Ian Rutledge

  A Mysterious Profile

  Charles Todd

  Ian Rutledge

  It’s hard to say where Ian Rutledge came from. He sprang, rather like Minerva from Zeus’s brow, fully grown. Only in this instance, Zeus had two

  heads: Caroline and Charles working together.

  It has been a winding road toward this collaboration.

  The beginning was probably as simple as both of us growing up in a family of storytellers. When you sit on a porch on a warm summer’s evening, listening to your elders talking about the past, watching fireflies light the night, mesmerized by the soft creak of a rocking chair, it’s easy to fall under the spell of a world you’ve never seen except in your imagination.

  That imagination was most certainly fed by reading—we were also a family of voracious readers, books everywhere in the house, something about nearly everything from the American Civil War to a study of zebras in East Africa. It’s our opinion that favorite authors tend to shape one’s taste in books. Favorite stories stick in the mind because they offer something that captures the fancy and thus become a part of our literary memory. It follows that when you sit down and decide to write your own novel, there are already certain standards in place, affecting decisions that you will make both consciously and unconsciously. You are familiar with the framework of a good story. You know how strong characters seem to take on a life of their own. You’ve developed a sense of how a setting adds to the story, and a feeling for the importance of pace.

  And finally the two of us share a family enthusiasm for history. There are several periods in which we each have a special interest, and others where we share a background. Nevertheless, we’d argue into the night about what might have been, what ought to have been, and what actually happened when the layers of viewpoints have been peeled away from the truth. If you are a student of history, you must also be a student of war. War is what happens when diplomacy fails, and the odd thing is that war always brings out the worst—and sometimes the best—in human nature. As the knights of the round table learned to their sorrow.

  Now fast forward to one summer’s day in 1992 when we had paid a visit to the King’s Mountain Revolutionary War battlefield. We discussed tactics and how the outcome might have been changed by this or that event. We were still talking about it in the car driving back to Charlotte, N.C., where Charles happened to be living at the time. And at a lull in the conversation, Caroline commented, “You know, we ought to write a book together. A novel. A mystery.” She was never sure afterward where this sudden thought came from, although we’d just been delving into how the writer Inglis Fletcher had dealt with the battle in her Carolina Series, where it had become a dramatic centerpiece. So blame Inglis Fletcher, if you like.

  Caroline had actually met her at one of Mrs. Fletcher’s book signings years before and had been impressed by a remark indicating that Mrs. Fletcher knew what had become of her characters after a book ended. This was intriguing and, as Caroline read after that, she could see what Mrs. Fletcher meant. Authors who knew their characters as people generally wrote more exciting books. And action novels seemed to be better written when the author pictured that action like a film unrolling, rather than directing it on a stage set.

  At any rate, Caroline made the suggestion to Charles, and Charles laughed. Married and busy with his own life, the last thing he had time for was writing. But what he hadn’t reckoned with was traveling in his work, and as that travel increased, long nights in hotel rooms also increased in number. Finally boredom sent him to the telephone and he asked Caroline if she’d been serious when she made her suggestion.

  Any port in a storm …

  By that time, Caroline had almost forgotten even asking the question. But she said yes, what did you have in mind?

  Charles answered, “You brought it up, I didn’t.”

  There ensued a long period of discussion about what might interest both of us.

  Mysteries were popular and selling well. But what kind of mystery? We were both tired of the burnt out Italian/ Irish/whatever cop, drinking too much, overweight, divorced, and about to retire when the case he can’t let go comes along. So psychological suspense seemed to be our best choice. And we couldn’t think of a city both of us really wanted to write about long term—or that someone else wasn’t already using very well.

  We wanted something different, something that was interesting enough to keep us guessing and excited. London, Charles said. We’d both been there, we liked the city, we liked the English folks we’d come to know over the years, and it was an excuse to travel. That bug had bitten the entire family at one time or another, and the idea of going back to England to do research appealed. Oddly enough, in the end, we chose not to put Rutledge in London as his patch, seeing far more creative potential in the wide range of villages where class distinctions were blurred and old grudges offered more interesting motives. Even Holmes enjoyed moving out of London.

  But—forensic science was taking over police work. Did we really want to spend our time digging into cadavers or swabbing up vomit or looking for threads of carpet in the body hairs of victims? Not really. Mafia, drug runners, terrorists, serial killers—ditto. They weren’t challenging subjects because their motivations are predictable.

  The solution regarding forensics was simple: go with an earlier period—one modern enough to be familiar, but still a time frame when forensics was in its infancy. And what was the most traumatic event at that time? World War I.

  The next challenge was to consider why ordinary, civilized people sometimes kill. If killing is instinctive, why do we spend millions of dollars training ordinary civilized men to march into battle and shoot the other side? But people do kill without warning, sometimes once, sometimes multiple times. The question then becomes: What is there in a person’s life that makes him or her decide to murder someone? What is the critical factor? And if there is one, how would a policeman solve such a murder? What would he look for? What would make him arrest this person when there were five others with what sounded like equally solid reasons for taking a life?

  Ah!

