The internet is a glorious gift to writers bent on historical fiction. As in a miner’s fevered dream, nuggets of information lie glittering on the surface, needing only to be snatched up and plunked into the bag of a plot
“Don Juan Bardh had superintendent of … the Anglo Costa Rican Economical Mining Company. It had been in business these three years without losing anything, which was considered doing so well that it had increased its capital …the most prominent
The bard of the Raj knew from substances. From the mention of marijuana in “Kim” – referring to a certain spy technique, the eponymous hero is counseled, “It must be used sparingly, like bhang” – to the opium that enlivens
Every house has a “junk drawer” – that place where you keep the Scotch tape, loose screws, parts of hings that may or may not belong to other things, the occasional spare light bulb, and so on. What lands in