Charles Todd--A Pattern of Lies

DEBORAH CROMBIE: The only thing in the year I like as much as a new Ian Rutledge novel by Charles Todd every January is a new Bess Crawford novel by Charles Todd in August. And guess

what? It's that time! I'm so pleased to have Charles Todd (mother and son writing team Charles and Caroline Todd) here today to talk about it to chat about the new Bess Crawford, A PATTERN OF LIES.

I'm going to start with a synopsis, so that you'll have a little context for my questions about the book:

When Bess goes to the Abbey Hall where the Ashtons live, she learns very quickly that the trials the Ashtons have endured are quite real.  Someone throws eggs at Mark’s car, and just after luncheon with the family, Philip Ashton is arrested for the multiple murders of the men killed in the explosion.  And that night, someone tries to set the house on fire.  What’s more the police are adamant that Philip is not allowed visitors, and it’s later established that the inspector in Canterbury had a relative killed in the fire.  As Bess tries to understand what’s happening, she realizes that most of the village and even farther afield, people had lost loved ones—and that trying to pin down where all this new hatred of the family is coming from.  It could be anyone.

The Army had established that the explosion and fire were not sabotage, and they accepted the fact that it was a terrible accident. But they weren’t interesting in rebuilding the mill on site because it would mean clearing all the rubble first, very labor intensive. So the mill contracts were moved to Scotland where a similar mill could be expanded.  So loss of income was added to the loss of loved ones.

There was one witness to the explosion—at least only one had come forward two years before—and he is now in France.  The Canterbury police don’t feel that it’s necessary to send for him, and the lawyers for Philip Ashton seem to agree that this witness had never been questioned about anything but sabotage—and therefore no one could be sure just what he would say.

 Back in France, correspondence with the Ashtons indicates that matters are not improving, and that general feeling was running high against Philip—now that there was a focus for their grief and uncertainty, people who were once employed by him or dependent on the mill turned against him.

Bess gets in touch with Sergeant Lassiter, the Australian who has appeared in several books, and asks him to find the witness, a man in the Tank Corps by the name of Rollins.  But before he can find the man, Bess encounters him quite by accident, and when she had an opportunity to speak to him, she’s surprised that he’s adamant about refusing to return to England. He doesn’t seem to care either way about what happens to Ashton, and since he’s the best Tank man Britain has, he’s not interested in leaving France at this juncture in the war just to testify.

Not long afterward, a fellow nurse is attacked and nearly killed.  It’s put down to a drunken soldier, although he’s never found.  But this nurse had been assigned the quarters meant for Bess, who got in much later and was given another room.  Was this attack really just an accidental case of a soldier fumbling around in the dark?  Or was she the intended victim?   Someone is also attempting to kill Rollins.

So who in France wants her to stop searching for Rollins—and is just as eager for Rollins to stay in France—dead, if necessary.

I won’t spoil the rest for you.  But at one point the Ashtons fire their lawyers and Mark finds a new barrister in London, an interesting man in a wheel chair with a mysteriously competent valet who does his leg work for him. 

DEBS: I don't know Kent well, but the beginning of this book is so lyrically beautiful in its description of Canterbury and the countryside that Kent is now on my must-do list. There is also this wonderful sense of taking a breath before the coming end of the war. Of course I had to pull up Google Maps and explore the area while I was reading. (What did we do before Google Maps!)

Are the village of Cranbourne and the abbey real places?

C & C:   Actually they are.  We've changed the name of the

town--it's based on Faversham, with some changes to suit the story--and a real explosion and fire that demolished a gunpowder mill.  Because it really happened, with great loss of life, we wanted to use the story without touching on the tragedy.  We felt that would be rather ghoulish.  But we believed it would be interesting to explore the question of what happens to anyone who had gone through such a devastating event.  How does a town that had not only lost so many dead as well as their main source of income, react when a whisper campaign suggests that it wasn't sabotage by the Germans and it wasn't an act of God, but a human agency--a single person who did this awful thing out of greed.   How do you make that person pay???

DEBS: I've loved the covers of all the Bess books, but this one is just stunning. Does it look just the way you imagined?

C & C:  Yes, this is really how we imagined one scene where Bess borrows a coat from Clara and walks out to the ruins, now overgrown, and stands there for a moment looking at the lie of the land.  She's well aware of the way geography influenced this area and she wants to see it for herself, to understand it better.  And because--in our version of the story--the bodies were never recovered--this is a tomb as well.  We've been so fortunate in our jackets.  Morrow works closely with us on finding just the right one, and we've just seen the jacket for the paperback edition of the Rutledge that came out in hardcover in January.  It's quite stunning. We're really delighted with the art department there.

DEBS: The description of the explosion at the gunpowder mill was horrifying. Did that really happen in Kent?

