Ian Rutledge

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.