Charles Todd on police procedurals
For Caroline and Charles Todd, the mother and son writing team who write the Ian Rutledge series, including A Pale Horse and A Matter of Justice (on sale in December), police procedurals are second nature. So while Bouchercon is on, we asked for a guest post (for all author posts, click here). Their view:
There are always problems getting your police mystery “just right”. Much of what police do is about as exciting as mud: writing reports, double checking evidence and interviews, looking at files, waiting for forensics, attending meetings where nothing happens of the page-turning variety to keep a reader enthralled.
To sell, a murder mystery has to be fast paced, electrifying. The old cops and robbers at its best. If an author must skim over the boring stuff to achieve that, it’s literary license. But that license comes at a price. It’s important to keep the essence, the feel of what happens when a real crime is being investigated. You also have a responsibility to your characters, these men in blue who people your novel. There’s a tendency to make them more macho, more burnt out, more devious than they are in real life, and to some extent, that’s all right. After all, it’s a book. But how far over that line can you go without losing touch with the reality? That too must be addressed.
There are restrictions on using weapons in real life police work. Restrictions on the way evidence is acquired. Restrictions on physical contact with suspects and interviewees. Etc. And here it becomes another question. How believable will your characters be, if you transgress these restrictions? In short, you are dealing with a rather inflexible framework, in which you must create a make believe world that entertains and still lives up to the recognizable world that your reader sees in newspapers, on TV, on the street corner and in squad cars every day.
Research is essential, so that the author knows where the lines are drawn. In our case, since our Inspector Ian Rutledge of Scotland Yard was at work just after World War 1, we can’t very well ride along in a cruiser and watch how things are done. We must delve into whatever material we can find and piece together what his work day was like. We must look at how he went about finding evidence and interviewing witnesses—and in this time frame, what people felt about policemen in general. Murder wasn’t all that common in England in 1919. But people did kill, for reasons that were very important in the period in which they lived.
As authors we must stay within the reality of their lives—but when you are dealing with psychological suspense, as we do, there is the commonality of human nature to draw from. No terrorists as such, no drug dealers, no race problems, but the seven deadly sins of greed, envy, lust, avarice and so on are as true then as they are today. We must reach back in time to a different country and a different world to find first of all the murder, then the suspects, and finally the murderer. Rutledge, without the aid of forensics as we know them today, really must delve deep in his own experience, his intuition and his knowledge of human nature to solve the crime. And that’s the fun of writing—to create a world you never saw, that exists now only in memories and reference books and first hand sources, and make the people who live in it available to twenty-first century readers. It’s always a challenge, and that’s why writing about another time and place is so rewarding.
And always, in the forefront of our minds—as it must have been in the forefront of Rutledge’s mind, if he’d actually lived then—the penalty for murder in 1919 is death by hanging. Whatever we think about the justice of the death penalty today, in Rutledge’s day, he’d better get a crime’s solution right—or he’d be sending an innocent man or woman to the gallows. Here is where art and life must meet. The reader too must be satisfied that when Rutledge makes his arrest, justice has been served.
If we are going to borrow the men on the force or at the Yard for our livelihood, as authors we owe them the courtesy of presenting their story to the best of our ability. Critics can love a book and readers can buy it, but our toughest audience will always be the policemen we’re trying to capture on the printed page.
Categories: Bouchercon/Charmed to Death, Meet the Author
While she always preferred The Hardy Boys to Nancy Drew, 
