Charles Todd--An Irish Hostage

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Summer is really here! There's a new Bess Crawford novel from Charles Todd, an event I look forward to every year! Now I just need a little vacation day so that I can read it straight through!

For those who aren't familiar with the series, "Charles Todd" is mother/son writing partners Caroline and Charles, and they write two series, one featuring Scotland Yard Inspector Ian Rutledge, set after WWI, and one featuring English nurse Bess Crawford, set during the war--and now after .

This 12th Bess Crawford novel sees the war over and Bess trying to chart a new course for herself. It takes her to Ireland for the first time. I wanted to know what drew the Todds to Ireland in this complicated post-war period. (Every time I learn even a little about Irish history, I realize how much I don't know.) Caroline explains:

CAROLINE TODD: Bess Crawford took us to the Great War to show how women stepped up to do their bit.  We followed her through the worst of the fighting to the Armistice and the Peace Treaty—even to the tragedy of men who were to become the long term wounded…

But there was one story we hadn’t told—that of the Irish Troubles—because it was a problem that wouldn’t go away for much of the 20th century.

The Irish had been struggling to find a path to home rule, and London made promises, but nothing seemed to come of it.  When war was declared in 1914, Irishmen enlisted in the British Army, in the hope that their service would be rewarded when it was over—dying for Britain in the worst of the fighting.

But others felt this was not going to move London—and the Easter 1916 Rising in Dublin sent Irishmen into the streets to take their freedom with armed insurrection. It was put down, the ringleaders executed—and people who had had mixed feelings about the Rising suddenly found themselves supporting the Cause.

And when the soldiers who had fought for Britain in France returned, they were treated not as heroes, but as traitors, shunned by their own people.

Into this turmoil, Bess is asked to stand up for Eileen, the Irish nurse who nearly died when Britannic went down in A Duty to the Dead. She has healed, her fiancé has just come home from France—and she wants to be married in Ireland in spite of high feelings against both of them.  But Bess’s family is worried for her safety, and the only way they can see for her to travel is by aircraft. In and out for the wedding….

But it doesn’t quite work out as everyone hopes!

And before she knows it, Bess is involved in kidnapping, murder, no idea where to put her trust, and even dragged to a prison cell!

She feels a duty to help those caught in the middle of what is happening—and learns something about her own heart—but how she can save others when she herself is threatened?

DEBS: There is a great flying scene in the beginning of the book, and of course I thought of Caroline and Charles' adventure going up in a biplane. 

 Now I call that serious research!

But I've never been to Ireland, and I want to know more about their Irish background. Caroline and Charles, is Bess's friend's village a real place? Did you get all the material you needed for this book before the pandemic? Tell us more!

 And REDS and readers, have you visited Ireland?

Charles Todd--A Forgotten Place

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Two of the highlights in my year are the releases of two new Charles Todd novels, one featuring Scotland Yard inspector Ian Rutledge in the winter, and one featuring WWI battlefield nurse Bess Crawford in the fall. Which means--There is a new Bess Crawford book, A FORGOTTEN PLACE !!!

And it's fabulous!! For those of you who don't know, "Charles Todd" is the mother/son writing team of Charles and Caroline Todd. I have been fans of the Todds since long before I met them, and now, even though they are dear friends and fellow Anglophiles and I have some idea how their writing process works, their books never cease to amaze me. A FORGOTTEN PLACE  is no exception.

The Todds have been kind enough to answer some questions for us today, but first, here's a snippet about the book to put our discussion in context:

The Armistice has been signed, and WWI is finally over. A battlefield nurse now attending war wounded amputees, Bess Crawford watches the despair Captain Williams feels for his wounded men.  The Captain worries that peace will do what war couldn’t—take their lives by suicide. For these men, there are no parades, no cheers. When they are sent home at last, their injuries prevent them from returning to the mines where they once made their living.  When the Captain’s letters become increasing depressed, Bess requests leave and goes to that bleak coal mining village to help. But she arrives too late. His men dead, Captain Williams has left the valley and Bess fears he too will find a way to end his own life. 

Finally, Bess tracks him to an isolated, storm-battered Welsh peninsula; a harsh and forgotten place where secrets and death go hand in hand. Once there, Bess realizes she is stranded—and in mortal danger. A rising death toll and the hostility of a village in possession of a lethal secret shut her in, as winter storms cut her off from any escape.

