Bryant & May - London's Glory: (Short Stories) (Bryant & May Collection) (2 page)

At least Conan Doyle’s solutions possessed a kind of strange plausibility, whereas Christie’s murder victims apparently received dozens of visitors in the moments before they died, queuing up outside their bedrooms like cheap flights waiting to unload, and the victims were killed by doctored pots of jam, guns attached to bits of string, poisoned trifles and knives on springs.

‘It is a childishly simple affair,
mon ami
. Brigadier Hawthorne removed the letter-opener from the marmalade pot
before
Hortense the maid found the burned suicide note in the grate,
after
Doctor Caruthers hid the viper, easily mistaken for a stethoscope, under the aspidistra,
at exactly the same time as
Lady Pettigrew was emptying arsenic over the jugged hare.’ The only thing I ever learned from an Agatha Christie novel was the lengths to which county people would go to show how much they hated each other.

Traditionally, authors who write more books featuring their detectives survive over ones who write fewer, but there are exceptions. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and R. Austin Freeman post similar numbers: Sherlock Holmes starred in 56 stories and 4 novels, while Freeman’s terrific Dr Thorndyke appeared in 40 short stories and 22 novels. Agatha Christie used Hercule Poirot in 33 books, while her contemporary Gladys Mitchell used her detective Mrs Bradley in 66 volumes. Dorothy L. Sayers only wrote 11 Lord Peter Wimsey novels, while Robert Van Gulik wrote 25 Judge Dee novels, although as each of these contain several cases in the Chinese style do we count them as more?

When it comes to totals, Christie also wrote an additional fifty short stories featuring Hercule Poirot, so she wins on volume. This is important as readers develop a loyalty, but it also creates its own problems. How do you keep a series fresh?

It’s not all about numbers, of course. Colin Dexter wrote surprisingly few Inspector Morse novels, but an exemplary TV series kept his character alive with stories often created by respected playwrights, and despite the death of the superlative actor John Thaw, they continued into both the future and the past with spin-off series. The
Bryant & May
books are slightly unusual in that they’re simultaneously fictional pastiches full of real London history, but also contain quite a large cast of characters – what I term ‘the Springfield effect’ – all of whom I have to keep track of. Then there are the plots …

I rarely watched TV as a child, but I did love
The Avengers
, joining at the start of the Emma Peel series, where strange plots were the norm – the field in which rain drowns people, the village where nobody dies but the cemetery fills up, killer nannies, clocks with missing hours, houses that send you mad – and I failed to realize that these were Golden Age plots transposed to the medium of television.

Many years later I came back to the classic mysteries I’d found in the library, with their academic eccentricities and timeless view of an England that never really existed. If you’re going to describe the investigation of a crime, you might as well have fun with it.

I did some homework. I read Sexton Blake and Raffles, who were so chinless you had to wonder how they managed to put a pillowcase on by themselves, but the early French masters were fun because they were sometimes dashing, like Arsène Lupin, or stubbornly peculiar, like Vidocq and Fantômas. There were the aforementioned R. Austin Freeman’s charming Edwardian mysteries featuring Dr Thorndyke, showcasing the opposite of the whodunnit, the ‘inverted mystery’, the how-will-he-be-caught? puzzle. And there was Edmund Crispin, the spirited, funny man who composed six scores for the
Carry On
films and wrote the majority of his joyous Gervase Fen books between 1945 and 1952. Fen is the crime-solving Professor of English Language and Literature, and assumes that the reader can keep up with him as he spouts literary allusions while cracking crimes over a pint. There were also those mordant mysteries by Gladys Mitchell, starring pterodactyl-like Mrs Bradley. Mitchell was once judged the equal of Dorothy L. Sayers and Agatha Christie.

I wanted to create my own detectives like theirs, so Bryant and May were born. I made my sleuths elderly because I was fed up with the ageism that suggests only the young can carry out their jobs well, and wanted to show that older characters could bring knowledge and experience to crimefighting.

