“Shaken from sleep, and numbed and scarce awake,Out in the trench with three hours' watch to take,I blunder through the splashing mirk; and thenHear the gruff muttering voices of the menCrouching in cabins candle-chinked with light.Hark! There's the big bombardment on our rightRumbling and bumping; and the dark's a glareOf flickering horror in the sectors whereWe raid the Boche; men waiting, stiff and chilled,Or crawling on their bellies through the wire."What? Stretcher-bearers wanted? Some one killed?"Five minutes ago I heard a sniper fire:Why did he do it?... Starlight overhead--Blank stars. I'm wide-awake; and some chap's dead.” ― Siegfried Sassoon, The War PoemsA Jack the Ripper copycat is loose in London, but instead of joining the manhunt Inspector Ian Rutledge is dispatched to Cornwall. His boss, an Inspector Bowles, doesn’t like him very much, not very much at all. No one including Rutledge knows if he is really ready to go back to work at Scotland Yard. The war shattered him mentally and everything feels a bit rushed getting back in the swing of things. He also makes things worse for himself annoying his boss with these leaps in logic. Well, I’ll let Rutledge explain it. ”I survived in those hellholes they called trenches for four years. It seemed like forty--a lifetime. I learned to trust my intuition. Me who didn’t often died. I was lucky to possess it in the first place, and war honed it. I learned that it wasn’t a figment of my imagination. Nor was it a replacement for the God I’d lost. Whatever it was, you came to recognize it. An inkling, a warning, a sudden flash of caution, a split-second insight that saved your life. Indisputably real, however unorthodox the means of reaching you. It gave you an edge on death, and you were grateful.”And then there is Hamish.You see he is dead, but very much alive in Rutledge’s subconscious. He is a Scottish lad that Rutledge unwillinglyhad to execute on the battlefield. Let’s just say the moment stuck with him. Hamish whispers to him all the time undermining his confidence.Even though this Cornwall trip was meant as a slap in the face Rutledge doesn’t mind. There certainly wouldn’t be anything to a pair of unmarried cousins committing suicide after all. Another cousin falling down the stairs and breaking his neck, even with a missing foot from the war providing a place for blame, does seem to lead one to think the Trevelyan family is unlucky. It happens, ask the Kennedy family, but then the Kennedy’s did receive more than just a gentle push into the next world. Another cousin Rachel was the one that asked Scotland Yard to investigate the suicides of her cousins Olivia and Nicholas. She finds it hard to believe that they would commit such a crime against their immortal souls. When Rutledge discovers that Olivia is actually O.A. Manning a poet who gave him many nights of solace in the muck and blood he is even more determined to find the truth. He always assumed she was a man and it takes a bit of mental wrestling to conceive how a woman could understand his state of mind so well without ever venturing a dainty foot into a trench. She is a poet after all, a crippled poet, a woman who knows fear and anger and how it is to look at the world with eyes tinged with both. ”Murderer I am, of little things, small griefs,Treasures of the heart.Of bodies and of souls I have takenAll that is there to give,Life’s blood, the spirit’s wealth.And these secrets I keep locked away,For my own joy and your pain.”As he begins to ask questions of the remaining relatives and the village people Rachel quickly reaches a state where she wants him to leave. He is digging too deeply into family affairs, rubbing raw wounds, and unearthing unseemly family secrets. She expected him to just come down there and by some trickery like a gypsy fortune teller ascertain what really happened. As he finds out more about the family he discovers more deaths each surrounded by more questions than answers. It doesn’t take long for him to realize there is a killer and it has to be a member of the Trevelyan family. He has men searching moors for decades old clues. He resorts to unorthodox means to get people to talk. He makes an old woman cry. ”She began to weep, tears running down her white, withered face in ugly runnels, as if there had never been places for them to fall before, and now they couldn’t find a way. Rutledge found himself breathing hard, his body tight with black and wordless rage. He gave her his handkerchief and she took it, fumbling in the blindness of tears. She touched her face with a dignity that was heart wrenching, because these were not tears for herself. She still hadn’t cried for herself.”If the moors haven’t already put you in mind of a certain Sherlock Holmes maybe a fall off a cliff wrapped up in the arms of a killer will. ”Then before either person could brake their momentum, over the edge of the cliff.It wasn’t a sheer drop. It was rock eroded by wind and weather. It was clumpy grass and earth, punctuated by straggling shrubs and heaved outcroppings. A long and rough slope that took its toll on bone and flesh as they tumbled down towards the fringe of boulders where the surf crashed whitely. The noise rose to meet them, so mixed with the thunder that there was only an endless, deafening roar.”I really liked the first book in this series, A Test of Wills, but this one was even better. The plot was riddled with plausible red herrings and the pressure that is brought to bear on Rutledge to just let it all go was palpable in my own reading chair. The conclusion comes together like a train loose on a track with a full head of steam. I couldn’t have put this book down if a scar faced one eyed bandit had a cocked .45 nestled up against my head. I’d get to him...after...I turned the final page.
