A decade after the end of World War One, a bitter conflict unfolded in a Cobourg courtroom, dredging up memories of one of the darkest periods in Canadian history. The Currie Libel Trial, also known as the Third Battle of Mons, saw General Sir Arthur William Currie sue the Port Hope Evening Guide over a frontpage article it published which claimed Currie was responsible for thousands of casualties on the last day of the Great War. Currie sued the paper for the equivalent of $750,000 in today’s currency.

When Christopher M. Briggs heard about this story, it gave him a brilliant idea. Briggs is an author with a BA in English and Philosophy from the University of Toronto and a graduate of the Humber School for Writers Correspondence Program.

Briggs himself had enlisted in the Canadian reserve army in 1970. When he retired in 1985, he was the commanding Captain of the “A” Squadron and had been awarded the Canadian Decoration for long service in 1984. Nearly 35 years after his retirement, Briggs wrote a gripping-fictionalized account of the infamous court case in his latest novel, Trial.

Trial tells the story of WW1 veteran Alfred Simpson, one of the lawyers representing Currie, as he battles his own physical and mental injuries from the war throughout the trial. In the midst of all this, Simpson attempts to navigate his stormy marriage to his wife Sarah.

Trial is thoughtfully-written and the product of over two years of writing and research. My conversation with Briggs began when I asked him about how his research and personal experiences shaped the novel.

There was a lot of research that had to go into Trial, and I know that you also have some experience with the Canadian reserves, so, I'm curious how you were able to balance the historical facts, the research you did, and your personal experiences to put together the story?

My personal experience helped me with a few of the details. I know what it's like to be cold. I know what it's like to be scared. I know what it's like to be hungry. Which are experiences that a lot of people today don't really know what it actually means. But when you're a soldier, even a reserve soldier not in actual combat, we do go through a lot of periods of deprivation. That's what writers call life experience, that helps you with the details of the novel. And when it comes to the historical facts, I look at the history first. I usually look at a topic that I'm interested in and I learn as much as I can about it by reading as wide a field of different writers as I can. So I read a lot about the Canadians in World War One, and I know if I just write a novel about historical facts, nobody's gonna be very interested in that. So I have what I call a hook and sometimes it takes a lot of research and a lot of thinking before you actually come up with that hook. And the hook in this case was the fact that I came across information about this trial. And that was the hook, that Word War One was refought in an Ontario courtroom 10 years after the war ended.

Another thing that I found really interesting was that part of your research was looking into historical figures. And that you were also able to read some official records and communications and letters from people who were involved in the war. What were you able to glean from reading those correspondences?

Primary information is always the best. And then you also look at secondary sources where they're commenting on the primary information. So since there's nobody left alive from World War One, I can only rely on written accounts. So I read novels about World War One to try and take advantage of other people's research. I had a couple of primary sources which I actually mentioned in the note at the end of the book. The first one was a history of what my regimen did in World War One which is the history of the 4th Canadian Mounted Rifles.

And the other one was, was the book Last Day, Last Hour by Robert Robert Sharpe, a law professor at U of T. And he basically took the transcripts of the actual trial and created a book out of it. I didn't look at the actual transcripts but I did look at Professor Sharpe’s book.

So within Trial, a lot but not all of the dialogue is actually right from the transcript. So that's what I tried to do. Some of the things that General Currie said in the book are actually things he said at the trial.

I would be very interested to see those and know which lines are actual quotes and which ones you made up.

The one that comes to mind is where he talks about his own PTSD. Where Currie talks to Alfred and Alfred says that he's seeing visions of his friend Dix who died and then Currie says, “Well, you know, you only see one ghost? I see thousands.”

On that note, were there any things you learned through your research or that were interesting to you or that you didn't know about with World War One or about the trial?

That was one of the most striking, the fact that General Currie had no frontline experience but he showed symptoms of PTSD. It was obviously a traumatic event. You know, everyone was portraying him as a butcher and things like that and I have severe doubts in my mind as to whether that was in fact the case. So, that was one of the things. The other thing is the sheer horrific nature of it. The more you research into it, the more you find things like tales of people that were actually gassed. I tried to put as many of those incidents into the novel as possible.

There’s that one scene where Dix crawls into no man's land and starts sniping at German soldiers and rather than killing them, would only wound them so he can kill more of them. That actually happened. It didn't happen that way but that’s from a first-person account that one soldier wrote about his experiences in the war. A lot of the action sequences actually happened. They may not have happened in that way or to those people, but I tried to make it as authentic as I could.

Did you feel empathetic towards any specific character?

It's quite interesting (*Chris laughs*), General Currie was going to be a secondary, you weren't going to hear too much from him, other than he’s there and that was what the trial was about. And then General Currie started talking to me. He started coming to me and saying “no, no, my story is more important. I've got things to say.” And I started listening to those inner voices and I said, “No, I have to revise this novel, to give him a bigger part in it.” So that's what I did. When it comes to some of the other characters, yeah, I feel an affinity with a lot of my characters. My fictional characters always have a certain something about myself that goes into each one, that's one thing I should say. And then the other thing I wanted to say about that is my female characters, I usually fall in love with my female characters so Sarah is a special character and I have an affinity for her.

