Volume 3, Issue 6 – December, 2000

Bill Fawcett: Admitting to Influence

Everyone wants to know “the power behind the throne.” Unfortunately, real-life Merlins tend to hide behind a smokescreen of incomprehensible titles and pseudonyms. Experts at misdirection, they reveal themselves only where you least expect them — putting their real name on books or projects with almost no connection to their true claims to fame.

At DragonCon, Crescent Blues persuaded Bill Fawcett, one of the real wizards of the gaming, mystery and fantasy publishing worlds, to come clean about his involvement with Mycroft Holmes, the Inspector General’s wife, Mayfair Games and Navy SEALs. The behind the scenes glimpses he provided of gaming and publishing — and even a little peek into the workings of the Public Broadcasting System — surprised even us.

Crescent Blues: Who is the mystery writer known as Quinn Fawcett?

Bill Fawcett: Chelsea Quinn Yarbro and Bill Fawcett with Quinn being the talented half.

Well, I sort of have my doubts on that one but…

I don’t. I see what we write. I’m an editor. Quinn’s the talented half.

Is that how you work in the collaboration — Quinn writes and you edit?

Actually, we figure out the plot together. Quinn writes the bulk of the material with large gaps that say: “Bill, do 3,000 words that go from point A to point B with a fight scene that has this happen in it here.” Or, “Go back and rewrite this chapter with all the historical background material we need in it.” Or, “Write the board meeting on this train and create the characters, then tell me who they are so I can use them for the rest of the book.”

In other words, she gives me the technical things, which I’m able to do as a historian. Then she does characterization, description — which she is an expert at, as well. And between us we put together my action — and she’s also a wonderful action author. Neither of us is doing what the other couldn’t. It’s just that she has to find something for me to do. So she gives me those parts.

How did the collaboration start?

I had worked with Quinn on prior projects. We had done another series of mysteries together, called “Mme. Vernet’s Investigates,” because we wanted to. I’m a Napoleonic-era historian by hobby. Quinn and I set the Mme. Vernet mysteries in that period, because we wanted to do a book where the French were the good guys instead of the bad guys.

We all read the British books, and Napoleon’s people are always the vicious bad guys. Well, to half of Europe [the French] were the good guys, and come on, they’re the ones who financed our revolution and who supported us. This country entered the War of 1812 rather stupidly in timing, because we were sympathetic to the universal image and the rule of law that attached itself to Napoleon.

The person we have is one of France’s Inspector Generals, who bears no resemblance a certain movie character [Editor’s note: the famous Danny Kaye character and movie of the same name]. Inspector General Vernet is a chief investigative officer, one of five in Napoleonic France. He is a confidante and familiar of Napoleon. But Mme. Vernet is the real investigator. While he takes off on the big things, she’s the one who solves important cases in and around Paris, and when she goes with her husband to places like Egypt. Mme. Vernet is under all the restrictions of the French culture of that period, which was more liberal than any until today but still much more repressive to females than our own.

Napoleonic history is only one of your historical interests. Aren’t you also the official historian for the Navy SEALs?

No, no, not in the least. I am a field historian for the SEAL Museum in Fort Pierce, Fla. The official historian for the Navy SEALs is a retired ex-Navy captain who is an excellent historian and writer and who I have worked with. I’m very, very far from being an official military historian. Among other things, the captain has the security clearances to allow him to actually look at what happened — something that no civilian from the outside should be able to do.

I write with and write about the Navy SEALs. I work with them. I’ve been privileged to know a large number of them. Privileged to work with their fraternal order, to work with various members of the SEALs, to do their stories or to interview many of them for books like Hunters & Shooters, an Oral History of the U.S. Navy SEALs in Vietnam, working with Kevin Dockery. I even worked with the last television special on the SEALs, but simply because I am a historian who works on it. There’s nothing official involving either the military or the government in those projects.

Did you study history in school?

History is my background in that I did study it in school, although my advanced degrees are not in history by any means. But who earns a living in what they trained to do?

