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 Gatekeeper

DEBORAH CROMBIE: It's that time of year--as in time for a new Rutledge novel from CHARLES TODD!! I have been a huge fan since A TEST OF WILLS, the first book in the series featuring Scotland Yard Inspector Ian Rutledge, a WWI veteran suffering from shell shock, came out to critical acclaim in 1996. Since then I've been fortunate to get to know both Charles and Caroline, the mother/son team who write as "Charles Todd."

Isn't this a fab cover? Caroline and I got to chat about THE GATEKEEPER here in Dallas a couple of weeks ago. We had a great time and I could just kick myself for not getting a photo! But here is Caroline to share some of the things we talked about with you!

--Did you ever imagine, when you and Charles came up with the idea for A Test of Wills, that you would be writing 20 books (so far) about Ian Rutledge and Hamish? That's just an amazing achievement.

We didn’t even think the first book was going to sell—when it did, we were given only a one book contract!  But St. Martin’s realized that very quickly and renewed it for two more as soon as TEST got so much attention.   We’re just very glad Rutledge had a chance to do more with his career at the Yard, and we could follow it with him.

--And yet time has moved very slowly in the series. Did you make that decision early on?

We felt that the PTSD, the shell shock, was something we wanted to explore, and the only way to do that was to shorten the time period. We didn’t want to let a year pass and readers learn of what has happened in his secret life as a side bar in the mystery.  Shell shock defines Rutledge, and it’s how he deals with the shame of it and with the voice in his head—Hamish—that makes him what he is.   And so we’ve killed off a lot of English victims to achieve this, but I think it has been worth it.

--This case is different from any Rutledge has ever investigated in the series. Can you tell us why?

Because of the state of the English roads in this time frame, Rutledge always arrives on the scene a day—two days—after the murder, when the trail is cold and the local people have trampled all over the evidence that might have been there.  We thought it would be fascinating to see what would happen if he got there just as the crime was committed.  Not in time to see who did it, of course,  but while the blood, so to speak, is still fresh and he can begin straightaway to look for clues.  And we liked what that did to the local man who had his own reasons not wanting Rutledge there.

--A rare book about apples figures in the case. Is it based on a real book? Is there a photo?

How I wish there was a photo.  Years ago someone showed me a book that was fascinating. Plates of hand drawn and painted apples that no longer are grown but were popular in medieval times.  Just absolutely lovely workmanship. It obviously impressed me, because I can still remember the various plates.  Charles had to take my word for them, but he liked the idea.  This is what’s neat about working together.  We have two imaginations to draw on.

 --When you were here in Dallas a couple of weeks ago, you talked about this book exploring the dynamics of three different families--can you tell us more?

We were interested in how families work.  There are several in the book, each with a different take on what’s important.  For example, one woman has more or less forced her daughter into accepting an engagement with an abusive man, because he’s such a good catch. Her concerns are more social than motherly.

--What's next for Rutledge? 

We’re over halfway though the next book, and it’s a cold case that Rutledge—for his sins—is assigned to look into. One that’s been revived and looked at before, with no more luck that when the murder happened.  But Rutledge has one advantage.  A bit of gossip, shall we say, that makes him look deeper into the case than his superiors anticipated.  It’s a chase story in a way.   As he begins to search, building one piece of evidence at a time, he’s not sure where this is taking him. And at this stage, neither do we!  So we try to keep writing in between promoting THE GATE KEEPER.

 DEBS: Here's more about THE GATEKEEPER:

 On a deserted road, late at night, Scotland Yard’s Ian Rutledge encounters a frightened woman standing over a body, launching an inquiry that leads him into the lair of a stealthy killer and the dangerous recesses of his own memories in this twentieth installment of the acclaimed New York Times bestselling series.

Hours after his sister’s wedding, a restless Ian Rutledge drives aimlessly, haunted by the past, and narrowly misses a motorcar stopped in the middle of a desolate road. Standing beside the vehicle is a woman with blood on her hands and a dead man at her feet.

She swears she didn’t kill Stephen Wentworth. A stranger stepped out in front of their motorcar, and without warning, fired a single shot before vanishing into the night. But there is no trace of him. And the shaken woman insists it all happened so quickly, she never saw the man’s face.

Although he is a witness after the fact, Rutledge persuades the Yard to give him the inquiry, since he’s on the scene. But is he seeking justice—or fleeing painful memories in London?

Wentworth was well-liked, yet his bitter family paint a malevolent portrait, calling him a murderer. 
But who did Wentworth kill? Is his death retribution? Or has his companion lied? Wolf Pit, his village, has a notorious history: in Medieval times, the last wolf in England was killed there. When a second suspicious death occurs, the evidence suggests that a dangerous predator is on the loose, and that death is closer than Rutledge knows.

And more about CHARLES TODD:

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 and Charles will be stopping in to chat with us on JRW today, so get your questions ready! 

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!