A Conversation With Charles Todd on Writing History as Living Story (Killer Writers)

I’ve known Charles Todd for more than 20 years. Our paths have crossed often: at conferences, signings, dinners, and late-night conversations about stories, history, and the mysterious way character drives both. Charles and his late mother, Caroline, built one of the most beloved bodies of work in modern mystery fiction, from the Inspector Ian Rutledge series to the Bess Crawford novels and their unforgettable stand-alone stories. Together, they transported readers into post–World War I England with such authenticity that you could almost smell the damp earth, hear the engines crank to life, and feel the ache of a country still recovering from war.

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I recently caught up with Charles in Florida, where we talked about how he keeps history feeling alive on the page, how to avoid the dreaded “information dump,” how to make a time period breathe, and how the past can illuminate the present. What follows is one of the most insightful conversations I’ve had about the art of writing historical fiction and, really, about the timeless craft of storytelling itself.

“Charles, we’re going to talk about writing history as a living story, not as a historical document, but as something that feels alive even though it’s set in another time. My first question is: How do you decide which details from your research to use and which ones to leave out so the story keeps moving?”

“That’s always the challenge. Every writing class warns you about the ‘information dump.’ New writers love to show everything they’ve learned. They want readers to understand every bit of backstory and context. But what makes the world real isn’t a lecture; it’s the way characters live inside it. Their outlook, how they move, how they speak. I try to let that do the work rather than explaining it in three paragraphs of exposition.”

“So less telling, more living.”

“Exactly. I use dialogue wherever possible. There’s a wonderful old book called Show, Don’t Tell that captures the idea. Take something as simple as crank-starting a car. You don’t need to describe the full process every time, turning the ignition, setting the choke, walking around to crank the motor, but you also can’t have him hop in and drive off. The act itself tells you where you are in time. The trick is knowing when the detail matters.”

“When you start writing a historical piece, do you think of it as 'historical,' or does it feel present-tense to you as you write?”

“I live in the moment I’m writing about. When I’m working with Rutledge or Bess Crawford, I see them in their world. It’s as natural to me as breathing. The hard part is when the seasons in real life don’t match the book. It can be the middle of summer outside, but I’m describing winter in England. You’re trying to feel the cold, the stillness, the look of bare trees, and nothing outside your window helps you get there.”

“Writing characters who lived in another time…does that distance ever make them harder to portray as real, human people?”

“After nearly 30 years of writing these books, I don’t really think of them as 'historical.’ I think of them as contemporaries, alive and working in their own year. That mental shift is important. The hardest part is transitioning in and out of that headspace. I’ll be deep in a scene, and the phone rings, and suddenly I’m yanked from 1919 back into the modern world. It takes a few minutes to find my way back in again. When you’re truly immersed, the story feels as real as anything outside your window.”

“A lot of historical novels try to capture every event of the period, and sometimes it starts to sound like a history lesson. How do you keep from letting that overwhelm the story?”

“By remembering what’s germane to the story and what isn’t. I stay aware of what was happening in the world at that moment, but unless it touches my characters directly, the reader doesn’t need to know it. I’m writing about people, not headlines. There are exceptions when real events naturally intersect with the plot. If Agatha Christie disappears and my story happens to be set in Harrogate at that time, that belongs in the book. But if the story’s in Cornwall, it doesn’t. Otherwise, you risk turning your novel into commentary or politics, and that’s not why readers are there.”

“I love how your settings become characters themselves. How do you achieve that?”

“Location is absolutely a character. Take Northumberland. It isn’t like Cornwall or the Midlands. Its history, its dialect, even its landscape come from different roots, more Norse, more Scottish influence. You can feel it in the air. When you walk those fishing villages, see the herring boats, smell the smoke from the kipper sheds, you realize the land and sea shaped the people. That’s why I always go there. You can’t fake that knowledge. ‘Boots on the ground,’ as I like to say. Walk the streets, talk to the people, study what makes their world unique. Then, when Rutledge walks into a pub and there’s an anti-submarine poster on the wall, the reader feels the war still echoing in that room. I verified that poster existed before describing it, but I didn’t lecture about the U-boats; I let the detail do the talking.”

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“That realism extends to language. Even within the U.S., dialects vary. Add another country and another century, and it gets even trickier. How do you make the language authentic but still readable?”

“Sparingly. I might include a few turns of phrase or period slang, but clarity always wins. Readers come to be immersed, not to decode. We’re storytellers first. If someone can’t understand a sentence because the dialect is too thick, we’ve lost them. So, I sprinkle just enough flavor to suggest the time and place, never enough to confuse.”

“Have you ever fudged on a historical fact, and how do you decide when that’s okay?”

