When Real People Intrude in Fiction by David Hagerty

LUCY BURDETTE: When David Hagerty, a contributor, contacted the Reds about a date for the new anthology, LOW DOWN DIRTY VOTE 3, we said we'd love to have him. What's more important than every single person having a chance to vote? Today he'll talk about including historical figures in his fiction. Welcome David!

DAVID HAGERTY: I’ve included many historical figures in my fiction. Growing up in Chicago, I heard stories of corrupt politicians and infamous criminals that fit right into a mystery. The city’s history teems with ready-made characters, so when I need a villain I don’t have to look far. I insert John Wayne Gacy or Mayor Richard J. Daley and let them do their worst.

However, I get a lot of questions about the practice, often from other writers. Have you ever been sued? (No, I’m not famous enough). Do you make them do stuff they never did? (No, that would be grounds for a lawsuit). Do you research them? (Yes, as much as possible).

For me, the challenge and delight of using real people as characters is capturing them as they were. Anyone can create a caricature. To sum up a living being, with all his or her traits and contradictions, is far more difficult.

Truth be told, you can choose facts based on your own ends. Whether you love the president or loathe him, there’s plenty of material out there. You just need to put your spin on it.

In my last book, I wanted a community activist to pontificate, so I read Jesse Jackson’s speeches and distilled them to a few catch phrases. When I needed a criminal governor, I had four in Illinois’ recent history to choose from. And when I needed a tale for Low Down Dirty Vote 3, the new anthology about voter suppression, I had decades of election fraud to cull.



I created a fact as fiction piece about Chicago’s last political assassination: of Aldermen Ben Lewis in 1963. I read all the original sources I could find and stuck close to the facts. Ben Lewis was executed in his own office two days after his reelection. No need to falsify the drama of that.



What’s more, there was rampant speculation in newspapers of the time about who did it and why: a jealous husband, a bilked business partner, a vengeful mobster. All I created was a skeptical journalist to narrate the tale, and the story wrote itself.

I don’t often get so lucky. In most of my books, I have to invent most of it and sprinkle in the historical figures for spice. I like to think it gives the text the flavor of my hometown. This story captured the city’s corruption at its most rotten.

What about you? Is there a person from your town’s history you’d like to write about?

David Hagerty is the author of the Duncan Cochrane mystery series, about a governor bent on revenging his daughter’s death using the powers of political office. He has also published more than two dozen short stories online and in print. The most recent, “City Mourns Slain Pol, Chicago Style,” appears in Low Down Dirty Vote 3, which released this month.

About Low Down Dirty Vote 3: Twenty-two writers contributed stories to the anthology, which is the third focused on voting rights. The theme of this edition is « the color of my vote. » Sales from the volume will fund $10,000 donated to Democracy Docket, a journalist organization fighting voter suppression.

https://lowdowndirtyvote.com/