A Norse of Another Color by Caroline Todd
**The Little Blog of Murder welcomes Caroline Todd, who writes the the Ian Rutledge series with her son, Charles, under the pen name Charles Todd. Welcome, Caroline!**
I can’t talk politics here. Which is too bad since the politics I know best are those of 1919 Britain. At least I feel I know them best–they have been history for nearly a hundred years, so in researching the Rutledge series, it’s easy to find out what the resolutions of hot issues were over the next ten decades. But then you have to remember that
Rutledge isn’t privy to what a professor discovered in archives somewhere in 1959. And so you walk the line between what was known to the ordinary man on the street then and what readers may be aware of in 2006.
One of the most interesting facets of being an author is that you get to play with history–a little. You can give someone a very carefully selected insight into the future, and have others in the story pooh-pooh it. That gives you both sides of an issue. But it must be done without the all-knowing, all-seeing author tipping the scales either way.
We avoid politics like the plague, but some issues are there, whether you want them to be or not. Like the death penalty. As an officer of the law, Rutledge knows the fate of convicted murderers. He can’t debate it, and neither can we.
Caroline