 In a place with no Constable, with the Captain and his wary sister-in-law her only allies, Bess is in a race against time to stop a murderer driven to kill again and again. And she must take care not to put the Captain and his brother’s widow at risk even as the villagers themselves begin to take the law into their own hands. The sense of urgency heightens as Bess fears the next person in a killer’s sights is Simon Brandon, searching for Bess and unaware of his danger. Meanwhile, not a soul in England knows where she is…

DEBS: I don't want to make this book sound depressing, because it's absolutely not, just gripping and moving. But I cried all the way through the opening scenes, where Bess is working with the injured soldiers in the clinic. How do you two explore these wrenching circumstances without feeling overwhelmed by the suffering of the characters?

CAROLINE:  Sometimes it’s awfully hard to write about real pain, something that affects real people. When the fighting ended in the last Bess, A CASUALTY OF WAR, and through her own tears, Bess saw that the doctor standing beside her was crying too, I realized that I was also crying.  But that’s how some people met the sudden quiet when the guns fell silent—the relief was too powerful for words. It was the hopelessness of shattered men that moved us at the beginning of A FORGOTTEN PLACE, because it had happened in real life. And here it becomes Bess’s motivation for all that follows.   

CHARLES:  Caroline’s right—it’s not easy to write a lot of scenes.  But my experience is, you have to know what your characters are going through.  If you don’t,  if you can’t feel for them and with them, it comes across all wrong. If Bess hadn’t felt deeply about what those wounded men had lost, she wouldn’t have cared enough to go to Wales. And the reader must feel that pain along with her, if they’re to respect her decision to help when no one else would. 

DEBS: How do you come across such interesting settings? The part of Wales where most of the story takes place--the "forgotten place" is somewhere I'd never even heard of. But it was fascinating, and sounds so beautiful. Is it still that isolated now?

CAROLINE:  It’s a national park now, protected and still rather isolated. We took a trip to southern Wales, expecting to see castle ruins, picturesque headlands, and even the coal valleys, which are green once more.  It was an area we hadn’t really explored, and we were excited about that. But we didn’t anticipate writing about it.  To our surprise, a short story, THE TROPHY, which appeared in Alfred Hitchcock and then this Bess came from the trip. Once we saw that bay, so pristine in the sunlight, and heard stories about the storms and what had once happened there, we knew we’d found the right setting for PLACE.

CHARLES:  As you know so well in your own books, you can walk around a corner or turn down a country lane, and there’s the perfect setting, sometimes when you least expect it.  It just draws you in, and you begin to see things there.  A place to find a body, characters with their secrets, a village past that can be woven into the motive for murder.  And the more you investigate, the more potential you find. It’s why you go to England and why we do as well. There’s nothing like walking the ground.  It just catches the imagination.

DEBS; Which brings me to my next question. This book had a very different feel to me than the previous Bess books. Bess is usually, like Ian Rutledge, moving about a good deal, often back and forth between England and France, to London, to Somerset, even to Paris. But this book feels very confined, almost claustrophobic, with Bess being stranded in this remote part of Wales. Was that deliberate, or something that just grew out of the story? It's a great device for increasing tension.

CAROLINE:  We never know until we get there just where Bess’s story is going to take her. The question in Paris was, without her usual support team, could she manage to find a spy on her own?  And she discovered some really interesting new people to help her. When we started PLACE, we knew we’d go to the coal mines, because that’s where the men under Captain Williams had come from.  Then we realized that his story—and therefore Bess’s—couldn’t be finished there.  It held too many memories for him.  But that isolated village on the bay, where both he and Bess were strangers, put them at odds with people desperate to protect a way of life that was all they’d known.  And there was no one to help Bess as matters escalated.  It tested Rachel, it tested Hugh, and it tested Bess, all in different ways because they had to draw on their own strengths if they were to survive. The claustrophobia in the setting echoed their own sense of isolation. 

CHARLES:  Some of the best stories come out of what makes people tick. That’s why we call our books psychological suspense rather than historical mysteries. You’re looking at people who see their world in danger of being changed forever by a stranger, and some are willing to go to any lengths to protect what they have. The question is, where can you put your trust, when you don’t know who is a threat and who isn’t?  And that was the dilemma Bess faced in a place she couldn’t escape and yet couldn’t make sense of.

DEBS: And of course, everyone wants a hint of what's next for Bess. And Simon!

CAROLINE and CHARLES:  Well, the war is over now, and Bess will be sent to France to evaluate a situation for one of the Matrons high up in the hierarchy of the Queen Alexandra’s. What appears to be a rather straightforward mission is anything but, and while the Allied powers are trying to hammer out the Treaty of Versailles that will bring the war to an official end, Bess begins to look at her future for the first time.  After all, by Victorian standards, where girls married at eighteen, Bess would be considered a spinster! Does she want to continue in nursing in a civilian hospital? Stay in London at Mrs. Hennessey’s?  Go home to her parents in Somerset?  What she begins to realize, as she once more deals with life and death, is that her own life has been on hold for four years, and now it is she, not the Queen Alexandra’s, who must choose where it will go from here.  And Simon has some decisions to make as well…

DEBS: Oh, I can't wait! And as I've been lucky enough to get a sneak peek at the THE BLACK ASCOT, the Rutledge book coming out in February,  I will just have to read it again. It's that good.

