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.