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.