Charles and Caroline will be stopping in to chat and answer questions about Bess and their writing, so please say hello!

Charles and Caroline Todd are a mother-and-son writing team who live on the east coast of the United States. Caroline has a BA in English Literature and History, and a Masters in International Relations. Charles has a BA in Communication Studies with an emphasis on Business Management, and a culinary arts degree that means he can boil more than water.

Charles Todd--The Shattered Tree: A New Bess Crawford

DEBORAH CROMBIE: What a treat we have today! One (two, actually) of my favorite authors, mother and son writing team CHARLES TODD (Charles and Caroline!) are here with us to talk about their new book featuring WWI battlefield nurse Bess Crawford, THE SHATTERED TREE, out on August 30th.  (And what gorgeous cover!)

The Todds are such an inspiration to me. They write TWO terrific books a year, one featuring shell-shocked Scotland Yard detective Ian Rutledge in post WWI England, and the other featuring Bess, a colonel's daughter who joins the British nursing service at the beginning of the war, a time when nice young women did NOT do those things. The books are chock full of research but are so gripping that only later do you realize you've learned history. The Bess books are to me particularly vivid, because they are told in first person and often in the midst of the battlefield action.

Here's what happens in THE SHATTERED TREE:


At the foot of a tree shattered by shelling and gunfire, stretcher-bearers find an exhausted officer, shivering with cold and a loss of blood from several wounds. The soldier is brought to battlefield nurse Bess Crawford’s aid station, where she stabilizes him and treats his injuries before he is sent to a rear hospital. The odd thing is, the officer isn’t British—he’s French. But in a moment of anger and stress, he shouts at Bess in German.

When Bess reports the incident to Matron, her superior offers a ready explanation. The soldier is from Alsace-Lorraine, a province in the west where the tenuous border between France and Germany has continually shifted through history, most recently in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, won by the Germans. But is the wounded man Alsatian? And if he is, on which side of the war do his sympathies really lie?

Of course, Matron could be right, but Bess remains uneasy—and unconvinced. If he was a French soldier, what was he doing so far from his own lines . . . and so close to where the Germans are putting up a fierce, last-ditch fight?

When the French officer disappears in Paris, it’s up to Bess—a soldier’s daughter as well as a nurse—to find out why, even at the risk of her own life.

I loved this book! It was fascinating to see wartime Paris through Bess's eyes. And of course I was thrilled to have the chance to ask the Todds what inspired them. Here's Caroline to fill us in.


*Why Paris, when Bess was so at home in London and other parts of England?

 Paris was where many English officers and a lot of Aussie enlisted men went to recuperate from their wounds,  and we really hadn’t done much with it. So this was our chance, and that meant creating a French mystery to use it more thoroughly than an English mystery would have done.   And THAT meant a whole bucket full of new research!  We found some really fascinating material about the salons and a designer who worked on French Army uniforms, and all sorts of odd tidbits that didn’t fit the book but were fun to discover.  You wouldn’t believe some of it.  Like a French air ace and his relationship with a French designer.

 *She was out of her comfort zone there—without her father’s knowledge and influence, without Simon, and so on.  How did you manage that?

That made for very interesting opportunities!  We needed some new characters.  That meant learning enough about the period in France to draw them well.  People who really would have been there, people Bess would have been able to turn to, not just handing her versions of her English background.  You’ve done much the same in Cambridge and Cheshire—where your characters are out of their element.

 *You bring back a very popular character in Captain Barkley, the American serving with the Canadian forces. How did he fit into this new setting?

 He’s there to help Bess—but she doesn’t quite trust him!  And he has his own agenda, one part of which is trying to keep Bess safe, and only succeeding in creating problems.  Bess has been used to the freedom that being raised wherever the Regiment was sent, and she missed out on many of the more suffocating English views of women carrying over from the Victorians.  He wants to make sure she doesn’t run into trouble, he wants to see her rest in bed and take care of her own wound and stay out of trouble, but Bess knows her own mind, and much as she likes the Captain, she just isn’t the sort of woman who is afraid of doing anything a man would disapprove of as “unladylike.”   She’s more modern because of her upbringing than many of her contemporaries.  And many of the young women who chose to become nurses often faced these ideas of what a well brought up young lady should see or do or know about.   When it came to bathing the wounded, most Victorian women had never seen a grown man in his underwear much less stark naked, and for many it was more shocking than the wounds they’d suffered.

