of Methven. Scotland was thoroughly annihilated by another major character, called Aymer de Valence, who was Edward I, the King of England's cousin.
We then talk about, the treasure comes back in, and we bring in some characters from Constantinople. It was two Emperors there, one was called the Emperor Andronikos. He was, and his son Emperor Michael, they were both joint Emperors in 1306. And they were, you know, presiding over a declining empire that had its wealth largely stolen by, to eventually, the sacking of Constantinople and for which the Empire never really recovered from.
We then move to France, and there are the Templars, and lots written about what happened to them, they were still very important at this time. The Philip IV-Edward I conflicts, they were very jealous of each other, look to each other as the main threat. And of course, Scotland was involved in that, because we joined up with the French in 1295, which is another event that happened called the Old Alliance, which was still in place, right up to the end of the last century. And then there's a couple other characters. So, you can hear there's lots and lots of content.
Júlia: That's so interesting. Yeah. Especially, like, it is an eight-part series, so it's huge and you have so much space to develop and introduce so many more characters. But I imagine there must have been some sort of process of cutting out characters and events that happened, because you maybe didn't have space, or maybe because you thought it wouldn't be as entertaining to the plot. But it's just such an interesting process to see what sort of made the cut and what didn’t.
Lynda: There’s several characters that were too stand alone. They did something but it didn't have a, a continuation. So, there's many events. I mean, they describe the Byzantine Empire as the “Forgotten Empire”. There's lots of lots of really interesting history going on at that time there. But it doesn't relate to the other areas. It doesn't relate to France, or England, or Norway, whereas the events I kept in the book are where either two or more of the political areas, the French, the English, Scottish and Norwegians and Byzantines actually had involvement and were, were working together either against each other or against, you know, ganging up on one of them. So, some of the events, you know, obviously, it's not a history book. It's a historical fiction. I didn't intend ever to write a history book. But I did take real events because real events, in many ways are, are stranger than any fiction you can make up.
Annemarie: You’re writing a series on the Scottish Wars of Independence, but when you get down into the history, you're really encompassing so much else. And one of the things that Revenge of the Tyrants examines, besides, you've talked about in Raise Dragon how you have all of these different conflicts and alliances between different areas of wider Europe, that Revenge of the Tyrants takes a look at the relationship between, the tense relationship between England and Scotland in particular, which is still present today. When you started writing the series, did you set out to represent this conflict for your readers to learn about?
Lynda: Well, you know, Raise Dragon, as an idea started off more than 10 years ago. I wrote it over about three years. But actually, current events have reversed engineered themselves into the context of the book. I didn't write the book to fit what's happening now, the events of the last, especially the last three years, I guess, four years, since 2020, and the relationship between Scotland and England has almost, you know, gone back to a state (without the swords involved) as it was many hundreds of years ago. Almost the events of the last four years have matched the book, but you can, you can just see the characters and the relationship between Scotland has certainly, I don't know if you’d use the word “deteriorate”. I think, certainly the English, and this is a personal, a personal view, not sure people, some people would disagree with me. But there's certainly been a, an attack on our devolution, an attack on our democracy.
There are fundamental cultural differences with how Scottish voters view the world and English voters view the world. I'm talking about the group, not all individuals, of course, will agree with everything. But I think, you know, you can see that the vote, the EU vote, where there wasn't a single district in Scotland that voted to leave the EU. And in fact, when you aggregated it all up, 62% wanted to stay and 30% wanted to leave. Most of the governments over the last 60-odd years are not the governments that Scotland has ever voted for. So, we have to consider that there is a definite difference in culture. And there's a definite difference in how things are here. And I think it's got worse over the last few years. I don't see it improving. So, as I say, to come back to my original point, real events have reversed engineered themselves into my book.
Júlia: History repeats itself, I think, and literature really makes that obvious. On a little bit more, I guess, not as dark note, one of the characters while I was reading Revenge of the Tyrants that I enjoyed the most was Christina of the Isles because she's just such a fearless, yet compassionate leader. And you give her a, like, very distinct personality and very fully fleshed background, which makes her more than just a side kick or like a side character. So, what was your thought process when introducing a female character in such a male-driven narrative?
