Book Title: Trilogy consisting of:
Whirligig (Book #1)
The Copper Road (Book #2)
Tigers in Blue (Book #3)
Series: Shire’s Union
Author: Richard Buxton
Publication Date:
WG = 22/3/2017
TCR = 26/7/2020
TIB = 8/12/2023
Publisher: Ocoee Publishing
Page Length:
WG = 479
TCR = 421
TIB = 424
Genre: Historical Fiction
Whirligig Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEBrhvpPNH4
Twitter Handle: @RichardBuxton65 @cathiedunn
Instagram Handle: @richardbuxton63 @thecoffeepotbookclub
Hashtags: #ShiresUnion #AmericanCivilWar #Historical Fiction #BlogTour #TheCoffeePotBookClub
Tour Schedule Page: https://thecoffeepotbookclub.blogspot.com/2024/04/blog-tour-shires-union-trilogy-by-richard-buxton.html
Book Titles and Author Name:
Whirligig (Book #1)
The Copper Road (Book #2)
Tigers in Blue (Book #3)
by Richard Buxton
Blurb:
Shire leaves his home and his life in Victorian England for the sake of a childhood promise, a promise that pulls him into the bleeding heart of the American Civil War. Lost in the bloody battlefields of the West, he discovers a second home for his loyalty.
Clara believes she has escaped from a predictable future of obligation and privilege, but her new life in the Appalachian Hills of Tennessee is decaying around her. In the mansion of Comrie, long hidden secrets are being slowly exhumed by a war that creeps ever closer.
The Shire’s Union trilogy is at once an outsider’s odyssey through the battle for Tennessee, a touching story of impossible love, and a portrait of America at war with itself. Self-interest and conflict, betrayal and passion, all fuse into a fateful climax.
Written by award winning author Richard Buxton, the Shire’s Union trilogy begins with Whirligig, is continued in The Copper Road, and concludes with Tigers in Blue.
Escaping Tara
My study door has an eye level wooden plaque. The spaced letters, pink with light blue edging read ‘TARA’. A new writerly friend, invited to visit and knowing that I write Civil War fiction, might think this some homage to Gone With The Wind. The more worrying truth is this used to be my third daughter’s bedroom. We named her long before I began a novel set in Margaret Mitchell’s part of the world, but occasionally I wonder if something subconscious was at work even back then.
When I did begin to plan the first novel in my Shires Union series, Whirligig, I wanted to avoid any close comparison with Gone With The Wind, except possibly in book sales. I was dangerously close geographically. Mitchell’s fictional Tara is just south of Atlanta, Georgia. I needed the home of my female protagonist, Clara, to be near Chattanooga, a little more than a hundred miles north and just over the border in Tennessee.
More important than location was avoiding a stereotype southern cotton plantation. Gone With the Wind was so incredibly successful that it defined the stereotype. The problem was that I understood enough about the history of the South, the American Civil War and the book, to know it was a wilfully misleading portrayal when it came to its benign and romanticised depiction of slavery, all brutality and suffering airbrushed away. I wanted no part of that. What I wanted was Clara’s home to have its own genesis and character and for her to come to see slavery for the horror that it was.
After much frustrated research, I happened on a website dedicated to The Copper Road, a 19th century mining road set in the very bottom right-hand corner of Appalachian Tennessee. I was instantly attracted to its dark and gritty history, a similar landscape to Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier’s masterpiece which I adored and which was set just through the mountains in North Carolina. Clara’s new home could be placed in Polk County, I thought, high in the hills, and its wealth could be built on copper. I called it Comrie, Appalachia’s early waves of settlement being largely Scots and Irish. But be careful what you click on. A few months later I was walking The Copper Road and wondering just how many more bear warning signs I would come across.
Before I travelled to Polk County, I wrote a short story set there. In it, a boy is killed on the road. Trapped there as a ghost he watches the years and the history pass by. It wasn’t a bad story, but I was really writing myself into the place, learning of the clearing of the Cherokee tribes, of moonshine and murder, of a wartime massacre. My immersion ultimately led to some profound changes to my early ideas for the novel.