 *Where does Bess go from here?

(How the devil do I know, we’ve only got a few chapters written!)  Ahem.  Next year’s Bess,  A CASUALTY OF WAR,  goes back to the Front as the war draws to a close. And there is a patient from Barbados in the Caribbean, serving as an English officer, who is certain he was shot by another English officer he recognized, although all the Army’s records show that this man was killed in an attack two years before.  What really happened there in No Man’s Land during that awful retreat when he was wounded? Is this young officer suffering from shell shock or mentally unstable from the strain of war?  He’s a long way from home, and Bess tries to find out just what the truth is.

 *How is Rutledge doing?

 He’s currently in production for next winter.  RACING THE DEVIL starts in France where five English officers who survived the Great War have met in Paris to race each other to Nice. But something goes wrong, and a year later,  tragedy appears to have followed them to England. 

DEBS: Caroline and Charles will be stopping in to answer questions, and will be giving away a copy of THE SHATTERED TREE to a lucky commenter, so get your oar in!

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!

Charles Todd's newest Ian Rutledge novel, A FINE SUMMER'S DAY

SUSAN ELIA MACNEAL: BREAKING REDS NEWS! Red Hallie Ephron's THERE WAS AN OLD WOMAN is #14 on the New York Times eBook list! Way to go, Hallie! We're all so, so, so happy for you!

(OK, now back to today's regularly scheduled blogging...)

Happy book birthday to Caroline and Charles Todd! Their newest novel, under the pen name Charles Todd, is A FINE SUMMER'S DAY. This novel is the latest in the acclaimed New York Times-bestselling Ian Rutledge series, about a brilliant but troubled Scotland Yard detective suffering from what we would now call PTSD after World War I. It's one of Hilary Clinton's favorite series and had a wonderful write-up in yesterday's New York Times Book Review.

A FINE SUMMER'S DAY is the seventeenth book in the Inspector Ian Rutledge series, and this one comes with a twist — it's a prequel, meaning we meet a young Rutledge before the war. Before he — and Britain — were changed forever.

And now, I am honored and delighted to introduce — Caroline and Charles Todd!

1. How did you come up with your character Ian Rutledge?

Caroline: I don’t really know. We wanted several things—to set A TEST OF WILLS in England because the Great War killed a generation of her young men, and we felt it would be interesting to see how a survivor of that war would return to civilian life—and to deal with murders committed by ordinary people, not gangsters or drug dealers or terrorists. The WHY rather than the how.  And so we needed a man capable of understanding people. Somehow we simply lucked out. I think I’ve been half in love with Rutledge ever since.

Charles:  Like the Bess Crawford series, we needed a character of his times, one who could act on his own. Much as we enjoy CSI, we didn’t want Forensics to solve the crime for our Inspector. Looking back to that first glimmer of Rutledge, he seemed to set the stage himself, rather than being “created” by us.  And I think that’s been his strength, just as it is Bess Crawford’s strength.

2. Why did you decide to set the new mystery, A Fine Summer's Day, in 1914?

Caroline:  After sixteen Rutledge mysteries, where we’d been examining him after the war, we were curious to see what sort of man he was before the trenches changed him forever. We weren’t sure we could carry it off, and yet, from the very first page, we realized that we must have known these things about him, however subconsciously. We couldn’t have done him justice in A TEST OF WILLS and the subsequent books if we hadn’t understood the bedrock of his mind and personality before the Battle of the Somme in 1916. It was an amazing journey of discovery on our parts.

Charles: As fans of the mystery ourselves, we’d come to admire so many characters created by other authors.  From Poirot to Dalgliesh, from Duncan Kincaid to Gamache, even Joe Leaphorn and Reacher and Stanley. It never occurred to us starting out with Rutledge that we might be creating another well known character. But he’s his own man, and we discovered while writing A FINE SUMMER’S DAY that he’s still full of surprises.

  

3. What kind of research do you do for your novels?

Charles and Caroline: You can’t write a good mystery without equally thorough research. In our case, with both series, we realized early on that we had to go to England if we wanted to get the time and the language and the settings right.  We also look for first hand sources of information about the period and the war. A friend found a little book by Florence Nightingale that was an interesting glimpse into what was known about dealing with war wounds and medicine at the time. Letters and memoirs and photographs are very important. But you have to be careful using a book written after 1920, you have to check that modern research hasn’t turned up information that a character living at the time couldn’t or wouldn’t have known. And England has lovely military museums. These and the ones here are an endless resource.