The plan – as much as there was one – was to explore my detectives’ careers from beginning to end, so
Full Dark House
was an origin story, kicking off with their very first meeting during wartime. I used the setting of old London theatres because they have hardly changed in decades. London is full of unusual characters, so I use people I’ve met, including a British Museum academic who finds his enthusiasm getting him into trouble with the law, artists, lecturers, a white witch, a disgraced scientist, members of a Gilbert and Sullivan society – all real. Unlike my standalone novels, such as
Plastic
and
Nyctophobia
, the
Bryant & May
s feel as if they write themselves. I’d be lying if I denied they’re hard work to put together – they are – but I have more confidence now.

To invent your own detective you have to ask yourself about the sleuths of the past. When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle conceived Sherlock Holmes, why didn’t he give the famous consulting detective a few more quirks: a wooden leg, say, and an Oedipus complex? Well, Holmes didn’t need many physical tics or personality disorders; the very concept of a consulting detective was still fresh and original in 1887.

But most detectives of the past have very few defining characteristics. By the time you get to Hercule Poirot all you have is some Euro-pomposity, an egg-shaped head, ‘ze little grey cells’ and a moustache. It’s interesting that we could talk about our friends using the shorthand templates of Dickens’s characters, saying ‘He’s a regular Harold Skimpole’ or ‘She’s a real Mrs Jellyby’, those being just minor roles in
Bleak House
, but you can’t do that even with a main character in many crime novels. Past mystery writers tended to be driven by the mystery, not the investigator.

How does a writer create a detective? I started with a matchbox label that read ‘Bryant & May – England’s Glory’. That gave me their names, their nationality, and something vague and appealing, the sense of an institution with roots in London’s sooty past. London would be the third character; not the tourist city of guidebooks but the city of invisible societies, hidden parks and drunken theatricals, the increasingly endangered species I eagerly show to friends when they visit.

Every night, my detectives walk across Waterloo Bridge and share ideas, because a city’s skyline is best sensed along the edges of its river, and London’s has changed dramatically in less than a decade, with the broken spire of the Shard and the great Ferris wheel of the London Eye lending it a raffish fairground feel.

By making Bryant and May old I could have them simultaneously behave like experienced adults and immature children. Bryant, I knew, came from Whitechapel and was academic, esoteric, eccentric, bad-tempered and myopic. He would wear a hearing aid and false teeth, and use a walking stick. A proud Luddite, he was antisocial, rude, erudite, bookish, while John May was born in Vauxhall, taller, fitter, more charming, friendlier, a little more modern, techno-literate and a bit of a ladies’ man. Their inevitable clash of working methods often causes cases to take wrong turns.

The hardest part was accepting the fact that after writing a great many books I was once again starting on the first rung of a new learning ladder. Smart plotting wasn’t enough; situations needed to be generated by character. Recurring staff members appeared pretty much fully formed. The rest of the team had to have small but memorable characteristics: a constable with a coordination problem; a sergeant who behaved too literally; a socially inept CSM; you can’t give them big issues if they’re going to be in several books, because you don’t want their problems to steal the spotlight from your heroes.

One of my favourite ancillary movie characters wasn’t from a crime film at all. Police Constable Ruby Gates was played by Joyce Grenfell in the early St Trinian’s films. It was a very funny idea to have a lovestruck PC missing police broadcasts because she had retuned her radio to a romantic music station. Her response to her sergeant was: ‘Oh Sammy, you used to call me your little blue-lamp baby.’ This is only amusing if you can picture her. There was also the hilariously stern Sergeant Lucilla Wilkins played by Eleanor Summerfield in the film
On The Beat
. Forced to operate undercover in a hairdressing salon, she had to keep getting her hair permed to garner information, and became increasingly gorgon-like through the film. There are also bits of Diana Dors, Liz Fraser, Sabrina and other pin-up models from the 1950s, but to create Sergeant Janice Longbright I added the toughness of a real constable I knew and characteristics of Googie Withers in
It Always Rains on Sunday
. The film is explicitly mentioned in one of the PCU bulletins that always start off the novels.

