By Victor Greto
WILMINGTON — A psychological darkness pulses at the heart of Caroline and Charles Watjen’s mystery novels.
Similar to the one that beats within their collaboration, one that has produced the dozen books they have written together for more than a decade under the pseudonym, “Charles Todd.”
Sitting in Caroline’s spacious living room, boxes of copies of their book, “A Pale Horse” (William Morrow, $23.95), opened and unopened, crowd the floor and clutter the top of a black piano.
There will be no music played today. Sitting on a soft green couch nearby, Caroline looks dwarfed by the stacks.
“We know a book is done when two UPS trucks show up at our door,” says Caroline, who, with her son, have invariably produced an extremely popular 100,000-word mystery each year since 1996.
They just handed in to their editor next year’s book, “A Matter of Justice.”
Promoting the current book means signing a couple of hundred copies over several days, and then sending most of them back via UPS to bookstores throughout the country.
Although they do most of the writing via e-mail, Instant Messaging and 2 a.m. phone calls, Caroline says that Charles comes up from his home in North Carolina when a book is finished, to close up any plot discrepancies, and to begin thinking about the next one.
Many of their books have been translated into a nearly a dozen languages, from Japanese to German.
Eleven of Todd’s novels, including the latest one, feature Scotland Yard Inspector Ian Rutledge, a World War I veteran who suffers from post-traumatic stress syndrome.
Despite his handicap, Rutledge has managed to solve nearly a dozen murder mysteries in remote countryside towns in 1919-1920 England.
“It is well known that Caroline and Charles are two of the most beloved people in the mystery community,” says Lisa Scottoline, who, like Todd, has produced a novel — hers are known as “legal thrillers” — each year for more than a decade.
But it’s the Watjens’ collaboration that is intriguing to many of their colleagues.
“How they can do this is fascinating,” says Robin Hathaway, a mystery writer who splits her time between Philadelphia and New York City.
“I could never write with someone else,” she says. “They get along wonderfully, and they share the work. Charles does a lot more of the research and Caroline does more of the writing. But they do both.”
Caroline characterizes it as a “50-50” give-and-take, mostly via e-mail.
“If you talk to my friends, they’re sure I do most of the writing,” Caroline says. “If you talk to Charles’ friends, they say he does it.”
Regardless of the process, Hathaway says, “Their books make you think. They’re not fluff.”
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Rutledge often reads as complicated as Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle’s much more famous consulting detective.
But while Holmes is an entrenched Victorian, complete with horse and buggies and a magnifying glass, Rutledge is inimitably a modernist, a tortured 20th-century man, haunted not by individual criminals like Holmes’ Professor Moriarty, but by a civilization’s near-suicide in a war, and by his own guilt.
Because that’s what World War I (or, the Great War, as it was known before an even greater one occurred two decades afterward) felt like to many who participated in it, both Caroline and Charles say.
“The first book deals with a man who is shell-shocked,” says Charles, referring to the introduction of Rutledge, and using the term for those who suffered from post-traumatic stress syndrome.
Twenty-five percent of England’s young men died in the war, he says. It had a profound effect, and this is why both authors chose an English detective as their hero.
Rutledge’s illness manifests itself through a dialogue in which he participates with the ghost of a man he executed during the war, a Scotsman named Hamish.
“It’s a unique device,” Hathaway says. “The whole idea of being haunted by someone, and talking to them, could be awful. But it comes off wonderfully.”
Caroline says she has talked to many psychologists, “And the greatest compliment we get is that we got it right. This is not a gimmick. It’s part of what Rutledge is.”
There’s yet another reason to place their detective at this period of time, Caroline says.
It’s close enough to our time to be somewhat familiar, but far enough away to be tastefully nostalgic. There are cars, but they’re flivvers. There are towns on the verge of modernity, but they’re still small, even rustic towns that look to the 19th century as much as they do to the 20th.
“If you want to have psychological suspense,” Caroline says, “you want it familiar. You don’t want men in white coats looking for DNA. We want to have Rutledge look at a crime and figure it out. It’s detective work, but it’s understanding the people that bring it to a conclusion.”