Lynda: She was relatively easy to form because she did exist. She was, before the “Lord of the Isles” title existed, she was the clan chief of Clan Raghnaill. They didn't call them chiefs at that time. She did inherit the lands. Her father, who was called Ailéan, he left his lands to her, even though he had two sons. And these two sons were called Lachlann and Raghnaill. She had slightly closer relationship with Rory. She named, actually, one of her children after him. The book, kind of, places her brother as a little bit more antagonistic, but there's a there's a bit of a couple of twists, which I won't spoil.
But she did exist. She did rule these lands. She ruled them very well. She was related to Bruce. There's some suggestion that her mother was Bruce's mother's sister. She did have close relationships with, you know, the island, on the island, the Chieftains, and she did struggle to keep them under control. But she did. And she did hide Bruce, after the Battle of Methven. And there is a strong suggestion, that they had a son together, who was called Rory. So, she must have been an incredible person because she was ruling a very wild area on the west coast of Scotland, where the later kings, the later Stuart kings had to go and arrest these people and fight these people. 200 years later, so they didn't get milder, they got more wilder in the 14th century. And she managed to use, she must have used wile, and, and cunning and intelligence and manipulation on political advice.
And why shouldn't she have been teaching Bruce? He was a very decent man. There's no suggestion that personally he was an unpleasant human being, so, you know, I kind of read into his relationship with her, one of respect, not somebody who used somebody and be detained in her area and her lands for you know, several months. Again, if you weave a plot amongst events that happen, and they connect with each other. As I said, she was a real person who had a real life and a quite remarkable one.
Júlia: No, I think that what you said, they’re relationship of, like, the friendship and respect between the two of them just really comes across in the book.
Lynda: Thank you.
Annemarie: For sure. And, to speak a little bit to their relationship and the relationships of other characters in the book: you have the friendship between Innes, Jamie, Will and Hendor as well. What advice would you give to other people who are writing within the historical fiction genre? How to navigate between truth and fiction? And how to navigate how much of the facts to elaborate on for the purpose of plot?
Lynda: Well, those four characters, with the exception of William de Irwyn, didn't exist. So, Innes and Hendor and Jamie, so Jamie Wishart had to be… Bishop Wishart was a man of the cloth, so I had to have him as being son of Bishop Wishart’s brother. Innes was made up for a specific reason, he has another plot theme, which involves some scores that he has to settle. Hendor is a, kind of, I'm sure Wishart had somebody like him. But Hendor is a kind of guy who, he has all the scars of Scotland in one man, he's been there, he's suffered. And he's – even despite being disabled – he has, there's lots to give. He's a very practical man. So, I always think that he's a part of Bishop Wishart. He's, kind of, Bishop Wishart’s, without the dress on, the clinical robes, he would be what Bishop Wishart would have been had Bishop Wishart been a fighter, well, he was a bit of a fighter, but not a knight.
And in terms of how they talk to each other: I wanted them all to be different pieces of personality, but have a common commitment to what they were doing and, and to be intelligent and to be empathetic, but an edge to them: being educated. I think that's a key thing I wanted them, you know, one of them to be well educated. Jamie wants to be well educated. Hendor is, kind of, practical, and Innes is a noble who's kind of fallen through hard times. And how they talk to each other is kind of, you know, I've got friends, some of them are based on their personalities or based on people I know. So it's almost like, how would they talk to each other? And how do my friends talk to each other and behave to each other? I mean, okay, they're not 14th century guys working for Scottish independence, but how would, you know, what – how did they used to speak to each other? I was at university and had a very good close group of friends, and how they talk to each other, how they behave, and the mannerisms they had. So, I kind of used real life.
So, the personalities. And then what would they see in those situations? You know, Hendor would be very, he'd say, “Well, okay, that's all very well, but here's what we need to do about it,” you know. Will, will be slightly more theoretical, but he knew how to use a sword. You know, Jaime was a bit more naive about how he views the world. And Innes is kind of your silent, but, you know, very practical, very knowledgeable, very intelligent man. He knows France, he's the French element, that the other three are out-and-out Scots, he's got half-French, half-Scottish. So, he, he kind of brings in that local knowledge. And in both books, they're trying to get away from France and get back to Scotland. And he's been working in France for a long time on behalf of Bishop Wishart.
