Historical mysteries, especially those set in the early decades of the last century, have been a staple of my reading diet over the past year or so. In the end, Wings of Fire disappointed me slightly. (But, then, most mystery novels do. They must operate on so many levels, and with so many moving parts, that a margin of failure is pretty much built into the enterprise.) Nonetheless, “Todd” is one of the most sophisticated “past” masters now practicing in the genre.
CHARLES TODD. Wings of Fire (1998).
Three descendents of the illustrious Trevelyan clan lay dead, new additions to a family crypt in the churchyard of a tight-knit, tucked-away fishing village called Borcombe. Vague doubts about their ostensibly non-homicidal deaths swirl like wisps of sea mist along the nearby coast of Cornwall. Scotland Yard, asked to investigate the matter, sends down Inspector Ian Rutledge, who here embarks on his second big case since returning to police service after his not-quite-complete recovery from shell shock. It’s just a year or so after the 1918 Armistice, and for Rutledge gruesome memories of the Western Front prove hard to separate from the gruesome family secrets that haunt Trevelyan Hall. All of the newly departed had connections to the Great War, either through combat or—in case of Olivia Marlowe, a poet who published pseudonymously as O.A. Manning—through an uncanny ability to evoke the horrors of combat. Rutledge, an avid reader of Manning, wonders how a woman and an invalid like Olivia could have understood so keenly the evil core of what he witnessed on the battlefields of France. Todd’s plot revolves around solving that conundrum. Skillfully using lines of verse from a Manning collection titled “Lucifer,” the author sets Rutledge on a hunt for literary clues that culminates in his discovery of a devil in the flesh, right there in bucolic Borcombe. Todd (the pen name of an American mother and son team) excels at taking the milieu of Golden Age British detective fiction and investing it with dark psychological shadings and clear-eyed social realism—qualities rarely found in actual mystery stories of the 1920s. This entry in the Rutledge series falters, though, in offering a resolution that is much too irresolute. A half-dozen mysterious deaths hang from the Trevelyan family tree, but Todd doesn’t fully clarify which of them were murders. A muddled final exposition also fails to illuminate several key details, swathing them instead in a haze of poetic allusion and Cornish superstition.