C & C:  It happened in many places where gunpowder was being made.  It happened here on the Brandywine River in Delaware, where the Du Pont Company began as a black powder mill.  And the loss of life there was pretty steep too.  The tragedy in Kent should have been far worse.  Women didn't work in
the mill on Sunday, so there were only the male staff on duty. 106 men is the usual number given for the death toll. If it had been any other day of the week, you could add 350 or so women to the toll.  In a small village that would have been unimaginable.  And what's particularly horrifying, from the point of view of the people at the Oare Works, just outside of Faversham, is that they still don't know to this day what sparked the explosion, and whether the fire was what ignited it--or if the fire came afterward, caused by the dust.  Which from the point of a mystery writer is intriguing. 

DEBS: You must have done lots of interesting research on the manufacturing of gunpowder and how its supply affected the war. Did you learn things you hadn't known?

C & C:   The chemistry for the "new" (at that time) cordite was much more complex than the old methods of making black powder.  And what use the cordite was put to was determined by how long the "cord" of material was. Whether bullets for revolvers and rifles, shells for the Artillery or the battleships, mortars, you name it.  And the new precision of recoilless guns made it possible to drop ten or a hundred or a thousand shells on precisely the same spot, three or four a minute!  With the high explosive powder being
used in the Great War and the constant pounding,  the term shell shock was used to explain what happened to the men exposed to it.  We also learned that water was necessary for gunpowder works, and so was a particular kind of tree for the charcoal.  Each stage of the process had its own building. And so on.  Putting it all together was very interesting, and we tried to keep it simple enough in the story that people could understand what was happening without getting into the complexities that would have taken up a large part of the first few chapters.  After all, it was the aftermath that made the story, rather than how the mill worked.

DEBS: You two never cease to amaze me. Two books a year, and not only two books a year but two GREAT books a year. And on top of finishing A PATTERN OF LIES and writing the new Rutledge book that will be out in January you have been traveling whirlwinds! Tell us about some of the things you've
done.

C & C:  It's been slightly mad.  We traveled quite a bit in January and February for A FINE SUMMER'S DAY, the latest Rutledge--and all the while we were preparing this Bess for publication as well as working on the Rutledge for NEXT January, 2016. That's NO SHRED OF EVIDENCE.   That takes us once
more to 1920.  A FINE SUMMER'S DAY looked back to 1914, when the war began and Rutledge had to choose between duty and service to his country.  Then in April we were in France for two weeks researching the NEXT Rutledge, 2017.
After that came Edgar Week and Malice, where we were guests of honor, and then it was off to England to finish that research and start researching the next Bess, for 2016, already titled THE SHATTERED TREE.  Meanwhile we put together four of our previous Bess and Rutledge short stories for an e-anthology titled TALES, which has just come out in electronic format but
will be in print format as well in September for those who don't have ways to use the e-form.  We have a short story coming out in the Summer Issue of STRAND MAGAZINE--a non-series story, by the way--and we have just learned that another short story, a Rutledge, will be published in next year's Malice Anthology.  As soon as we finish writing Bess and promoting Bess, we're off to Scotland. And if you think you're confused, imagine how we
feel!  If we didn't have calendars, we wouldn't know where we were supposed to be!

DEBS: Was this Bess book special to you with this year being the Centennial? Did you do something special to honor the remembrance?

C & C : Actually, it was the Rutledge book this January, A FINE SUMMER'S DAY, that looked back to the start of the war, and was our way of commemorating it.  Bess will see the end of the war in another two books, and that will give us a chance to explore the Armistice.  Everywhere you go in England, you see the remembrance.  But here we've done very little because it wasn't until April of 1917 that the US entered the war.  The fact is, the more we've learned about the Great War and  its time, the more we
feel we did the right thing choosing it as a setting for our books.   
PS. Bess won't stop with the end of the war!  There's still a lot of her story to tell, and you'll be surprised at what lies ahead for her.

DEBS: What's in store for you, for Bess, and for Rutledge?

C & C: We never know what lies around the corner!  We've up for a Macavity at Bouchercon, and so we'll be in Raleigh for that. By that time we'll have started the next Rutledge.  It sounds as though we have no other life, but actually we do.  We manage to cram in a lot of fun here and there.  But you always work a year ahead, so by the time we put 1916 to bed, we will start on 1917. 

DEBS: Thank you, Caroline and Charles!!  Congrats on the Macavity! I see I have questions I forgot to ask, but will save them for our ongoing discussion in the comments. 

And I am so intrigued by the new lawyer with the handy valet... Can't wait to read more of this book!

The Todds are giving a copy of A PATTERN OF LIES to one of today's very lucky commenters, and they will be checking in to answer questions and comments, so get your name in the hat!

REDS ALERT! Kathy Reel is the winner of Mary Kennedy's Dream Club mystery. And Pat D gets a copy of James Hayman's THE GIRL IN THE GLASS! You know the drill--email me at deborahcrombie.com with your addresses (Pat, I only need your email) and books will wing their way to you!