Louis Bayard has won great acclaim for his exciting thrillers ripped and reimagined from the pages of history. His Mr. Timothy (2003) featured Charles Dickens’ Tiny Tim grown into as a vigilante sleuth in 1860s London. In The Pale Blue Eye (2006), Cadet Edgar Allan Poe is entangled with a West Point murder.

In Courting Mr. Lincoln (Algonquin Books), Bayard continues to display his keen insights into the mid-nineteenth century, but this enthralling novel is propelled by the mysteries of the human heart rather than a crime. Moving to Springfield, Illinois, Bayard brings a fresh insight into an America icon - Abraham Lincoln – by focusing on Mary Todd, the Southern belle whom he later married, and Joshua Speed, his charming fellow bachelor friend with whom he shared a home and bed. Narrated by Todd and Speed, Bayard’s nuanced novel portrays Lincoln dogged by insecurities as he navigates high society, romance, despair and his own ambition. When Speed cautions his friend about marrying Mary Todd, Lincoln asks: “Is it this girl you object to? Or is it any girl?” In a conversation with The National, Bayard, discussed the rewards and challenges of writing his richly rewarding, multi-dimensional historical novel.

Q: The structure of your wonderful novel raises an essential question: What does the triangular relationship reveal about its characters that a linear one cannot?

A: I am going to violate Euclid's laws, because the triangle is still a plane, a two-dimensional figure, but I think in literary terms, it adds a third dimension. Suddenly, you're getting into different perspectives. Instead of looking at it straight on, it gives almost a sculptural feeling in my mind. I also like two narrators because they can cast doubt on each other. You have to wonder sometimes, ‘Who's getting this right?’ ‘Who has the correct perspective on this on this situation?’ So, a triangle, because it’s unstable in human terms, lends itself to conflict that makes it more interesting.

Q: While perhaps the most prominent figure – young Abraham Lincoln - of this unstable triangle, gets the fewest pages of your novel, readers see in a new prism through Mary Todd, and a more obscure character, Lincoln’s friend Joshua Speed who appears in Carl Sandburg’s Lincoln 1926 biography, in the description that Lincoln and Speed possessed "a streak of lavender and spots soft as May violets."

A: Yes, the trace of lavender. Apparently, that was in the first edition, and may have been expunged from later editions because apparently it was a little too leading. It’s my understanding that ‘trace of lavender,’ especially in the 1920s, was coded language.

Q: You so deftly evoke how Speed and Lincoln bolstered one another toward heteronormative relationships. Can you explain how you did that?

A: The letters that Lincoln wrote to Joshua are fascinating documents because as I've said, they do feel as though they are coaxing, coaching each other towards this heteronormative lifestyle. And there's this feeling of ‘you can do this, you know, I'm behind you, you can make this happen.’

They're terrified about the wedding night. So, the fact that Lincoln extracts a promise from Speed, ‘you have to write me back the next morning and let me know how it went’ and waits with bated breath to hear, suggests a level of intensity and insecurity around women. And Lincoln at one point said, “It's like you could have had any woman you wanted.” So, it's clear that the Speed was handsome. He was eminently marriageable.

Q: The title Courting Mr. Lincoln suggested that perhaps the character courting Mr. Lincoln was a woman, Ann Rutledge.

A: Ann Rutledge, she's a very interesting story.

Rutledge was sort of rediscovered by William Herndon, Lincoln's longtime law partner, one of his first biographers and a devout enemy of Mary Todd Lincoln. The ‘hell cat of the age,’ he called her. So part of his agenda was to embarrass Mary Todd. So, he dug up stuff that Rutledge and Lincoln were close and then he went on a speaking tour about it.

I think, frankly, he promoted her to a spot that she didn't have. This debate has been going on for so long, but back in the 1930s people started to question it, saying, 'Wait a minute, there's really no evidence that they were that close, let alone romantic lovers.’ Herndon wanted to paint her as the love of Lincoln's life and that Mary was so jealous of this dead woman that she resolved to make his life a misery -- it was this weird psychobiography.

Q: You made the decision to leave Rutledge out of Courting Mr. Lincoln.

A: Yes, the reason I kept Rutledge out of it is because Speed himself never knew about her. I figured, if she was that important to Lincoln, he would have told Speed was about her. None of Lincoln's friends or intimates going through life knew about her. I'm of the opinion that they were close but not romantic.

Q: Your historical novels move easily between time periods and between Europe or America. As you embark writing a new novel, how do you think about this?

A: The research burden is the same, you still have to find worlds that are lost.

I used to be very clever about setting books in London, Paris, and that way I could justify research trips -- that's what I do for my art, right? Ha yeah.

But it was always the story. With Mr. Timothy, for instance, I thought, ‘I have to make a plausible London, a Victorian London.’ That was my first historical novel and I had to figure out what that world would have looked like and smelled like, and I started very tentatively doing that. And then less tentatively and, and I suddenly realized I love this.

Q: Yes, there’s so much rich period detail in your novels.

A: I'm just such a geek about this stuff. I just love this stuff.

Q: So in Washington, you have the Library Congress with its incredible resources.

