Researching History by Mark Wightman

I was thinking the other day about how, when writing historical fiction, getting things right matters so much. And not only because there will always be a keen-eyed reader waiting to pounce and let you know when you don’t! No, there’s more to it than simple compliance with the recorded facts.

When researching my new book Chasing the Dragon – the second in the Betancourt Mysteries series about a Eurasian detective battling injustice in colonial-era Singapore, I did a couple of months of research before I even attempted to write the first words. I recall speaking to a Very Well-Known Author about my method, and she questioned whether all this research was nothing more than dressed-up procrastination. Wouldn’t I be better, she asked, just getting a draft of the story down and working on polishing the details later? Perhaps. But I explained that isn’t why I do the research; it isn’t simply researching facts. At the earliest stage of the writing process I’m less interested in exactly how deep the Singapore harbour was in 1940, or how high Bukit Chandu is, or exactly how many miles it is from the Marine Police station at Empress Place to the opium processing plant at Pasir Panjang. I agree that all that can come later. The type of research that I have to do before I can start writing is researching the lives and times of the people – what would life have been like for the characters that populate my books? This is particularly true for the lives of the Asian characters. When I started researching my series, one of the most difficult challenges was finding source material that related the social history of the people I wanted to write about. There was plenty of material about the lives of the expatriate colonial community – memoirs, biographies, travelogues, etc, but next to nothing about the lives of the hundreds of thousands of Chinese, Indian, and Malay immigrants who had flooded into Singapore over the preceding hundred years or so. Often, the only time that the lives of the workers were recorded was in the coroner’s reports of their deaths and such reports make fascinating, if sometimes harrowing social histories.

Another challenge when researching and writing historical novels is to remember that I’m writing fiction and not a historical treatise. If the reader learns something about the subject I write about (and I hope they do) then fine and well. But it’s important to tell the story through the sensibilities of the characters as they would have perceived things at the time, and not merely retell the received wisdom of later historical studies. In Chasing the Dragon, the story pivots around two apparently unrelated things: an ancient relic known as the Singapore Stone, and the government-run opium trade. Researching these two subjects presented unique but different challenges.

The Singapore Stone is a fragment of a much larger edifice (one of a pair, in fact) that someone, at some point in the pre-colonial past, erected as a monument – to what we don’t know – at the entrance to the Singapore River. The original stones were estimated to be about 3m high and between 60 and 120 cm thick. The stones happened to be in the way of a British engineer, so, rather than work around them, he blew them up, and all we have of them now is a single fragment which resides in the National Museum of Singapore. What made these stones fascinating is that they had engraved upon them about fifty or so lines of cuneiform writing which, when translated, or so it was hoped, might shed some light on who had left them and why. Several people tried, including Sir Stamford Raffles, the ‘founder’ of Singapore himself, but no one was successful. From my story’s perspective, an archaeologist is close to unravelling the secret of the stone. My challenge as a writer was to be careful about what could be reasonably inferred, given that much of the knowledge gleaned about Singapore’s real history (which, it is now believed, may date back to the 10th century CE) wasn’t uncovered until the numerous archaeological digs began in the 1980s. The temporal distance between the author and their subject matters.

The only remaining fragment of the Singapore Stone, courtesy of the National Museum of Singapore

An artist’s rendition of the markings on the Singapore Stone

In the course of his investigations my detective, Inspector Maximo Betancourt, is led into the murky world of the government-run opium trade. My challenge here was not so much finding about how the colonial government actually ran the importation, processing, and distribution of opium – all that is well-documented, starting with the activities of the British East India Company in India in the 18th C, right through to the start of the Second World War. My challenge again was finding out what life was like for working class opium addicts in the colony. In this case, newspapers were less helpful, as they gave only bald matter-of-fact reports of opium-related crime. More valuable were coroner’s reports which, depending on the number of witnesses who knew the deceased and how voluble they were about telling their stories, could show a lot more about how the person had come to be enslaved by the drug, and the effect it had had on their life. But the thing I found that shone the most light on the lives of opium users was a series of photographs taken by an American photographer named Carl Mydans in 1941/42 which captured every aspect of the trade, from the squalor and depravity of the government-licensed dens to the production line at the packaging plant – an engineering marvel known as the ‘House of the Tiny Tin Tubes’.

The interior of an opium den. © Carl Mydans/LIFE Magazine, Time Inc

Inside the opium packaging plant at Bukit Chandu, Singapore. © Carl Mydans/LIFE Magazine, Time Inc.

I hope that in my novel Chasing the Dragon and its predecessor Waking the Tiger I manage to give a flavour of Singapore and the lives of its denizens as they actually were in 1940. I know I had, and continue to have, a fascinating time learning and retelling the history.

Chasing The Dragon by Mark Wightman (Hobeck Books) Out Now. 

Singapore, 1940 A local fisherman finds the body of a missing American archaeologist. Detective Inspector Betancourt of the Singapore Marine Police is first on the scene. Something doesn't quite add up. He finds out that the archaeologist, Richard Fulbright, was close to deciphering the previously-untranslatable script on a pre-colonial relic known as the Singapore Stone. This was no accidental drowning. Is there more to this case than archaeological rivalries? Betancourt also discovers that Fulbright had been having an affair. He is sure he is onto something bigger than just academic infighting. A government opium factory draws criminal interest. In his investigations into the death, Betancourt finds his own life in danger, and now he has also put himself on the wrong side of British Military Intelligence, and he is unsure which set of opponents he fears the most...

More information about Mark Wightman and his books can be found on his website. You can also follow him on X @mark_wightman and on Facebook. He can also be found on Instagram @mark_wightman.