Occupation Series by Chris Lloyd

Taken from the CRA Newsletter:

Layers of Research by Chris Lloyd

There is only one rabbit hole that is deeper and more relentless than researching for a novel. And that is asking a historical novelist about their research. Never, under any circumstances, do it. You may never escape.

I write the Occupation series, featuring Eddie Giral, a French police detective in Paris under the Nazi Occupation. To get the story right calls for a lot of research. This ranges from the general – the major events of the war – to the specific – the occupying authorities and the French police, rationing and criminality. To get the atmosphere and the setting right calls for much more targeted research into the day-to-day minutiae of people’s lives under Nazi rule. Where other writers have a social life, I have layers of research.

The bottom layer is immersive research. This is where I spend hours staring at photos of people of the period, what they’re wearing, where they work, how they move about the city. Films released at the time are a great source of getting a sense of the place and period. Eddie used to moonlight at jazz clubs, so I listen to the jazz he would have listened to.

The next layer up is general research. If my story takes place in autumn 1940, as in the case of Paris Requiem, I need to know what was happening in France and elsewhere and decide how much of it Eddie could have known, given censorship and restrictions.

Next up is specific research. As I set each book at a specific time during the Occupation, the bulk of the research goes into what was happening in Paris during that particular time. What laws were passed, what groups were being persecuted, which senior Nazis visited the city. I look for specific events and curiosities, such as French prisoners going missing from a Paris prison and interpret that through Eddie. His investigation turns up the same truth as the research gave to me but cast through his prism.

Finally comes the targeted research. This comes mainly from diaries and interviews. Recorded memories of people who lived through the Occupation are essential. This is what creates the atmosphere – what it was like to queue for bread, the silence of the streets without cars and buses, the sound of boots on cobbles.

Uniting all of the above, there is one underlying piece of research that is both extremely important and extremely enjoyable – walking Paris. If you want to bring all the strands of your research together, you need to walk the streets your characters walk. Just don’t ask me to talk about it. As I will. At length.

Read more about Chris and his books here.