A: In some ways, the challenge is to kind of winnow down. What do I actually need to know? And I will say (William) Herndon is an amazing resource, because he had the intuition to realize, ‘Oh, wait, I need to talk to people, all the people who knew him growing up and talk to his stepmother and talk to his stepbrother and talk to him.’ It’s an invaluable trove.

Q: Even though he's so unreliable?

A: He is deeply unreliable because he was driven by his agenda, but I think everyone does have some kind of agenda.

I think one of the reasons that Mary Todd does have a bad reputation, is that her history was written by her enemies, particularly Herndon. He wanted very much the world to see her as the shrew -- the mad woman, the unbalanced wife.

There's a scene at the end of the Steven Spielberg movie “Lincoln.” Mary Todd, played by Sally Field, says, “All anybody remembers is that I was crazy, and I made your life a misery.” And that's all people remember. Then you tell them that ‘in 1841 she was extremely accomplished, attractive, and unusually well-educated for her era, passionate about politics.’ She had all these qualities that people don't know about.

Q: Mary Todd and Abraham Lincoln were two people who came to their depression from similar different places. Their mothers died when they were very young. Their motherlessness was a bond. Interlocking neuroses!

A: Oh, I really agree. I think that was a big bond. The difference was that Lincoln loved his stepmother and Mary did not love hers.

At one point in the book, Lincoln says, “I think we're the two brokenest birds I know.” I love the idea that it is their brokenness that draws them together.

Q: Just a few questions about writing: Do you research and then write?

A: It is very much a back-and-forth thing. It's me kind of blundering along until I get to a particular scene and I say, ‘Oh, I need to learn some more. And then I'll go back.’ If I'm doing a ball scene, I ask: What would they've been wearing? What would the music have been? How would they have been dancing? How did it work? For instance, I found that ladies had their dance cards as little books that they’d hang around their wrists. It was very practical.

I'm not smart enough at the beginning to know what I need to know. So the story instructs me as I go along. There's no method in it at all. It's: ‘What do I need to know to make that happen?’

Q: Sounds like you’ve developed an instinct?

A: The instinct is a story instinct. It's like, 'Okay, what does the story need at this moment?' ‘What needs to come out of this scene?’ I don't think it's something I necessarily do consciously. But I have a sense of what a scene needs.

Q: So you think in scenes?

A: Yes, I think in terms of scenes, definitely.

Q: Do you write chronologically?

A: Pretty much, although as you know in this structure, there are two narrators. So, the chronology, the story, sort of starts over again.

Q: You feather in scenes so deftly that there’s a real arc to Courting Mr. Lincoln.

A: Yes, I think feathering is a technical challenge as much as anything. You don't want to stall the narrative with ‘We're going to pause now while I educate you about this person.' Right?

Q: What draws you to historical fiction as a form? What was the first historical novel you loved?

A: That's a great question. This will date me and perhaps, come back to haunt me, but as a kid, I loved Gone with the Wind. I was too young, clearly, to grasp how profoundly racist it was. I didn't know what the KKK was, what the Lost Cause was, but I read the story obsessively. I recently went back to just the first chapter, and that first line: "Scarlett O'Hara was not beautiful." That was a great first line. That was the first time I remember being really obsessed with this tunnel, this wormhole into the past. It fascinated me.

So, that was probably the first, but it's very hard to justify that book now. I certainly would never encourage a kid to read it.

Q: Contemporary writers of historical fiction?

A: I will say my favorite living historical novelist is Hilary Mantel. She's a genius.

I think James Wood said this, 'she's just unfailingly interesting.' There's never a dull moment. Not that there's necessarily a lot of action, but that you're just gripped from the first moment. I don't know how she does what she does. She also pulls up the technical trick of never using Cromwell's name. He's always just 'he'. In a scene where there are other 'hes and 'hims" It shouldn't work. It should drive you crazy, but it works.

Q: Have you read Gore Vidal's Lincoln?

A: Yes, but a long time ago. What I like about Vidal is that he is has very realistic takes on people. He didn't take a hagiography angle. He recognized that Lincoln was a politician. That was also one of the lessons about doing the research for this book was that Lincoln was a fount of ambition. This guy wanted to succeed, and he cultivated the relationships that would make that happen. With newspaper editors, with judges, with other politicians, with families.

Q: Lincoln is the character you write least about, yet he comes through completely as a political animal.

A: I think that was part of the attraction between him and Mary. They were both political animals. She was looking for a candidate, because that was the only way to power for a woman. So, she had to find a candidate. I think it's an extraordinary act of prescience that she chose him, because she had Stephen Douglas as an option. He was reportedly besotted with her. So, she chose Lincoln. That speaks well of her, because nobody else would have picked him to become president.

That's what people forget. He chose her, too. You know, he broke off their engagement at one point, but he came back. I think he grasped her value. I mean, she certainly was a difficult woman. I think the more public a figure she became, the more her private demons came to the fore.

I think in those early days, what I tried to convey is her attractiveness. That's why it's great to catch her at this moment in history because she's at her best.

This interview has been edited and condensed for publication.