2nd in the Inspector Rutledge of Scotland Yard series, set in post-World War I.[return][return]Rutledge, having just come back from solving his last case in Warwickshire, is shuffled off to Cornwall by his jealous superior, Bowles, who doesn't want the possibility of Rutledge muscling in on the glory of finding a serial killer. There really isn't a case; a relative of two members of the landed gentry who have committed suicide has asked the Home Office to send an investigator to make sure that all has been handled properly. Rutledge has been assigned what looks like a fool's task so that he is out of London and away from a high-profile case as well as in the hopes that he will fall flat on his face and give Bowles something with which to damage Rutledge's career. Rutledge arrives in Borcombe to find yet another dead body, this time from an accident, and a baffling inability to make any sense out of the family of the suicides and what really might have happened. Was it a double suicide or was it really murder-suicide? Instead of the usual police procedures, Rutledge looks for motive as a way of determining if there was a murder and who, then was the killer.[return][return]While better than the first book, Test of Wills, Todd still is unable to pull off what has the potential for a very good series. His background--post World War I Great Britain and his incorporation of the horrors of the Great War itself into his plots--is extremely well done. But the psychological approach simply does not come off. Rutledge in his mind is simply too analytical, too self-absorbed to make his character really credible. The voice in his mind, that of his dead corporal Hamish McCloud, which is the physical manifestation of his shell shock, is not well done. Todd can't seem to make up his mind if Hamish is the voice of Rutledge's conscience, his survivor's guilt, or some supernatural manifestation who comments on places and events that Rutledge can not possibly know about. Additionally, Hamish gets the worst writing in the book--he "grumbles" and "rumbles" a great deal, "growls'" too much, and "stirred" too restlessly. The character simply does not work.[return][return]The minor characters are adequate, although Chief Inspector Bowles is really badly done as the villain--it's a poor imitation of Chief Inspector Racer in Grimes' Richard Jury series; Racer is a wonderful character in his own right, while Bowles is a stick figure.[return][return]While the plot is good, Todd does some unfortunate things at the end, leaving gaps in the reader's understanding, loose ends that are never tied up, leaving a sense of dissatisfaction with the resolution.[return][return]Despite its potential, there's just not enough to keep me reading this series.
What do You think about Wings Of Fire (1999)?
Inspector Ian Rutledge carries in his head the voice of Hamish Macleod. Rutledge had been forced to witness Hamish=s execution for disobedience of orders just before they were all buried by shelling that collapsed the walls of their trenches in the later part of WWI. Rutledge was hauled out barely alive, but the voice of Hamish and his running commentaries on Rutledge=s actions continues to haunt him so clearly that he wonders no one else can hear Hamish’s voice. The inspector is sent to investigate the deaths of three related individuals: two apparent suicides and an accidental fall down a long stairway. A well-connected relative finds the coincidence too unlikely and pressure from the Home Office being what it is, Ian is to verify or disprove the findings of the local constabulary. One of the suicides is an Olivia, a crippled poet. As Rutledge delves deeper into the tragedies, he learns from other members of the family that Olivia may be hiding several rather dark secrets. Evidence, all anecdotal, much to Rutledge’s despair, reveals that someone has been systematically murdering members of the family, making each killing appear to be an accident.. Soon even the local citizenry wish that this Scotland Yard interloper would just abandon the investigation, declare everything an accident, and go home. The wounds being opened are just too deep. After all, if Olivia is the culprit, and she is dead, what good can be served. “O. A. Manning [her pseudonym] is alive,” is Rutledge’s response. Todd writes very well and the suspense becomes quite unbearable as the suspicion moves from one member of the family to another. This is an excellent mystery.