  Now we needed a detective—in this case, an English police inspector. But not someone living in a small town where he knows everyone and everyone knows him. In the long run you wind up killing off the neighbors. Much more interesting, as Charles had discovered in his own troubleshooting, to be the hired gun, the stranger come to shake up the town. Therefore our man must work for Scotland Yard, where he can move about. There’s also the fact that unlike Philadelphia or Chicago or Los Angeles, England doesn’t see that many murders in a year’s time. We rather liked the idea that there was nothing commonplace about murder there—that it was still shocking and people tended to withdraw from it rather than rush to gawk at it.

  And of course our man at the Yard must have marched off to war. Every ablebodied British male fought in WWI—it was expected that he’d be a veteran like Wimsey and Captain Hastings. Even Hercule Poirot was a Belgian refugee from the war. This proved to be a dilemma. Four years in the trenches and not even a scratch? Unlikely. But if this policeman lost a limb or an eye or was gassed, he wouldn’t be able to return to Scotland Yard when the fighting ended. We set that aside, deliberating.

  Now for a name. Something strong, but individual. And as a salute to Inglis Fletcher and one of her favorite characters, we chose Rutledge. With a name like that, his first name should be short, and Caroline remembered another book she’d loved when she was young, where a man named Ian had been memorable. Thus was Inspector Ian Rutledge christened.

  So far so good.

  Hamish wasn’t our idea. He came with Rutledge, just as he does in the novels.

  Every man—or woman, these days—who has seen combat has memories he’d just as soon forget. And Rutledge was surely no different. All right, what about an invisible wound? Something there, damaging, something that couldn’t be spoken of? There was shell shock, of course—what we now call Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. In 1919—indeed even in World War II—this sort of thing was considered cowardice. Men who could manage to keep it hidden, did so, sometimes at a price that was almost higher than they could pay. More than a few wound up taking their service revolvers out to the back garden and putting a bullet in their heads.

  We’d both known veterans who suffered from PTSD and, in Rutledge’s case, it seemed to be a logical outcome of a war that had quickly become a slaughterhouse for four unimaginable years, a stalemate in which generals had developed no better strategy than throwing men against an entrenched line over and over again until—they hoped—the enemy would falter. Consequently, gains were measured in mere yards.

  Rutledge isn’t a perfect man and was never intended to be. He doesn’t suffer fools lightly, he has a temper, and he knows what guilt is. How it feels, how it fills the brain and invades dreams. He’s tenacious and insightful as well, and he understands human nature better than most. He’s also university-educated at a time when most of the British police force came up through the ranks from a very different class. The new face of Scotland Yard.

  He’s a romantic figure, too, in a sense—not in terms of Romance novels, but in the older tradition of the Greek heroes—men who were vulnerable even when they were demi-gods. Epics and legends and the long tradition of story-telling drew on characters who have a fault and whose tragedy is compelling. Hamlet is of that mold, and some of Jack Higgins’ men, and Shane, and the old legends
of Arthur and Lancelot—men for whom there was a destiny. The anti-hero has his place but, over the centuries, it’s a man who stands alone and struggles with life and death who makes the most interesting reading.

  The only problem was how to use this in a modern setting, where there are no dragons to slay and no damsels in distress, only dead bodies left behind by murderers. The solution came very naturally through Rutledge’s father, a barrister. Years before, Rutledge asked his father: Who spoke for the dead? He was told: No one. The law is concerned with punishing the killer so that he’s an example to other would-be lawbreakers, a warning that this will happen to you if you transgress the rules of a civilized society. The dead are simply evidence of wrong-doing.

  And so Rutledge, instead of following his father in the law, chose to become a policeman, only just beginning to be seen as a respectable profession. A generation earlier, Inspector Pitt was expected to knock on the door at the servants’ entrance. Times were a-changing, but there was still a certain dislike of the sort of people a policeman must be involved with. If Rutledge began his career with the altruistic intent of speaking for the dead, he soon found that this way of looking at murder actually gave him a practical insight into why someone was killed.

  Add to that the intuition of experience, which Rutledge believes he’s lost after four years in France. He fights to recover that in the first novel, A Test of Wills.

  The Rutledge novels don’t have a large ensemble cast. There’s his sister Frances, single and busy with her own life, though possessed of an ability to read her brother’s moods even when she doesn’t understand what lies behind them. His god-father, the retired architect, David Trevor, plays a larger role in Legacy of the Dead, and he’ll return soon. There are the occasional friends from Rutledge’s university days or war years. Melinda Crawford appears from time to time—especially in A Fearsome Doubt. She’s actually of his parents’ generation. She’s had an interesting past of her own, and Rutledge is fond of her. Having known him as a child, she returns that fondness with a tart tongue that hides her deep caring.

  Of course Chief Superintendent Bowles is always there, wishing Rutledge at the devil, because he feels threatened by the younger, more able man. Sergeant Gibson, who knows most of what’s happening in the Yard and who has been there long enough to become a fixture, is sometimes an ally and sometimes not. Since A Cold Treachery, Inspector Mickelson, protected by Bowles, is ambitious and often treading on Rutledge’s heels.