“All the time…and carefully. Except for A Test of Wills, every book changes the name of the town. That gives me freedom. I might combine two real villages or move a manor house that existed elsewhere because it fits the story. I’ll base things on photographs or records when they exist, but if there’s no documentation, say, no surviving images of a police station’s interior, I create it. The key is plausibility. You don’t turn it into a tiled modern subway station. You imagine what fits the period. When there’s no record, no one can contradict you. It’s oddly liberating.”

“How do you handle outdated beliefs or social attitudes from those times, especially ones that would be offensive today?”

“With restraint and context. For example, in A Fearsome Doubt, Rutledge faces a woman who claims he wrongly executed her husband. That touches the question of capital punishment, but we don’t linger on the morality of it. In 1919, it was an accepted fact: if you were convicted of murder, you were hanged. Today it’s a debate. Back then, it wasn’t. I focus on Rutledge’s conscience, his need to be absolutely certain before accusing anyone. That’s the bridge between their world and ours. We’ve dealt with religion, abortion, class, all through the lens of that era. Understanding the social hierarchy of a small English village helps. In London, the classes rarely mixed; in a village, everyone knows everyone, from the lord of the manor to the rag-and-bone man. Rutledge has to move between both worlds, and his education lets him do that gracefully. It’s a study in empathy more than judgment.”

“You’ve mentioned the importance of detail but also the danger of overdoing it. How do you choose the right details to pull readers in?”

“The ones that characters would naturally notice. If Rutledge walks into a pub in 1920, I’ll mention that they’re drinking ‘government beer,’ the weaker ale introduced during the war. That’s the kind of small, lived-in truth that makes a world believable. But I don’t give a lecture on brewing regulations. A couple of words can carry the whole weight of history. It’s the same with a church. Rutledge might glance around during morning prayers and notice the architecture, but I won’t go into a timeline of who rebuilt it after the fire of 1623. Readers tune out. One vivid impression does the job of a page of exposition.”

“That’s where your worlds feel alive. They’re sparse in just the right way.”

“It’s about rhythm. Give them enough to see, then move. Let them fill in the rest.”

“Is writing in another time period essentially the same as writing any other story, or do you ever worry that the historical limits box you in?”

“Not at all. The limits inspire new stories. Bess Crawford was born because certain plots wouldn’t fit within Rutledge’s role at Scotland Yard. He could only take official cases. But we’d find clues that fascinated us, things a woman, a nurse, or a civilian might encounter, and we needed another character to explore them. A Duty to the Dead began that way: a dying soldier gives Bess a message for his family, and when she delivers it, their reaction makes no sense. That moral puzzle drove the book, and fourteen novels later, it’s still giving me stories.”

“That’s remarkable longevity.”

“The secret is curiosity. Every new book starts with, “What hasn’t Rutledge faced yet?” Sometimes he’s sent out by the chief constable; other times, like in The Gate Keeper, he happens upon a crime by chance. A man in a tuxedo lying dead in the road, a woman in an evening gown beside him—it opens up endless possibilities. The history doesn’t limit you; it focuses you.”

“Writers at Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference often tell me they’ve been researching for years and still haven’t finished their historical novel. They’re afraid to get something wrong. What would you say to them?”

“I’d tell them that the difference between a writer and an author is that an author finishes. Research can become a hiding place. You’ll never know everything. Finish the book anyway. The process of writing teaches you more than research ever will. I’ve known people who tinker for ten years trying to perfect one manuscript. Don’t. Write it, learn from it, move on. Even if it’s terrible, you’ve gained the experience to make the next one better. You can always come back later and fix the first, armed with everything you learned from books two and three. But you can’t revise what you never finish.”

“That’s wisdom hard-earned.”

“It’s the only way to grow. You can’t steer a parked car.”

“When you write about trauma, murders, war, loss, how do you decide how much to show and how much to imply?”

“It’s a fine line. Suggestion is often stronger than description. In A Cold Treachery, the family massacre is so brutal that the policemen refuse to go inside. I didn’t need to show the gore; I only had to describe the men standing under the eaves, unwilling to enter. Readers’ imaginations do the rest. With The Christmas Witness, it was the same. A man believes someone on horseback tried to kill him. The mystery isn’t just physical; was there a horse? It’s psychological: why does he believe he’s marked for death? His fear drives the story more than the act itself.”

“That’s where your work transcends history. It’s not about the era; it’s about being human in any time.”

“That’s the goal. The past is just the stage. The play is always about people.”

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Charles Todd is the New York Times bestselling author of the Inspector Ian Rutledge mysteries, the Bess Crawford mysteries, and two stand-alone novels. Originally a mother-and-son writing team, Caroline passed away in August 2021, and Charles lives in Florida. https://charlestodd.com/