—Eric_W
Rating: 3.75* of fiveA more assured second outing for a mystery series that is becoming an addiction! This is a very well-written novel that happens to have a mystery at its center. The role of Hamish-the-voice is a little skimpier this time, not quite as loud on the page; I'm not sure that's entirely to my liking, but I think it's probably the best way to treat that difficult character. He could be a very great distraction, used too freely, though I find him fascinating...sleuth and sidekick only need one body!I'm always interested in stories set in Cornwall, as this one is. It's such a different place, one that doesn't seem quite like England but undeniably is; it's so isolated (in English terms) from the main flow of the country that it seems to have all the advantages of being foreign...mystery, exoticism...without the inconvenience of learning a foreign language. Necessarily, that is, since a determined (an American would say "bloody-minded") effort is underway to "save" the Cornish tongue.Inspector Ian Rutledge's work in this small Cornish village, whose Hall has seen three rapidly succesive deaths, is to determine with his London experience whether the local force did its job properly in ruling the deaths accidental or suicides. You can imagine that puts the backs up of pretty much the entire village as the news spreads! No one likes his territory big-footed across by the Big Noise from the City. It's just never a popular thing, and as the newsvine spreads the fact that it's a member of the Hall family...a cousin...who called in the Londoner, feeling runs even higher.Todd examines how people, no matter their connection to events, respond to them with fierce passion. A simple childhood slight, an accident of observation, a detail changed by a fearful witness in a larger plan...all these play their role in creating and then sustaining a mystery that has at its heart the simplest of human motivations: Envy. Coming fresh off the Great War, this trope has special poignance, since it was largely the German Kaiser's envy of his cousins that set the conflict in motion.I would recommend reading these books in order. I hope you'll give them a shot. They're good psychological novels that happen to come in a series and feature the same protagonist(s). Gladly recommended.
—Richard Reviles Censorship Always in All Ways
This is #2 in the Inspector Ian Rutledge series. I finished #1 few months ago and was so impressed, I've acquired a number of volumes and plan to read them intermittently over the next year or so. I've never been a big fan of so-called British mysteries but I do like these stories, perhaps because of the characters, especially Rutledge.Rutledge, a veteran of World War One survived the war, but is haunted by his experiences, including being buried alive in a German artillery barrage. He also he hears the voice of one of his men, a Scot named Hamish, who he had been forced to put in front of a firing squad because of Hamish's unwillingness to lead a suicidal advance. Hamish is a constant companion in his head, telling him things he often does not want to hear. They argue, sometimes out loud which can be disconcerting to the people around Rutledge - a WW I version of PTSD. "Wings of Fire" is the title of a poetry book written by a critically acclaimed, virtual recluse, Olivia Marlowe. Writing under the pseudonym of O.A. Manning, she is mistaken for a man because she does such a good job of capturing the Hell that is combat and the passion of love expressed in "Wings of Fire".Olivia and her half brother Nicholas are found dead in what is assumed to be an apparent suicide. When another family member breaks his neck falling down the stairs, questions are raised by another relative, Rachel Cheney, Rutledge is sent to Cornwall to determine what really happened.The plot then unfolds as Rutledge discovers the tragic history of the family in which a number of people have died under mysterious circumstances. He becomes convinced that all of the deaths were murders. He takes it on himself to unravel the tangled family history in the face of opposition from the local authorities and most of the citizens of the nearby town. Rutledge, who could be seen as being an obsessive-compulsive cannot abide an unsolved mystery and persists in his inquiries until the truth comes out in a very satisfying, exciting conclusion.While this book can certainly stand on its own, the first book in the series, "A Test of Wills," was helpful to have read as it does an excellent job of describing Rutledge's syndrome and the history of his relationship with Hamish. I certainly can recommend this book.
—Ed
