The Whispering Bookworm: On tour with The Coffee Pot Book Club: Shire’s Union series by Richard Buxton

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.

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

Join me in a cosy chat with author, Richard Buxton.

What inspired you to start writing?

That sounds a simple question but I’m not sure I’ve ever been asked it in quite that way. I’d written a little in my teens, mostly Tolkien type fantasy, but my academic choices of Geography and International Relations took me away from my creative side as did my eventual IT based career. If I had my time again, I think I’d choose English and History. I’m very jealous of my youngest daughter who is studying English at Cambridge. It sounds a bit cheesy, but all three of my daughters are an inspiration. They were achieving so much academically that it made me think, ‘Heck, some of those genes are mine, get on and do something!’

Coming into my forties I very much felt the need for a creative outlet and the desire to craft a novel was still bubbling away. My father had written when he was young, mostly poetry, and he was always one for trying something new, so he was an inspiration. He passed away in 2010, my mother having left us five years before; there’s nothing quite like mortality to focus your mind. I joined a local evening class, hugely enjoyed it and discovered I had an aptitude for writing. I’m the youngest of five so my inheritance was relatively modest, but enough for me to take eighteen months away from my IT career and complete a Masters Degree in Creative Writing at Chichester University. I absolutely loved it.

Shire, my hero, is not really like my father, except maybe the ability to get on with almost everybody. But Shire’s start at Ridgmont as a sometime farmhand who tends to the shire horses, was based on my father’s work as a boy during WWII as a fifteen-year-old on the Duke of Bedford’s Estate. In his later years he wrote about feeding the horses and putting on their heavy tack. It became a starting point for Shire and christened him. I even kept the names of my dad’s horses.

A further inspiration was the history of the US Civil War. Having studied in New York State aged nineteen and again aged twenty-one, I was already wide-eyed about America. Later in my twenties I discovered the Civil War and was mesmerised by the scale and sweep of the conflict. It’s easy to romanticise the past, as it’s not something you personally have to deal with. Some of my favourite scenes are my fictitious squad talking over a campfire, on a paddle-steamer or, as in the latest book, on the roof of a train. But I hope I’ve done enough to convey how brutal and unforgiving a war it was. It killed more men as a proportion of the population than WWI did in Great Britain.

What was the hardest part about writing this book?

The recently published and final part of the Shire’s Union trilogy is Tigers in Blue. From an emotional standpoint the hardest part was writing the end of the trilogy and the end of some of the characters. Some are fictional and some were real people, either way it wasn’t an easy task. I’d lived with some of these characters for over ten years. Some survive the war and some don’t. I have a special attachment to my fictional characters; they are my creations after all. All their loves, all their friendships, all their traumas are down to me. For the real historical figures their broader story is set, but I’ve read their letters, stood where they stood, visited their graves. I had an obligation to handle any deaths as accurately but as sensitively as possible. I like to think I managed that. They were certainly moving passages to write.

From a more technical perspective, the timeline and the geography gave me some challenges. In books one and two, Whirligig and The Copper Road, the timelines are around fifteen-months and nine months respectively. It’s enough time for the characters to cover some ground, literally and emotionally; to meet each other, to form deep and sometimes troubled relationships. If you don’t count the epilogue-like final two chapters, all the meaningful action in Tigers in Blue takes place over a couple of months. Two of the main protagonists are in opposing armies with their movements prescribed and both need to meet and test the romantic water with Clara. There’s not a lot of elbow room for the plot.

Fortunately, knowing the historical culmination as I did, I’d seen this coming and set up Clara with property interests in Middle Tennessee as far back as Whirligig; she even visits them in The Copper Road. So when it came to Tigers in Blue, she had a ready-made home set alongside the Columbia Pike, the main artery used by the two armies during the campaign. I couldn’t overdo the happenstance meetings or it would have become farcical, but as the relationships were already well established, I didn’t really need to. Tigers in Blue is very much a climactic novel, all the plot lines and characters converging at the end as per the history. Knowing this hugely informed the setting and the point of view characters I employed.

Does one of the main characters hold a special place in your heart? If so, why?

What a lovely question. I think that would have to be Tuck. Tuck is a Kentuckian in an Ohio regiment, but way more at home than Shire. He becomes Shire’s best friend, what was called his pa’rd (or partner) at the time. They would share a dog tent together on the march and rations when they needed to. Tuck’s introduction came when the regiment was being formed in December 1862 at Cleveland, Ohio:

‘The tall man had no rifle and his uniform was too short, an inch of pale skin showed above his boots. He had an odd gait as he walked, rather than marched; his lower legs and forearms appearing to swing past the usual stopping point, as if a vital ligament was missing.’

I based Tuck in part on Lincoln (also born in Kentucky) and tried to give Tuck Lincoln’s wit and horse sense. Tuck and Shire bond because they are both outsiders, but Tuck is much more streetwise and acts almost as a big brother to Shire in the first book, Whirligig, sometimes getting him out of trouble and sometimes into it, as big brothers are wont to do. He’s a fixer and always ready to fleece the unwary with some contraband stashed in his knapsack. Later in the trilogy the dynamic shifts and it’s Tuck, worn down to breaking point by the war and all he’s seen, who needs Shire’s help. Tuck is entirely fictional but hails from Bourbon County, Kentucky, and each Christmas he sends my very good Ohioan friend and pa’rd Jeff Houston (we’ve done the tent thing) a bottle of locally distilled whiskey.

If your book was to be made into a movie, who are the celebrities that would star in it?

I like a good movie but I’m not across all the actors, so my Beta readers helped me out big-time with this, which was fun. My thanks to them. Here we go.

Tom Holland for Shire. Fresh faced and youthful at the start of the trilogy but he’d carry some scars by the end.

Florence Pugh in her Lady MacBeth guise is perfect for Clara. Dark looks, serious demeanour.

Rhys Ifans as Tuck. Nice and tall. He also has Tuck’s mischievous air about him.

Peter Ferdinando for the bruff and worn Sergeant Ocks.

James Norton for blond, blue-eyed Taylor, if James is not too busy playing all the other badies.

What do you hope your readers take away from this book?

Above all, I hope my books transport the reader, that they empathise with the characters and enjoy the story. That’s what all writers want. Shire’s Union is an adventure story wrapped around a love story set against what I hope is a convincing and epic backdrop.

What they take away will likely depend on whether they are at least in part familiar with the US Civil War. I hope those who know it, find the books convincing and well researched. For those who don’t, I hope it makes them aware of the magnitude and the ferocity of the war and what was a crucial struggle in the history of America and the western world.

I was surprised myself in my twenties to discover the scale of America’s civil war. I sometimes try to explain it this way. Imagine you meet someone in middle-life, maybe through work or a mutual acquaintance. They come into your social group and you become firm friends. In the years that follow, often just the two of you go out for a drink and chew the fat. You think you know them well. Then one day they open up to you about a trauma they suffered earlier in life, something that has shaped them into who they are now, and you realise that you only partially knew them before. The Civil War is America’s great trauma. Without knowing something about it, I don’t believe you can begin to understand the America of today. The low estimate is that the war killed 650,000 people. It ended slavery and preserved the Union, but the echoes of the war shaped America for decades to come, right up to the here and now.

Buy this Book Series

Amazon US

Amazon UK

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.

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