Charles Todd’s series of books about Scotland Yard detective Ian Rutledge are, unlike most mainstream fiction, chock full of people with disabilities. The series is set just after the first World War. The authors (mother and son writing team Caroline and Charles Todd) sprinkle characters with disabilities liberally throughout.
The disabled include main characters, secondary recurring characters, one off characters, villians, heroes, and just ordinary people. They have both physical and mental disabilities. The lead character, Inspector Ian Rutledge, suffers from PTSD (shell shock, in the parlance of the day) and auditory hallucinations. There are characters with amputations, multiple personality disorder, impending vision loss, shell shock, traumatic muteness, long-term blindness, paralysis, more shell shock – you get the idea.
The Rutledge novels never let you forget that England’s people have suffered tremendously, and that the aftermath of the Great War is to be seen everywhere.
The Todds do not succumb to the usual disability in fiction stereotypes. Disability is not used as an outward and visible sign of inward evil. Todd’s disabled characters rarely die and they’re never cured. They are not Christ figures, super-crips or vehicles for pity. Some of them (like some of the able-bodied people in the books) show evidence of actual sex lives.
The Todds show some understanding of the continuum of disability. A blind woman is shown to have at least light perception, possibly more. A woman who uses a wheelchair after an accident is able to stand and take several steps.
While on the one hand, the Todds do not transplant early 21st century disability thinking into the immediate post-war years, on the other hand, disability doesn’t seem to inconvenience especially the main characters very much. Rutledge’s shell shock is certainly the bedrock of his characterization, but it doesn’t seem to impair his day to day relationships with others or his ability to do his job. The wheelchair user in A Cold Treachery helps run a boarding house in a remote Scottish village that doesn’t even belong to her, and there’s scarcely a word of explanation as to how she even manages to get in and out of the building.
These are minor quibbles, though – the books are fascinating reading, and it’s a novelty to encounter such matter of fact portrayals of disabled characters.
Thanks Katja. I’m going to search my library online and request one of these. Do you know why the Todds wrote with these characters? I wonder if one of them or someone close to them is disabled…
Not a clue – I’m kind of hoping someone else will know. Or I suppose I could write to the authors and ask – what an idea!
Thanks for sharing this, Katya. I’ve not heard them being spoken about before during discussions of authors who do disability well. Will keep an eye out for them.
And that’s kind of what I like about it – the books aren’t disability fiction, they’re historical detective stories. The characters are just … there, like real people.
I haven’t read much by Charles Todd yet. Where do you suggest I begin?
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Tel: (703) 573-4929 robert.rudney@gmail.com http://www.loverslame.com
Disability, Love, Sex … and Jobs: A Novel Perspective
“Lovers Lame is the novel that makes disability sexy,” quips Bob Rudney, the author and long-time disability advocate who’s just published his first fiction work (Booklocker, $16.95, paperback, $8.99 electronic, http://booklocker.com/books/6101.html). “The book’s also a conscious effort to raise public awareness on disability issues, especially employment, and to expand the audience,” he adds.
In Lovers Lame, narrator David Levin’s lonely and tightly controlled world turns upside down when he wanders into a self-help group for job seekers with disabilities. David, an acerbic, out-of work editor with left-side paralysis, grudgingly befriends a motley group of self-styled ‘crips’ and becomes infatuated with Jessica Cowan, an alluring, but mercurial artist battling the debilitating effects of multiple sclerosis.
David falls hopelessly in love, while Jessica insists on maintaining her distance as she comes to grips with her own tempestuous past. Their struggle with their own inner demons plays out against the backdrop of people with disabilities fighting prejudice and ignorance in a world that still excludes them.
“It’s both a plea for social and economic justice, as well as a poignant love story,” says Bob, who’s retiring as a Senior Advisor in the Defense Department. “Only one in five Americans with disabilities is employed. That’s unacceptable. The characters in the novel confront this bleak reality. They also face all the extra hurdles of forming personal relationships, of looking for love, while burdened with a disability. Lovers Lame shows them as human beings, not as poster children.”
Bob was recipient of a 2008 Kennedy Foundation Congressional Fellowship and won the 2011 Defense Department Award as ‘Outstanding Employee with a Disability.’ He was Co-Chair of the Booz Allen Hamilton Disability Forum and served on the Virginia Business Leadership Network Board. He is available for presentations, interviews and other media events. Information can be obtained from robert.rudney@gmail.com.
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