The setting also plays into Caroline’s love of English history, and Charles’ interest in the history of warfare.
It allows them to take yearly trips to England, fanning out to small British towns with Caroline’s husband, John Watjen, who also proofreads the manuscripts before they’re sent to the editor.
“John drives so we both can look,” Caroline says.
They both enjoy exploring the conceit in each book that Rutledge is sent off from London to a small town to help local police solve a murder.
Charles says he knows something about being a person who ruffles local feathers.
Before becoming part of a successful writing team, Charles says he was a company troubleshooter.
“I was the guy who showed up, and it wasn’t good news,” he says. “You have a short window to get in there and understand the relationships. That’s what we enjoy Rutledge doing.”
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Neither Caroline nor Charles knows what their main character looks like.
“I dream about Rutledge,” Caroline says. “But I can’t see his face.”
Sort of like Charles’ grandfather, Caroline’s father, whom Charles says he recalls listening to on the screened-in front porch at the Todd — Caroline’s maiden name — family home in Greensboro, N.C.
“You couldn’t see him because it got so dark,” he says. “But you heard his voice. When you’re a child and your elders tell stories, you stay quiet and don’t want to go to bed. You absorb the way they talk.”
Charles certainly has.
Caroline, who was born in North Carolina but has lived in Wilmington for four decades, has no discernible accent.
Charles does. Even his laconic demeanor — in contrast to his mother’s coiled-spring posture — connotes the South.
Charles was born in Charlottesville, Va., while his father attended graduate school at the University of Virginia, but grew up in Wilmington — where his father moved the family when he went to work as a chemical engineer at duPont. Charles graduated from A.I. duPont High School.
The South drew him away after high school, and he attended college at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro. As a company troubleshooter, he lived in Alabama, Georgia and Charlotte, N.C., before he settled in Winston-Salem.
According to Hathaway, in the mid-1990s, Caroline was an aspiring mystery writer when they met, and helped her and Scottoline found the Delaware Valley chapter of Sisters in Crime, a group that worked to gain recognition for women mystery writers.
Caroline had been a member of the far-away Chesapeake chapter in Washington D.C.
“She offered to read things and put me in touch with people,” recalls Hathaway, who did not published her first mystery until she was 60.
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Yet another intriguing aspect of Todd’s popular mysteries is their authors’ contention that neither outline or think too hard about their complex plots.
It’s all character-driven, they say, a process Hathaway calls “intuitive writing.”
“It’s a talent, or lack of talent, to get a character to do what you want it to do,” Charles says.
“The people or characters work it out,” Caroline says. “You have to understand people before you set them in motion. They’re actually real.”
The appeal of their murder mysteries, Caroline says, is to figure out what drives an ordinary person to commit murder. “These aren’t drug dealers,” she says.
Many of the characters in “A Pale Horse” are weird, and have secrets. One can see many of them fitting snugly into an Alfred Hitchcock movie.
“If you look at people, they all have a secret,” Caroline says.
Deepening a character also involves another form of darkness, Charles says.
Who you are depends on who you are in a dark room, he says. “You are what you do when no one else is around.”
What Charles Todd does in a dark room only Caroline and Charles know.
No one else, no matter how they parse the novels to find who did what, can say.
Once, the team went up to the stage to receive an award, Caroline recalls. “When I got back to my seat, I heard someone say, ‘Isn’t that sweet that he took his mother to the stage?’”
What we settled on is what works best for us, she says.
“We work in scenes, so he will send me one and say, ‘This will come next,’ or ‘That will come next,’ and we’ll both write it and we amalgamate them,” Caroline says. “All we do is let it happen and see what comes out of it.”
But this may be the key to unlocking the mystery of Charles Todd.
“There’s no ego involved,” Caroline says. “That’s where the consistency comes from. Rutledge is so alive to us, so much a part of our lives. We can’t make him do anything he doesn’t want to.”