Reading Note:
Todd on Rutledge
21 July 2014
The question is, how long can I jump from one Ian Rutledge mystery to the next without getting sick of the series? There seems no danger of it at the moment. When Legacy of the Dead, the fourth novel in the set, lurched to what seemed a very premature conclusion, I rushed in from the balcony and sat down at the computer to buy the fifth, Watchers of Time. Then I went back out to my Kindle and skipped through the first chapter, which was all about the next crime, to find out how Rutledge was doing. I hadn’t doubt that he’d survive the shooting in Scotland, but what about all the loose ends? A quarter of the way through Watchers, I still don’t know. There’s a stack of letters from Rutledge’s godfather, David Trevor, waiting in his London flat, but Rutledge hasn’t felt up to dealing with them, what with having his arm bandaged to his side for a few weeks and then a sudden assignment in Norfolk. I do hope to hear some gratifying news about Fiona Campbell and little Ian. I have in any case learned that reading the Rutledge books in sequence is not an option but a requirement. It’s as though the novels were chapters in a greater book.
This does not mean that the naive reader, blundering in by mistake, is not clued into the vital statistics. Not too far into each book, sometimes concentrated in a few brisk paragraphs, sometimes spread out like debris from an exploded plane, there is a bit of business about Ian Rutledge’s war. As a captain at the Battle of the Somme, Rutledge got to know a brave Scots soldier who was promoted to the rank of corporal. Always outspoken about the folly of the battle, Hamish MacLeod eventually mutinied, refusing to lead his men into yet another pointless engagement with mortality. Rutledge had no choice but to have MacLeod executed by firing squad. (If ever there was a scene in an English novel that merited operatic treatment by Verdi, the Rutledge-MacLeod duet, “I Hate to Kill You/You Have to Kill Me” is it.) The firing squad muffed the job, and Rutledge was obliged to deliver a coup de grace. No sooner had he shot MacLeod than the salient was shelled, killing almost everybody and burying Rutledge alive — beneath the corpse of MacLeod! Two years later, Rutledge emerged from the fighting with a bad case of shell shock. A persistent doctor was able to bring him back from madness, but could not cure him of the haunting of Hamish MacLeod, who always seems to be standing behind Rutledge’s left shoulder, commenting, usually immoderately, on the situation at hand. Every so often, Rutledge fears that he has spoken his reply to MacLeod aloud.
This wartime episode, the background for what is essentially a great narrative gimmick, is rehashed in every novel, but never in quite the same way. It becomes a sort of wine-dark sea beneath the rosy-fingered dawn, a riff that for the normal reader, someone capable of waiting more than ten minutes between books, is a welcome refresher. As for me, the business is not at all repetitious (so far), but, on the contrary, it intensifies not only the strange but not implausible intimacy between the dead man and the living one but also the idiotic horror of the trench warfare that the Allies never learned how to fight. (More on that some other time.)
There is also a variable paragraph or two about a woman called Jean, to whom Rutledge was engaged in 1914. They were to be married in October of that year, but they put it off pending the the cessation of hostilities. The scene in which Jean visits Rutledge in hospital, but is so repelled by the man he has become that she literally runs from the room, is always played a little differently. Meanwhile, Jean continues to lead her own life. In the third novel, I think it was, Rutledge learned that Jean was engaged to be married to someone else. In the fourth, he sees her on the steps of St Margaret’s, Westminster, the church in which she’s to be married, presumably at some point in the novel that I’m reading now. Although he has rationally accepted the fact that they would have made an unhappy couple, Rutledge continues to mourn the loss of her.
The second gimmick in the series, and the source of a very subtle power, is the setting of each novel in successive months. The first mystery is solved in June 1919. Now, four books later, I have reached October of that year. Although an inspector at Scotland Yard, Rutledge is usually detailed to a rural area, largely because his superior officer can’t stand him and is in fact always praying that Rutledge will die in the line of duty. The weather and the various natural beauties of the English countryside figure largely in the text, just as they did in literature of the period. Only, here they make an ironic counterpoint to the mayhem that has been dealt to English society by the war, something that writers between the wars were inclined, rather desperately, to overlook, particularly in the entertainments of the detective novel. In those books, the War was emphatically seen as having happened elsewhere, usually in France or Belgium. England was held up, more than ever, as merry and olde. The Rutledge books rather elegantly junk such nostalgia. It ought to be noted that occasional references to previous cases intensify the richness of the tapestry.
Rutledge himself is intriguing, as something of a classic, elusive cipher. In the venerable tradition of English gentleman, he is both determined and understated. His inner life, disarrayed by the war and disturbed by the ghost of Hamish MacLeod, has no time or place for hobbies. If the case involves a handsome young woman of gentle birth, Rutledge is sure to develop tender feelings for her (provoking abusive warnings from Hamish, who tends to cast women as Delilahs), which stop, however, somewhat short of romance. Rutledge’s prize possession is his intuition, which allows him (if Hamish will only shut up) to see antecedents of the crime, always far more convoluted than the local police can grasp. Meanwhile, Rutledge himself is a field upon which the reader’s intuitions, whatever they might be, can agreeably be projected.
If I haven’t mentioned the author yet (in this entry), that’s because their authorship is easily the kinkiest thing about these mysteries. “Charles Todd” turns out to be a couple of Americans, Caroline Todd and her son, Charles. We are told no more about them than that they live in different American states. A photo at Amazon reveals them to be at opposite ends of middle age, or perhaps a bit older. They have been turning out Rutledge novels (and other works) since 1996, and they have developed a stylistic formula that flirts with quaintness without ever surrendering to it. Their comfortable tone makes welcome upholstery for tales that are as astringent as they are exciting.
A final word, about that excitement: like Jane Austen, Charles Todd tends to forgo thrills in the forward mid-section of every story. After all the introductions have been made, with one or two slightly surprising clues, Rutledge hunkers down to a prolonged period of being dissatisfied with the direction of the case, of which, as a Scotland Yard outsider, he is never fully in charge. While he taxes his recalcitrant intuition, the hapless accused, although innocent, drifts toward the cataract of the scaffold. Avenues of investigation are officially closed by officious pooh-bahs. Mounting frustration takes the place of suspense, generating a great deal of exhilaration when the pace begins to pick up. I ought to point out that Watchers of Time, exceptionally, has so far failed to propose a suspect. The hapless accused is thus replaced by the prospect of hapless further victims.
And, yes, I did go back and read the first chapter.
Daily Blague news update: Knausgaard-Free Days.