I set to building Comrie. I gave it a high view over the Tennessee valley, basing its outward appearance on the neo-classical ante-bellum style. I visited the Belle Meade house in Nashville and the Carnton House in Franklin to try and gain feel and detail. I rested in a rocking chair and felt the cool breeze through the portico, saw how the curtains are kept drawn to keep out the heat, but mirrors are profligate to multiply the light. I had to rework the layout of Comrie after learning that almost all houses of this type have their kitchen detached from the house due to the risk of fire. There were springhouses and smokehouses; slave huts which were unbearably warm even in the spring. Nowadays, most Civil War museums or places of interest will expose the horrors of slavery far more honestly than Mitchell ever did; the chains, the punishment collars, the whips.
After walking the Copper Road, I had an appointment to keep with Ken Rush, Director at the Ducktown Basin Museum. He’d sent me passages on the history of the Copper Road and I wanted to thank him and quiz him some more, but as we talked, and he handed me a copper ingot to feel, I became interested in the copper mines themselves. I read the history of the mines and of Julius Raht, the head mine captain of the day, who then became one of my characters. I realised that the road and the mines, both dark and foreboding, could be used to draw out Clara’s increasingly anxious state of mind. Janet Burroway, in Writing Fiction – A Guide To Narrative Craft tells us that, ‘Seen through the eyes of a character, setting is never neutral.’ The mines themselves play a central role in the second book, The Copper Road, and Clara gets to know them all too well.
Clara’s attitude to slavery, given there were a large number of enslaved people at Comrie, was challenging to write, but I developed her attitude across the trilogy. In her early chapters, Comrie presents as a content enough place, somewhere she might be happy. She’s an outsider here and mostly accepting of the status-quo, including slavery. Her own upbringing maybe had something to do with that; as a duke’s daughter she was used to having servants on hand whenever she needed them. But servants aren’t slaves, and over time she is steadily introduced to its inhumanity; finding people bought, sold and revalued in the Comrie ledgers; discovering the lead house-slave, Mitilde, was purchased as a wedding gift to Clara’s prospective mother-in-law, Emmeline. Ultimately, she unearths an even darker secret history hidden at Comrie. The fact that Clara began her life at Comrie living on the wrong side of the moral argument made her a more interesting protagonist. By the third novel, Tigers in Blue, she’s living a very different life within Union lines and is fiercely protective of Mitilde’s new freedom.
I’m happy that Comrie is sufficiently distinct from Scarlett O’Hara’s home at Tara, and that Clara has helped me with a more honest portrayal of slavery. Though there’s still the odd review that compares the books to Gone With The Wind. Ho hum. To track Clara’s moral and emotional struggles, I went as far as creating a line-graph of her mood on my study whiteboard as it varies across her story arc. My daughter, Tara, who was nine back then, was in the habit of leaving messages for me on all the parts of the board she could reach. As a compromise I marked off a corner just for her to use. I guess you can’t escape Tara completely.
Buy Links:
Universal Buy Links for individual titles:
WG: https://books2read.com/u/3GP7AO
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/whirligig-richard-buxton/1130891070
TCR: https://books2read.com/u/b5JRvR
TIB: https://books2read.com/u/mVnXaA
Trilogy Amazon Buy Links:
US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08CDXDZDB
UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B08CDXDZDB
Author Bio:
Richard lives with his family in the South Downs, Sussex, England. He completed an MA in Creative Writing at Chichester University in 2014. He has an abiding relationship with America, having studied at Syracuse University, New York State, in the late eighties. He travels extensively for research, especially in Tennessee, Georgia and Ohio, and is rarely happier than when setting off from a motel to spend the day wandering a battlefield or imagining the past close beside the churning wheel of a paddle steamer.
Richard’s short stories have won the Exeter Story Prize, the Bedford International Writing Competition and the Nivalis Short Story Award. His first novel, Whirligig (2017) was shortlisted for the Rubery International Book Award. It was followed by The Copper Road (2020) and the Shire’s Union trilogy was completed by Tigers in Blue (2023). To learn more about Richard’s writing visit www.richardbuxton.net.
Author Links:
Website: https://www.richardbuxton.net/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/RichardBuxton65
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ShiresUnion
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/richardbuxton63
Book Bub: https://www.bookbub.com/profile/richard-buxton
Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.co.uk/stores/author/B06XV3FYQF/about
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/16673953.Richard_Buxton
When Angels Fly 