4. Do you generally know how your books will end before you start writing, or do you make changes as you go along?

Caroline:  We have no idea from page one forward who did it or why. We let the story evolve and the characters tell us what we need to know. And I think that’s a good thing, because it keeps the reader guessing too. We never outline, or write a proposal, because we prefer to be surprised as we work. Other writers thrive on outlines. That always amazes me because I was never good at them. Anyone who is has my respect.

Charles:  My father, who was our proofreader for many years, always worried about the ending because when we handed him a chapter, he knew that the next one hadn’t been written yet, and having the logical mind of a chemical engineer, he was afraid we might find ourselves going astray before he could find out who did it and why. Somehow we never did, and he’d laugh and say, “I don’t know how you managed it this time.” And sometimes we weren’t sure how we did, either.

5. What are you working on now?

Caroline and Charles:  In December we turned in the next Bess Crawford. It will be out in late summer, and the title is A PATTERN OF LIES.  It’s a mystery about our version of an actual event, and how a pattern of lies can warp and twist the truth until people start to believe them. We always love writing a Bess mystery.  She’s one of our favorite people, and she’s fun as well as interesting. Her decision to become a nursing sister, her background in India, and her relationships with her flat mates, her parents, and of course Simon Brandon and even Sergeant Lassiter, and not least, her experiences in the war, give her so many dimensions that we never lack ideas for her series. Now, with that one finished and in production, we’re about to start the next Rutledge for the winter of 2016.  Starting a new manuscript is always so exciting.

6. Anything else we should know?

Caroline:  There’s a character in A FINE SUMMER’S DAY who just might walk back into this new Rutledge.  You can almost hear her asking to reappear six years later…   The question is, what will Rutledge have to say about that?

Charles:  We weren’t sure how reviewers would take this return to the Summer of 1914, but they got it right away, and I think Rutledge fans are going to find it very satisfying.

  

SUSAN ELIA MACNEAL: Thank you, Caroline and Charles. I was lucky enough to receive a copy of A FINE SUMMER'S DAY and it is fabulous — a perfect start to the series for the new reader, or, for those of us following Inspector Rutledge, new insight into his character (along with a fascinating new mystery). 

Reds and lovely readers, what do you think about a prequel to a long-running mystery series? And what do you hope to learn about Inspector Rutledge from his past?

ABOUT THE AUTHORS: Charles and Caroline Todd are a mother-and-son writing team who live on the east coast of the United States. Caroline has a BA in English Literature and History, and a Masters in International Relations. Charles has a BA in Communication Studies with an emphasis on Business Management, and a culinary arts degree that means he can boil more than water. Caroline has been married (to the same man) for umpteen years, and Charles is divorced.

Charles and Caroline have a rich storytelling heritage. Both spent many evenings on the porch listening to their fathers and grandfathers reminisce. And a maternal grandmother told marvelous ghost stories. This tradition allows them to write with passion about events before their own time. And an uncle/great-uncle who served as a flyer in WWI aroused an early interest in the Great War.

Charles learned the rich history of Britain, including the legends of King Arthur, William Wallace, and other heroes, as a child. Books on Nelson and by Winston Churchill were always at hand. Their many trips to England gave them the opportunity to spend time in villages and the countryside, where there’a different viewpoint from that of the large cities. Their travels are at the heart of the series they began ten years ago.

Charles’s love of history led him to a study of some of the wars that shape it: the American Civil War, WWI and WWII. He enjoys all things nautical, has an international collection of seashells, and has sailed most of his life. Golf is still a hobby that can be both friend and foe. And sports in general are enthusiasms. Charles had a career as a business consultant. This experience gave him an understanding of going to troubled places where no one was glad to see him arrive. This was excellent training for Rutledge’s reception as he tries to find a killer in spite of local resistance.

Caroline has always been a great reader and enjoyed reading aloud, especially poetry that told a story. The Highwayman was one of her early favorites. Her wars are WWI, the Boer War, and the English Civil War, with a sneaking appreciation of the Wars of the Roses as well. When she’s not writing, she’s traveling the world, gardening, or painting in oils. Her background in international affairs backs up her interest in world events, and she’s also a sports fan, an enthusiastic follower of her favorite teams in baseball and pro football. She loves the sea, but is a poor sailor. (Charles inherited his iron stomach from his father.) Still, she has never met a beach she didn’t like.

Both Caroline and Charles share a love of animals, and family pets have always been rescues. There was once a lizard named Schnickelfritz. Don’t ask.

Writing together is a challenge, and both enjoy giving the other a hard time. The famous quote is that in revenge, Charles crashes Caroline’s computer, and Caroline crashes his parties. Will they survive to write more novels together? Stay tuned! Their father/husband is holding the bets.

