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.