History has always been my passion. What science fiction reader isn’t a historian at heart? That’s why alternate histories do so well. Look at what Quinn writes — the Saint Germain novels. We are both fanatic history buffs. Therefore, it was quite logical when we decided another book — and my little commercial nose went up and sniffed for money, and I went Sherlock [Holmes] is big. His brother Mycroft has never been licensed. Conan Doyle’s estate lost control of that character; let’s restore it.

I contacted the estate. We could have just gone and written [the books about Mycroft], because there was no reason to work through the estate. The character was public domain. But I wouldn’t write a Tolkien [pastiche] involving his characters either — even if they were in the public domain. You have to have a certain reverence to the people who were us — the science fiction and fantasy community — a hundred years ago or fifty years ago and did that creative work. So I went consciously to the estate to get their approval.

At the time Conan Doyle’s granddaughter was still alive. (She has since died.) I requested permission and offered a payment program to them for the right to be the official Mycroft Holmes writer. The estate put certain restrictions on our writing. You will never see Sherlock on-camera in a Mycroft Holmes book. You will never see us dis any member of the royal family, and we will not introduce all the technology from the Wild, Wild West in the books.

[Laughs.] Well, that wouldn’t be period

That is exactly correct. We wanted accurate, period material in the books. We were inspired as much by the brilliant Jeremy Brett performances in the PBS series as anything else. In fact we were thoroughly crushed when their Mycroft Holmes unfortunately died. We did not take Charles Gray (the actor who played Mycroft in the PBS Sherlock Holmes series) as the exact model for our Mycroft. We took our model out of the book, but Gray’s was a wonderful portrayal of that character.

Isn’t there a fourth Mycroft book scheduled for release soon?

Yes, our fourth Mycroft book. [Editor’s note: The Scottish Ploy, scheduled for release in mid-December.] The first three are Against the Brotherhood, Embassy Row, and The Flying Scotsman. You could call The Flying Scotsman a locked room mystery. The last half of the book all takes place on a train ride from London to Edinburgh with all the major characters and everything going on just on the cars of the train.

The fourth book revolves around the fact that Mycroft has a substitute. Otherwise the Brotherhood would always know what was going on with [British Intelligence] by watching Mycroft. Did you ever wonder why nobody talks in Mycroft’s club? That’s because his substitute has a Cockney accent.

But Mycroft’s double is an actor who can make himself up to look so much like Mycroft that as long as the actor doesn’t talk people don’t know the difference. Well, in this book, something happens to the actor and in order to investigate a plot that’s going on, Mycroft and his double have to reverse roles. Mycroft has to join the theater company as the actor. The name of the book is The Scottish Ploy, so you can guess what play we’re doing.

They say the reason “The Scottish Play” has a reputation for bad luck is that the theater owners always trotted it out when the company was in the red. It was a guaranteed box office smash. Here’s hoping The Scottish Ploy will prove to be good box office too. What are your plans for the fifth Mycroft Holmes novel?

It depends on whether a lot of people go out and buy The Scottish Ploy and the paperback of The Flying Scotsman, and whether PBS goes out and buys the series. There may or may not be a fifth volume.

Are you talking to PBS about a Mycroft Holmes series?

Yes. We have a contract with a producer who has presented it to them and they’re making their decision now. Of course they’ve have 47 series’ that making a decision on for every slot so I’m not exactly putting the house up for sale to move to Hollywood yet.

[Laughs.] You’d hate the climate.

It’s the earthquakes.

Your college background seems to have been focused on history and other standard liberal arts subjects. How did you get from there to the areas for which you are most famous — gaming, writing and packaging books?

I’ve always been interested in gaming. When I finished school I worked at universities. Unfortunately — and particularly in the late Sixties and early Seventies — working in a university was like taking a vow of poverty. Certainly not one of chastity, but definitely one of poverty in the Sixties and Seventies. As a result when I started to realize that I had better get serious with life, sometime in my twenties, I moved into commercial training and education. I ended up in the insurance industry, which is necessary, very serious and conscientious — and dull to the point of exquisite boredom.

My entertainment, my distraction was gaming. I was fortunate to be in the Chicago/Milwaukee area when the first Dungeons & Dragons game was being played from mimeographed sheets Gary [Gygax] had passed out to the group he was leading. And one of that group began running a D & D campaign that I was in. Interestingly enough he was an IRS agent — well, he could enforce the die rolls. That’s Lawful Evil. So I got an interest in it, became more involved, began writing in it. I was writing for gaming for about ten years before I even thought about anything in book form.