  One other character has reappeared, much to our surprise, over many of the books. Olivia Marlowe, who wrote several volumes of war poetry as O. A. Manning, first appears in the second Rutledge novel, Wings of Fire. Our intention was to let her poems form the basis for Rutledge’s solution to the question of her guilt in a series of murders within the Marlowe family. Halfway through, we realized that readers must also read the poems for themselves. Oops. So we sat down and created her body of verse. O. A. Manning’s work continues to crop up unexpectedly—Rutledge has a tendency to quote her. We think he must have been half in love with her, though he never met her. Something about her, her poems (which he’d read in the trenches), touched him in a way that few women have—so far.

  There’s someone we never meet who has a strong influence on Rutledge’s past—his former fiancée Jean, who was appalled at the scarecrow of a man who came back from France at the end of the war, broken in spirit. She ended their engagement and walked away. It’s some time before Rutledge can come to terms with this betrayal. Rutledge spent weeks in a clinic for shell shocked men before his sister discovered a doctor who could help him rather than condemn him to madness. But Dr. Fleming also demands something in return—he forces Rutledge to face Hamish. Searching for stability, Rutledge returns to the Yard, praying his skills have survived, but there’s the very real possibility that Hamish will be the stronger force in his mind. A Test of Wills is just that, Rutledge facing the challenge that Hamish presents. There is always the alternative of using his service revolver to end the struggle for both of them, but Rutledge is determined to fight for his sanity, and at the end of the novel learns whether he has won or lost his battle.

  One other character of interest appeared first in A Long Shadow and returns in A Pale Horse. Meredith Channing is the widow of a soldier lost in France at about the same time Rutledge was forced to shoot Hamish. She was intended to have one small scene, but she didn’t take her cue and walk off stage left. But just what is her role? What connects her to Rutledge? At the end of A Matter of Justice, he turns to her in a moment of despair, and trusts her as he trusts few others.

  Each book takes place a month or so after the last. June, 1919, for A Test of Wills, July for Wings of Fire, August for Search the Dark, and so on. Search the Dark finds him faced with a killer he doesn’t want to arrest. And that was an interesting game to consider, plotting it. The killer has very sound reasons for murder, and the victims aren’t sympathetic. They have played a decisive role in their own deaths, proving that not all victims are to be pitied in the same way.

  Legacy of the Dead was an opportunity to delve more into Hamish MacLeod’s life before the war, and without warning brings Rutledge face to face with the woman Hamish would have married if he’d survived. We often use Hamish in Rutledge short stories, setting them before the Battle of the Somme while the young Scots corporal is still alive. That’s given us a very interesting insight into the man who now lives only in Rutledge’s damaged mind.

  Perhaps at this stage we ought to say something about the writing process. When we began the collaboration, we had no idea how to go about it and so we wrote our own rules. Other authors had used the alternate chapter system—Emma Lathen, for instance—where one took the lead character and his story while the other carried on with the secondary story that would mesh in the end with the main plot. But we had no primary/secondary story to parcel out.

  We were also hampered by the fact that we are not genetically programmed to outline. Caroline couldn’t do it in high school and she saw no reason to begin now. Charles had inherited this trait. We both had solved the outline problem in school by simply writing whatever it was and then outlining the results. The system had succeeded, we’d managed to fool teachers and professors alike (though it had meant not procrastinating—we always had whatever it was written ahead of everyone else), and we tried it here as well.

  But that means if one has no idea where the story is heading or what is happening, or who walks on and off the empty stage, another method has to be worked out. English 101 usually had topics: “How I Spent My Summer Vacation.” A mystery novel has a murder. Everyone claimed that the body had to be found in the first so many pages.

  It turned out to be unsatisfactory to plant a corpse in the first few pages.

  We quickly discovered that the mood of the story was more important than when the body showed up.

  And so we metaphorically sat down, each in our own space, and considered what this particular novel needed to launch it.

  It worked.

  The first few pages of A Test of Wills set out several important points that gave us a clue as to what happened next. It also set the mood and gave the reader an insight into how Colonel Harris died and his state of mind as he saw death coming.

  How did we arrive at these first few pages? By brainstorming, discussing what we wanted to establish for ourselves and for the readers, creating the wording that would give a sense of what was about to happen. Consensus developed from that, each of us offering ideas and even sentences or paragraphs, paring these into a whole, then reworking until there was a smooth and intriguing flow to entice the reader into our concept.

  For instance, in Wings of Fire, a housemaid walks to work one morning, an ordinary beginning to her day despite the sea mists, and opens the kitchen door as she has a hundred other mornings. But then she notices that some things aren’t the same, that the ordinary is missing. Dishes aren’t in the sink, drapes haven’t been opened, voices aren’t echoing through the house. She comes to the stairs and calls to the master of the house, then to the mistress, but no one answers. She looks into several rooms and finds them empty. And when she comes to the final door, and reaches her hand out to touch the knob, she knows that something terrible must be on the other side. And she can’t face it. She turns instead to go for help.