CHARLES TODD--A QUESTION OF HONOR

 DEBORAH CROMBIE:     This has been such a fun week for me, with new authors that I've discovered (Jenn McKinlay's Cloche and Dagger) and authors I've loved and whose new books I read with great anticipation, like Marcia Talley, and today, Charles Todd. The mother/son writing team of Charles and Caroline Todd, who write as Charles Todd, began with the wonderful series featuring shell-shocked WWI veteran, Scotland Yard Chief Inspector Ian Rutledge. And then they branched out into a second series with a WWI battlefield nurse called Bess Crawford. 

The Bess Crawford books are told in first person, and have such an immediacy that I feel I've been transported into Bess's life and time.  They are absolutely addictive, and in A Question of Honor, the 5th Bess novel, we find out some very interesting things about Bess's background. Although set in the latter months of the war, the story goes back to Bess's childhood in India. So of course, I had to ask-- WHY INDIA???
 
CHARLES TODD: Writing a novel isn’t just starting to type on PAGE ONE.  As any of my fellow authors on JUNGLE RED can tell you, there are “stages.”  The idea, the development of that idea, the setting and its potential, and a survey of what you’ve done before and what you intend to do in this next outing—they all play a role.

A QUESTION OF HONOR is the 5th Bess Crawford mystery, and throughout the previous four, we’ve said quite a bit about Bess’s intriguing background growing up in India.  So we decided it would be interesting to take a look at her life there.  And what better way to do this than at a time of crisis—the hunt for a murderer in the ranks of her father’s own regiment?  Then the question is, how will this event in the past come back to haunt her years later while serving in France? After all, the series is about the Great War, not India.

Of course that meant more research.  Fortunately we have a lot of slides and other material from a month spent in that part of the world.  Still, it’s never a walk in the park. 

They say that for an actor, nothing is ever wasted.  Everything that you see or do adds something to your repertoire of experience.  It’s true for a writer also.  You play so many roles in every book, remember so many small details that can enrich the setting, and draw on all kinds of odd bits of knowledge you’ve collected, sometimes without realizing it.   Then you put them together to make a mystery a page turner.  
  
Of course you can’t go tearing off in a dozen different directions—you always have to keep an eye on the suspense that drives the plot forward.  India is a vast place.  And every part of it has its history and its own unique quality.  But if your story is set in the Northwest Frontier, you can’t bring in sunrise across the Ganges or the cool scent of pines in the far north, along the border with Nepal, or the intense heat in the south where houseboats float on serene lakes.   And you have to tailor the new setting to meet the needs of the character.  Bess is fourteen.  She’ll see things differently from the battlefield nurse in France in 1918.
  
What was Simon like then? (DEBS: Bess's father was a regimental colonel; the enigmatic Simon was his sergeant major. Simon is just enough older than Bess that she knew him when she was a child, but now, as adults, their relationship has become MUCH more interesting.) 

What was his relationship with the Crawfords?  How did Bess and her parents interact? What place did her mother hold in the life of the garrison?  And how would the Colonel Sahib handle an unexpected, shocking situation?  You really come up with surprising and intriguing insights.
 
When the war ends, will Bess ever go back to India?  There are a lot of great plots that could take her there for one book. Who would go with her?  Simon?  Melinda Crawford?  Or is there someone else who will come into her life as the war draws to a close, and end her ties in the East? That’s the beauty of writing a series—you never know what’s around the corner.  And that’s what keeps it fresh from book to book.  




DEBS: I've been fascinated, through all the Bess books, by how modern Bess seems--and yet she is of her time.  I think we (in our time) have developed this idea of Victorian and Edwardian women as fragile and prone to vapors, and yet Bess is anything but. She is courageous in a way that I think most of us "modern women" would be hard-pressed to emulate. Were there women who particularly inspired your idea of Bess?




CHARLES AND CAROLINE: There were people like Florence
Nightingale half a century earlier, who really did so much for nursing, an unheard of thing at that time, and the lives she saved.  Clara Barton did much the same here for the Civil War.  There was Beryl Markham, the woman pilot from Kenya, after the war.  Isak Dinesen too, if you count her time in Kenya growing coffee.  And Freya Stark--who, as I remember, drove a Red Cross ambulance in Italy in WW1, at about Bess's age--and after the war explored places where no westerner had ever traveled, male or female, then
wrote about her adventures.  Gertrude Bell was an earlier explorer in the Middle East and worked there in WW1.  Mary Kingsley explored west Africa.

