Hello,
I enjoy reading about history, but most of what I read is non-fiction. Lately I have been thinking about reading some historical fiction books, because I feel it would be a much easier read, before going back to non-fiction. However are there good historical fiction writers? Of course it will be always fiction, with made up characters and imagined dialogues, but is there someone you think distinguishes him/herself by trying to be as true as possible?
Allan Eckert writes fictionalized histories. This is a slightly different type of book than a historical fiction.
Eckert specializes in the colonial and early United States history using the Lyman Draper Manuscript Collection at the Wisconsin Historical Society. These were thousands of letters and other documents collected by a Lyman Draper back in the 1820's - 1840's. Draper had planned on writing the definitive history of the settlement of the Western Waters (basically the Ohio River and tributaries) by English colonists and the early United States. Draper fell into the researcher trap of always looking for more information before publishing.
But, Draper did write many of the surviving early settlers asking them for information about the era and he paid particular attention to close relatives of certain famous individuals. For instance, Lewis Wetzel was a famous person in early West Virginia (when it was still part of Virginia). He killed a lot of Native Americans and was viewed as hero by many and a cold-blooded killer by others. West Virginia currently has a county named after him. In any case, Draper wrote Lewis Wetzel's cousin Lewis Bonnett and asked him a lot of questions about Lewis Wetzel and the years Wetzel was active in the Ohio Valley. Those letters and Bonnett's responses are in the collection. He also did this for Daniel Boone, George Rogers Clark, and many others. These are anecdotes from people who were present, but often they are not full conversations.
Eckert basically fleshes these out. He starts with the letters and documents related to a certain specific action. Then, he frames a story around adding in dialogue and descriptions making the story a fiction like tale. Eckert also footnotes his book with the source of his information for whatever section he is writing about, or in some cases he fleshes it out with new information that would not fit well within a narrative sense. (Such as giving precise directions to the exact location where William Crawford was killed after the US defeats at the Battle of the Sandusky and Battle of the Olentangy ).