So, a bit of, you know, my own observations of my own friends. It's a bit of, you know, what would they say in these situations? In Will’s case, it's based a little bit on who that guy was, the other three is, kind of, you know, different personalities with different skills.
Júlia: Yeah, the conversation between them, it does seem, like, so organic, so natural. They hold a lot of emotional weight. And for me, particularly, it was quite shocking to discover how some of them acted as double agents, because it made you doubt which one of them were going to end up being, like, good characters, and one of them would go more towards the evil side. Is it hard for you to write these, sort of, like, morally-gray characters? And do you approach them differently from other characters?
Lynda: It's supposed to be an adventure, it's supposed to be politics. It's supposed to be interesting. I don't want the books to be one dimensional, two dimensional, I want them to be three dimensional, almost like, you know, the old Star Trek, three-dimensional chess. So, I want the characters and the plots to have more and to reveal little bits as they go on. The duplicitous ones, the ones who are out-and-out, you know, evil. You know what they're going to say and you know what they're going to do and what's their parts. So, those type of characters, very single dimensions aren't really that interesting. You lose interest in them, but if you've got people that you're not too sure about where it's going to land, you know, like the old best detectives, it's, I'd like to keep people guessing about who the good guys and who the not-so-good guys. There is some surprises as you go along. So some of the characters that you might think of traitors, maybe not traitors, and the people that you think are good guys might turn out to be not good guys, but you'll have to buy the books to see.
Júlia: So true.
Annemarie: Last question that we're really curious about, because this is an eight-part series, and this is the second part in the eight-part series: Did you plan the content of each of the novels before you started writing Raise Dragon, or are you kind of figuring it out as you go?
Lynda: I certainly thought it was too much content for one or even two books. And it wasn't supposed to be, you know, a chronological history of Scotland from when the king died, Alexander, had died in 1286, through to 1328 and 1329 when Bruce died. There's so much going on, I needed to break it down. And if it wants to be a fictional following of those events, lots of people have done that. I wanted it to be a little bit more Alistair MacLean, a bit more political, a bit more guessing, a bit more exciting, a bit more adventure. So, the event was a great adventure, what happened between 1286 and 1329. But I wanted to put down a little bit more than that, because that's, we already knew all about that. So, we invent some new things, and weave in some possible legends. There’s a couple of legends that I've used about some people who should have been king that weren’t king, and that's, that made them more real, and perhaps they were at the time.
So, in terms of the books, there was always a start point and an end point. And my original end point was going to Bannockburn, which was 1314. But there's so much happened between 1314 and 1329. Originally, I was going to make Bannockburn the last book, but I think it'll be the second to last book, it might even be the third to last book, because there's lots of interesting stuff that happened after 1314 to lead up to the Treaty of Arbroath in 1320, the Treaty of Northampton-Edinburgh in 1328. And what with Bruce dying, 1329.
And then you could, you know, potentially look at what happened after Bruce died in ensuring his succession of his son, who was only five years old at the time when he died. Some of the characters that Bruce left in charge of Scotland, went on crusade, because that was something that Bruce wanted to do, and he couldn’t do it. So, I might even do another, you know, I might even move Bannockburn back to book six because in 1330 James Douglas went out to Teba with Bruce’s heart and was killed by the Moors. So, there's quite a lot of interesting things that happened.
Annemarie: Yeah, there's too many interesting things to leave out, you know?
Júlia: Yeah, that's good that you, that you give yourself like enough space, enough freedom, to wiggle the contents around as you see fit.
Lynda: Yes, yes. So, most of the characters, most of the events are events that happened. You know, I'd say out of the 80 or so characters that appear across both books, I'd say probably 85% of them were people that really existed, and in many cases, actually did the events that I've described.
Júlia: That's all we have time for today. But thank you, Lynda, for joining us on such short notice and for this insightful conversation.
Annemarie: If you haven't yet ordered a copy of Revenge of the Tyrants, you can get yours through the Ringwood Publishing website. Or, if you're listening from outside of the UK, head over to Amazon to grab a copy. Tomorrow, the 28th of April, is the official launch of Revenge of the Tyrants, and if you enjoyed our conversation with Lynda and want to know more about the book, keep an eye on the Ringwood Publishing Facebook page, where we will post the live-stream of the launch of Revenge of the Tyrants so you can watch it at your own time from wherever you are in the world. Thanks for listening!
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