And there was the famous woman who was the first to be given a medical degree--her name eludes me.  And of course Marie Curie.  There were so many who never became famous but who explored all sorts of exotic places and were thought rather strange for Victorian women who were supposed to marry and have children and behave themselves as a properly brought up young woman
always did.

DEBS: Isak Dinesen is a particular heroine of mine. Running a coffee plantation in Kenya may not sound all that challenging--until you read her account of her life there. (Out of Africa, anyone? And if you've only seen the movie, READ THE BOOK!)


So, readers, are there women of that time that you see as role models?  (I've had Beryl Markham's memoir sitting on my to-read shelf for years--MUST GET TO IT.)


Tell us who you admire!


(Charles and Caroline will be giving a copy of A Question of Honor to one of our commenters!)
And a last little comment from me--this has been a week not only of authors who are some of my personal favorites, but of fabulous covers.  A Question of Honor is stunning, and a good argument for buying paper rather than digital books, so that you get the most enjoyment from it:-)

CHARLES TODD--THE NEW BESS CRAWFORD MYSTERY

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Two of my very favorite writers are the mother/son writing team of Charles and Caroline Todd, who write as CHARLES TODD. Their books featuring shell-shocked WW1 veteran and Scotland Yard policeman Ian Rutledge have been enormously popular and have received every critical accolade.

But a few years ago, deciding that they weren't content to write one book a year, the Todds began a second series featuring WW1 battlefield nurse Bess Crawford, and the latest Bess book, An Unmarked Grave, will be out in just a few weeks.

As the Todds and I share a publisher (William Morrow,) I've been fortunate to have done a number of book events with them these past few months, and I've been fascinated not only by the books themselves, but by listening to Caroline and Charles talk about how they work and what inspires them.

Here they share some thoughts with us at Jungle Red. (And I have to say that I just love this photo--Charles looking moodily and mysteriously into the camera, and Caroline looking so like Caroline!)

DEBS:  The Rutledge books, which are set just after the Great War and which deal with the ongoing consequences of Detective Inspector Ian Rutledge's experiences in the war, particularly his shell shock, have been very successful.  So what inspired you to write about Bess, a nurse and  amateur sleuth, and to go back to the war itself?

CAROLINE:  We’d talked about Bess for ages, but wanted to wait until we were sure that Rutledge was well established before tying up time and energy for another series.  In her case, we had two goals, to show how women coped with the war, and also to give people a chance to understand why Rutledge had come home damaged, to see what he’d faced in the trenches.   What surprised us about Bess is that she practically wrote herself. She's such an interesting person, and is such fun to work with.  This must have come across to the reader because Bess became popular almost overnight.  What’s more, we were looking forward to her second adventure before the first one even hit the bookshelves.   

CHARLES:  English women have always stepped up when they were needed, even running the castles during the crusades.  They've also traveled widely and independently, which gave us a great background for Bess.  Her father was a career army officer, and so she knows about weapons. Her childhood was spent at Army cantonments around the world, and so she has a different upbringing from that of the average Victorian woman. All this gives her an outlook on life shaped by a sense of duty and a sense of service.  It's not surprising that when war broke out she wanted to serve as a nurse, just as her father's son--if he'd had one--would have served on the battlefield.  Yes, it was going back to the war, but it was going forward to peace as well.

DEBS: Can you tell us a bit about the story in An Unmarked Grave?

CAROLINE and CHARLES:  Bess is in France, dealing with the wounded and now the influx of patients with the Spanish flu. That’s what they called the terrible Influenza pandemic that killed so many people all over the world, including members of our own families.   Among the dead awaiting burial is a body that shouldn't be there--he wasn't a victim of war wounds or of the flu.  He was murdered.  But before Bess can report his death, she herself succumbs to the flu and nearly dies.  By the time she is fully recovered, the discovery of the body seems to be a distant troubling dream. But as she tries to convince herself of that, she finds that the only other witness to the discovery has hanged himself--or has he?  As Bess delves deeper into memory and tries to pin down facts, she begins to realize that the dead man in the shed was not the first to die by an unknown hand, nor the last.  And it’s likely that she’ll be next, if she doesn’t watch her back.  That danger could well touch all those she loves most dearly, and now Bess must race a killer to his final target. 

DEBS:  One of the many things I love about the Bess books is their sense of immediacy.  As a reader, I feel Bess's experiences so vividly.  Some of this is due to the first-person narrative style, but I wondered about your research.  Have you visited the sites of the Allied lines in France, where, as a nurse, Bess would have been stationed?