And then one day I was the liaison — I already knew everyone in publishing as the liaison from my gaming company, Mayfair Games, where I had been brought in shortly after it was founded by the owners and made a partner. Anyway, I was working as the liaison to Berkley Publishing, which was distributing all our games in the book market.

One day Susan Allison handed me a book and said “You’re going to come in tomorrow, I know you’re here for the night, read this real quick and tell me what you think of it.” To be quite honest the book was a stinker. It was not a good book. It was in that era when if you put an elf and a sword and a dragon in it, you could publish anything. And I said basically, this is terrible. Then made the mistake of saying, “I could do better than this.” The four Sword-Quest juvenile books I did come from that statement. And Susan has to accept a certain amount of guilt for the rest of my career because of that.

You are still packaging games and putting games together. Could you give Crescent Blues readers an idea of your current projects?

Two online roleplaying games. I’m also involved with a number of lesser online role playing games, and I’m currently working with on a multimedia project — including computer, paper and book — for a cyberpunk project with a number of people, including one of the founding authors of the cyberpunk concept. We’re updating the concept to move it closer to today’s standards and attitudes, and more of what has significantly affected the attitudes of that community — the tech community. And that is the Matrix concept of “In the Net.”

Beyond that I occasionally get involved in card or board game concepts. In fact I’m talking with a company here [at DragonCon] about assisting in a peripheral manner that would use my military history background in a game that may be coming out in about a year from a major company. The game involves the military and images of main battle tanks and soldiers and things like that.

Given your long-time involvement with Dungeons & Dragons(r), did you catch some of the trailers and stuff related to the movie, and how did it look to you?

It looks beautiful. We’ll see if it has a plot, but it looks beautiful. I mean when you adapt something like Dungeons & Dragons you can have something that is wonderful like Baldur’s Gate or you can have something that is awful like Quag Keep. That was not Andre Norton — a brilliant writer, whom I admire in almost everything. But Quag Keep was an obvious attempt to do D & D, and it was not, let us say, the most well crafted book she has produced out of the many brilliant things she has done.

Have you ever thought of taking your passion for history and translating that into designing a game along the lines of your Mycroft Holmes or Mme. Vernet stories?

Actually there was an even more direct thing that I worked on — a design for that a company that was not financially able to go through with it. At one point they were working on doing a Highlander(r) game in which you could deal with each century [Duncan MacLeod] was alive. So you had everything from 17th century Scotland to the modern times — every war Duncan was in and everything else. You literally would have been able to play this game in about five or six different recreated eras.

The problem with that was that it meant five or six sets of terrain and programming, and it became a very expensive project. Eventually it became economically unfeasible to do the game in the way it was created. And when it became non-historical, it became a lot less interesting to me. Eventually another company took the license and is doing an online Highlander(r) game that is coming out soon, but it’s not that game.

What other aspects of your career would you like to discuss?

Let’s talk about working with Quinn a little, which is a fascinating process, because like an army in battle, neither of us ever does quite exactly what the other expects. And almost invariably in Quinn’s case, it’s a wonderful change that I more than heartily approve of. She’s the heart of the Mycroft series — growing more and more so as they progress and she gets deeper and becomes more involved with the character.

She has developed a wonderful insight into how someone from that era would [conduct intelligence operations]. This is not just a clone of James Bond. This is someone who doesn’t like to work hard but likes to use his mind to outwit people. Someone who is staunchly devoted and supporting to Queen and country — or King and country, in this particular case. Quinn has a wonderful way of putting herself into that mindset.

Do some of the books in the series take place after Queen Victoria’s death in 1902?

Some of them. It’s Queen and country first, then King and country by the time the last two take place.

Working with Quinn — it has been very interesting to watch how a paragraph description of a chapter evolves into that chapter. Then how you go back and modify and change what you’ve written. I’ve learned an awful lot working with Quinn as far as the creative process.