Sarah and Alfred's relationship was something I knew I wanted to talk to you about from the time that we were at the book launch. I remember you saying that, that your wife helped you kind of shape Sara, and maybe get a more realistic understanding of how their relationship worked or how their conversations would go. What was the process of getting that kind of consultation from your wife?

My wife is my first reader. She would see each chapter in the first draft, then I waited for her comment. And very often she would say “no, no, you need more detail. I want to know what she's wearing. I want to know what she’s eating.” So I would go back and in my second draft, I would incorporate some of those details. I remember going online and looking at Eatons catalog from the 1920s. And for a man, some of the details of what a woman wore, and what her dress looks like aren't of particular interest but for a female reader, apparently they are. I didn't know that. So this is where my wife helped me out. Or she would say, “A woman wouldn't do that or wouldn’t say that, she’d say something else.”

Would you recommend that approach if someone is writing about a character that they don't have a personal connection with? Like if you're going to write about the experience of a 13-year-old, would you recommend that the writer talk to a 13-year-old to get that authentic perspective?

Yes, or something written by a 13-year-old. It doesn't have to be direct contact. Or you could go to an expert who does know and could read your work and say “no, that’s not realistic.”

I find the relationship between Alfred and Sarah very interesting because it's clear that they love each other and feel some sense of loyalty towards each other but there's regret,a lack of passion, and misunderstandings between the two. How would you describe Alfred and Sarah's relationship?

It's very different in the Trial by Fire sections from the Trial by Jury sections. What I wanted to do was show how Alfred has to shut down all of his emotion because of his PTSD in order to remain sane. He shut down all of his emotions, shut down everything that he felt, and he was doing this partly to protect himself and partly to protect Sarah. But in the meantime, he lost hisproximity to her, he wasn’t there for her, and this is the biggest problem. Every couple goes through periods of time where there are hardships and the relationship is strained, there may be misunderstandings or conflicts or injuries or illnesses. But the point is, if the other person is not there then they just feel isolated, and that's when people start looking to end relationships. That's what I wanted to show, the fact that Alfred is such a bastard to her in By Trial sections, at least in the beginning, and you contrast that to the man who does nothing but long for her when he's suffering in the trenches. And you say to yourself, “well how can that be the same person?”

I’m curious about your decision to split the book into the By Trial and By Fire parts. Could you take me through what your thinking was?

I actually have to remember how that came about. But I always thought about the fact that the trial occurred 10 years after the war ended. Once I established the fact that what I wanted to do was write a novel that fictionalized my regiment's history in the war, but that would have been too boring, there would be nothing literary about it. So then I thought, what about if it's one of the lawyers that was actually there and he’s reflecting back on his own experiences. So that's how I think I came up with the two sections.

When I write, I like to structure the story so that it’s got two or three timelines going on. In my first book, I had three timelines going on simultaneously. It had three disparate protagonists, then the storylines all came together at the end of one event. People have done that before, but that's how I like it. It complicates the plot to a certain extent. Then it has the reader wondering, well, how are all these stories going to come together?

At your book launch, you commented that you could get philosophical talking about Aristotle's position on the arc of a novel. Could you explain exactly what that is and how that arc plays out in Trial?

Well, we're talking mainly about drama and theatre but it can be applied to novel writing as well. Aristotle is mentioned in a lot of books on screenplay writing and novel writing. Really, it’s that the novel has an epic character arc, and it can be that the novel has an act one, an act two, and an act three, just like a play, and there are specific things that happen. For instance, in a mystery novel, at the end of act one that’s when they find the second body, so there’s a plot twist at the end of act one. There's another plot twist at the end of act two. Then, at the midpoint of the novel, that’s where something is decided. It's a decision that's made, that affects the protagonist. And then the rest of the novel is keeping it going. When we talk about the arc of the novel, the action of a drama rises throughout the novel, and then at the end comes back down for the denouement. The thing is when you're dealing with a couple of timelines, you're doing it twice so you've got to create these inflection points for each timeline.

Although the novel is dealing with World War One, the Currie libel trial, and there's definitely mentions of PTSD all throughout the book, what are some other things you think that readers would be able to take away from reading Trial?

Oh, that is a good question.

Well, first of all, I want them to know more because Canadians need to know more about their own history. And what I was hoping to do is bring that history alive. Also, I like books where there's moral ambiguity, where things are not black and white. Where characters are not all good or not all evil, characters change for the bad, and change for the good. Sometimes the morality of the situation is ambiguous and that's what I wanted to stress here.

It’s that moral ambiguity that I like and I think that it adds a certain realism to the world you’re trying to portray.

Chris currently resides in Scarborough and works in Toronto. He’s already working on his third novel and is currently looking for representation. Trial was a finalist for the First Horizon Award, and the Da Vinci Eye Award, as well as a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award with an Honourable Mention in the Historical Fiction category. You can find Trial (and I 100% recommend that you do) in our shop along with our other fantastic selections. Happy reading!