CAROLINE:  We’ve made an effort to visit French museums and French battlefields, and we've got a copy of a Physician's Reference for 1908, which helps with the medical details. So the research is there.  Nurses write that they respond to her sense of dedication.  What we discovered was that first person really makes Bess come alive for the reader.    Rutledge is definitely third person as the professional detective, but for Bess, we needed to be a part of what she was seeing and feeling and doing.  Amazing, really, because characters seem to know what's best for them.  From Chapter 1 in first person, she literally leapt off the page.  Writers like to talk about Voice, too, and Bess found her own.  She’s fresh and different and intensely involved in her life, and whether you’re twenty of sixty, you have to respond to that.  

CHARLES:  Much of the research we've done for the Rutledge series has given us a good feeling for the period in which Bess works.  And so one series builds on the other.  We'd had strong women in the Rutledge books, so we weren't surprised to find we could write a strong woman on her own.  And she's as riveting to write about as she is to read.  Still, a story has to come down to setting and plot, and we have a drawer full for Bess to draw on.

DEBS: I recently recommended the Bess books on 20SomethingReads, a website librarians use to find suggestions for younger readers.  Bess is strong, independent, adventurous, brave--and sometimes stubborn, all traits that I'd hope contemporary young women and men would identify with.  Were you thinking about the appeal to a younger audience when you conceived the series?

CAROLINE:  Bess offers so much to the younger reader, male and female, because she's young too and she's trying to make a go of her choices in life.   We’d seen the success of Harry Potter, who had such a broad appeal to readers, and we realized that the real wizardry here wasn’t just happening in the story, it was the way the story was told, it reached out and grabbed you and said, here’s great adventure, come and see for yourself.   We try to do the same with our books, and Bess is a woman any woman can relate to.  What’s more, male readers love her.  I don’t quite know how we managed that, but we’re enjoying it.         

CHARLES:   I was told recently by a woman in her twenties, “I bought your latest for my Mom, because she’s a nurse and she loves the series.  The next thing I knew, I was still reading at midnight, and couldn’t put A BITTER TRUTH down.   Now I can’t wait for the next one.”   Remember, Rutledge isn’t quite thirty, he’s an attractive, haunted man who has a job to do and must face it every day, just like the rest of us, even if he’s an Inspector at Scotland Yard.  Bess is in her early twenties, caught up in the middle of a war and trying to do her bit.   You care about these characters because they seem so real, and you want to know what’s happening next.  That’s because the stories are fresh, and the plots involve you.   That’s what reading is all about.   

DEBS: An Unmarked Grave takes place in the spring of 1918.  We know (although Bess does not) that the war will be ending soon.  Can you tell us a little bit about what's in store for Bess?  I feel quite sure she won't be sitting at home knitting  And, the question that fans of both series always have to ask--do you envision Bess and Rutledge meeting after the war?  While I don't think they would be romantically suited (and Bess already has a surfeit of interesting men in her life!) it would be interesting if their paths crossed on a case...

CAROLINE:  When the war ends--as it must, Bess has to learn to live with peace.  She’ll be invited to an Irish wedding, in spite of the Troubles, and she’ll find herself in a very different environment where no one dares to trust his neighbor or his friend.  And Melinda Crawford wants to go back to India, where she had lived for many years.  At her age, such a long journey is very arduous, and so she invites Bess to accompany her. And Colonel Crawford sends Simon with them to protect both of them.  We'll learn more about Simon in this one, and about Bess's childhood. But wherever Bess is, can murder be far behind?  This is just a sampling of what’s ahead.  Will Rutledge and Bess ever meet? We don't know.  Would she pick up on his shell shock?   Interesting idea.  How would he feel about that?  Hmmm.

CHARLES:  Bess is a battlefield nurse.  This is the crucible where she learned to be an independent and engaging young woman, no longer in the shadow of her famous father.   And that's where the end of the war will find her, learning to live with peace, learning to move on. It won't be easy, and as anyone who has survived a war will tell you, it will leave its mark.  And so Bess must make her way into this Brave New World that isn't anything like the dreams people fought to save.   That's why we will take her to Ireland, and then back to her roots in India.    Bess never goes looking for trouble.  It finds her.  So life will never be dull for her—or her readers.    Whoever they are.

DEBS: Thank you both! I've cheated a bit, having been lucky enough to read the galley of An Unmarked Grave, so now I have to join the nagging hoard WHO CAN'T WAIT FOR THE NEXT ONE!

Charles and Caroline will be dropping in today to say "hi" and answer questions. Some of our readers can get a head start on the new book, too, as William Morrow will give galleys of An Unmarked Grave to three of our lucky commenters. (And the book is available for pre-order everywhere books are sold.)

I have to warn you, though, this is a dangerous proposition--if you haven't read one of the Bess books, you will then have to read them all.  And if you haven't read the Rutledge books, you'll have to read those, too.  So clear the decks!