Allan Massie previews the Summerhall Historical Fiction Festival

The proliferation of book festivals has been one of the surprising features of the last 20 years. Reading books is as much a solitary activity as writing them, even when the reader is not actually alone in a room.

Yet nowadays readers flock, usually in gratifying numbers, to hear writers read their work aloud, or speak about it. And so there are book festivals and books festivals and book festivals, some on a huge scale like the Edinburgh International one, others small and intimate. We are hosting a new one from 12-15 April, sponsored by Baillie Gifford, at Summerhall, Edinburgh’s independently funded arts centre in what used to be the Royal (Dick) Veterinary College.

“Why yet another one?” you may ask. Well, apart from the hope that it will be enjoyable, we think ours is a little different. Most book festivals are, for obvious reasons, eclectic; the variety makes good commercial sense. Ours is more limited. It’s a festival of historical fiction. We hope this makes good commercial sense too.

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It is also appropriate. Edinburgh can fairly claim to be the birthplace of the historical novel, or at least the city where it sprang into life. Next year will be the bicentenary of the publication of Waverley and its author, Sir Walter Scott, was not only born in Edinburgh, but lived as a boy in George Square across the Meadows from Summerhall, and was educated at the High School and the University of Edinburgh.

He was a Borderer as well, and a proud one, so that it is suitable that the Borders Book Festival hosts the annual Walter Scott Prize for the best new historical novel, but he was also an Edinburgh man, and the city features – is indeed a character – in some of his greatest novels, notably The Heart of Midlothian and Redgauntlet.

Moreover, one of the great works of modern literary scholarship, the 30 volumes of the Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels has now been completed, and it seems right to use that we should open our Festival with a celebration of this achievement. Professor David Hewitt, the editor-in-chief, and his colleague Dr Alison Lumsden will speak about the work, why it was necessary and the problems they encountered. In the Foreword to the edition, another Edinburgh scholar, the late David Daiches wrote that Scott used the novel to “produce a pattern that showed the living fabric of history”. All historical novelists owe a debt to him; the best try to weave a like pattern. Scott was born only two years after |Napoleon, was himself the Napoleon of Literature, and wrote a biography of Napoleon which few today have read, but which will be discussed by Professor Christopher Harvie and Stuart Kelly.

Starting with Scott points to a way in which our festival differs from other ones. Most, understandably, feature new books, authors’ most recent work. We are doing that too, but we are also looking back. So Owen Dudley Edwards will be speaking about Arthur Conan Doyle’s historical novels which have been overshadowed by his more famous creation, Sherlock Holmes, but which Doyle, himself, another Edinburgh man, valued more highly. Owen Dudley Edward is himself the author of what may be the best biography of Doyle. Professor Joe Farrell and I will consider the remarkable case of The Leopard by the Sicilian Prince Giuseppe di Lampedusa and ask if this was the greatest historical novel of the 20th century.

Two fairly recent developments in historical fiction will also be featured. The first is the fashion for setting crime fiction in the past, and Sara Sheridan will speak about “Crime in the Age of Austerity” that followed the Second World War. The second may be called the telling of stories concealed in classic novels. So Ronald Frame, one of Scotland’s finest novelists, wonders how Miss Havisham in Great Expectations came to be as she was in the Dickens novel, and James Benmore imagines what happened to Oliver Twist’s companion, the Artful Dodger after he was sentenced to transportation to Australia.

Historical fiction raises moral issues such as the propriety of re-creating the past in fictional form. Jonathan Falla examines this and other moral issues in one session. Andrew Williams, whose most recent novel, Poison Tide, was a story of espionage and sedition in the First World War, considers the difficulty of making fiction from recent historical events. In another session he will be speaking with the festival’s director, Iain Gale, about the problems of fact and fiction in writing novels about the Second World War, while Patrick Mercer, soldier and politician, military historian and author of historical novels, casts an eye on the Crimean War and colonial wars of the Victorian Age, as presented in fiction by George Macdonald Fraser and others, and as they may have been in reality.

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All book festivals have a duty to young readers too, and Celia Rees will be talking about witches, pirates, highwaymen, and Shakespeare.

We are also showing films (entry free), hosting workshops, and staging a discussion forum on the Sunday afternoon. Though I’ve said our aim is limited, it’s a pretty eclectic programme. An exhibition of watercolours by Hugh Buchanan is running concurrently.

• For more on the Summerhall Historical Fiction Festival, www.historicfictionfest.com. Box office, tel: 0845 874 3001.