Wasn’t it Harlan Ellison who was commenting that for all we admire his writing, he worries that people will figure out how much he hasn’t learned yet about writing? [Chuckles.] That’s not just the humble and intelligent side of Harlan most people don’t see, it is also a very realistic statement for almost every writer I know. I mean writing is a craft that you can never develop completely. And it’s not because of changes in writing itself, but because there’s never a point where you can’t put more into it.

How has your collaboration with Quinn changed from when you started?

I would say probably Quinn is carrying more of the burden in some ways. When we first started it was about an even split on writing. Quinn is now doing a larger amount of the final draft than I am. The reason we’re doing this, among other things, is to make sure it has a consistent voice. When you have two writers, there is a tendency for you to be able to tell that you have two writers.

The novels also have grown in sophistication and detail of plot. We’ve gone from one subplot to multiple subplots, and when dealing with those, Quinn does the final phrasing. As I said, I admire her skill. So it was never a question that she would be the one to make the books a better read — because we’re trying to make the books an easier read as far as style, while we make them a more difficult read as far as content.

Is there anything you and Quinn ever disagreed on, and how did you resolve the issue?

Ummm, you know, I can’t think of anything we have ever adamantly disagreed on once we decided on what we were going to write. Once we decided what the book was going to be about. It has been a very smooth collaboration on that level

Of the characters you have written with Quinn, which ones are your favorites?

I still like Mme. Vernet, obviously a personal passion of both of ours. In a way, Mycroft came about because of Mme. Vernet. There’s a line in one of the Holmes novels — the same one, The Greek Interpreter, that explains Mycroft. The line before the one describing him is: “My mother was the . . .” Do you remember the quote?

“My grandmother was the sister of the artist Vernet.”

Lucien Vernet is the artist being referred to, and he is the child of Mme. Vernet and her husband. The timeline fits. So basically, we have the French Norman ancestry of the Holmes family that was married into [derives from] our character 100 years or 70 years earlier. [Chuckles.]

Other than that, the character I identify with the most — so of course I love — is the assistant to Mycroft Holmes through whose eyes we see most of the books. And he is the character that both Quinn and I love dearly and have, because of that, tortured with romantic difficulty. We dropped a wonderful redhead in front of him, and she is constantly in every novel. But we love him dearly like a little brother that you torture on the way past the graveyard.

And you do torture him. You have put that poor boy through some major things.

Battered, bruised and bewildered from tying one on.

Where do you want to go with your writing? Anything you want to do?

My next look at writing, the next things that I’m involved with are books about both contemporary and historical novels that are also fiction. And I am working another major science fiction author whom, given any luck, I can get to do the bulk of the writing. Again.

[Laughs.] Which is your style.

And I’ve got one set in Vietnam during the Vietnam War, but I’m not really free to say anymore until we get further into it.

How do you feel about the way the Internet has affected the way people write?

It hasn’t yet. It’s just scared everybody.

How so?

Everybody is paranoid about what ebooks and e-short stories and e-magazines will do to the rest of the world. So far the benefit of selling the books over the ‘Net has changed the way books are sold and, to a degree, has hurt the independent stores. It’s hurt the small stores. It’s had that effect.

But as far as the content in the literature — other than opening it up to more people being able to put stuff up that otherwise would never be published — it’s not effected those who are published in what or how they write, in my opinion. Maybe a little of where we sell but not what or how we write. That’s pretty much remained constant.

Do you think the electronic media will ever become a force in publishing?

I think it is a force in publishing. It is influencing publishing already. I think that a lot of that will be decided by technical matters that are not yet determined — whether we can get an ebook that is actually as comfortable, as easy and functional as a paperback. And whether or not print-on-demand can be replace bookstores — a situation where you can go up on a computer, read a few chapters, read a few words, look at an illustration, then order the book right there. So a bookstore need be no larger than a series of cubicles [where you view the texts] and one print machine, rather than thousands of volumes. That will, if nothing else, save several hundred million cubic feet of trees killed for pulp every year.

The other thing I hope electronic publishing will do is it will make it tough enough that they’ll get rid of those tear-the-cover-and-pulp-the-rest routine, and go back to the pre-paperback norm of books are returned, and you print what you can sell.

Anything that you would like to add?

No. I don’t have original ideas; I just write.

Teri Smith and Jean Marie Ward