Arthur Bryant’s landlady started out as an Antiguan version of Irene Handl in
The Rebel
(with whom I once spent an enjoyable afternoon). The name of Dame Maude Hackshaw, one of Maggie Armitage’s coven, is an homage to a short-lived headmistress in a St Trinian’s film, which also inspired the idea of the two workmen who never leave the PCU office. There are many other hidden influences in the books, some drawn from friends, some from childhood books and movies.

I stuck by my character outlines, even though a couple of interviewers told me I should have made them younger, which would allow for more sex and violence – the very thing I didn’t want to do. It wasn’t a matter of prudery; rather the fact that a sexual bout or a fist fight is a lazy exit from an awkward scene. I wanted the tone to be light and funny, all the better to slip in serious moments.

I linked the Bryant & Ma
y
novels with compounding clues and recurring characters as reward-points for loyal readers. Following the Barnes Wallis rule, I started the first Bryant & May novel with an explosion that destroys the detectives’ unit and kills Arthur Bryant. I created a police division, the Peculiar Crimes Unit, loosely based on a real experimental unit founded by the government during the Second World War, and added younger staff members who would be knowledgeable about the ‘new’ London. I listened to oral histories of Londoners stored in museums, and ploughed through the diaries, notebooks and memorabilia hoarded by their families. This wasn’t strictly necessary; I just enjoyed doing it.

For my second Golden-Age-detectives-in-the-modern-world mystery,
The Water Room
, the research was literally on my doorstep; my house was built on top of one of London’s forgotten rivers, the Fleet, so the tale concerned a woman found drowned in a completely dry room. I usually explain that the strangest facts in my books are the real ones.

As a location, London offers more anachronistic juxtapositions than most European cities – you’re likely to find a church on the site of a brothel – and it was important to find a way of reflecting this. Each story tries out a different kind of Golden Age mystery fiction:
Full Dark House
is a whodunnit;
The Water Room
is a John Dickson Carr-style locked-room mystery;
Seventy-Seven Clocks
is an adventure in the manner of Bulldog Drummond; and so on.

The unlikeliest elements of these tales turned out to be mined from London’s forgotten lore: tales of lost paintings, demonized celebrities, buried sacrifices, mysterious guilds and social panics had casts of whores, mountebanks, lunatics and impresarios who have been washed aside by the tide of history – but their descendants are still all around us, living in the capital city.

In the sixth book,
The Victoria Vanishes
, I dived into the hidden secrets of London pubs. When you’ve got established characters your readers root for, you can start playing games. So far I’ve had Bryant and May release illegal immigrants into the social system, disrupt government offices and even commit acts of terrorism in order to see that justice is done.
Bryant & May On the Loose
dug into the murky world of land ownership in London, and
Bryant & May Off the Rails
did something similar for the Underground system.
The Memory of Blood
looked at how the English subverted the legend of Punch and Judy to their own ends.

One of the joys was always tackling the duo’s dialogue. They had known each other for so long that they could almost see each other’s thoughts. A writer friend said, ‘I’m not much of a drinker but I do like a visit to the pub to find a lovely bit of dialogue.’

One criticism levelled at me by a reader was that my books were ‘too quirky to be realistic’. I took him to my local pub, the King Charles I in King’s Cross. It sometimes hosted the Nude Alpine Climbing Challenge, which involved traversing the saloon dressed only in a coil of rope and crampons, never touching the floor. The pub was always either packed or closed, according to some mysterious timetable that the owner kept in his head. On that particular night everyone in the place had a ukulele. It was heaving, and what appeared to be a stuffed moose head or possibly the top half of a deformed donkey was lying on the bar billiards table. The owner was attempting to attach it on the wall in place of a barometer, ‘from where,’ he said, ‘it can gaze across to the gazelle opposite with a loving look in its eyes’.

While we were supping our beers, a man reached past my companion for a giant, well-thumbed volume. ‘Let me pass you the telephone directory,’ my friend offered. ‘No, mate,’ the drinker replied, ‘this is the pub dictionary. It gets a lot more use in here than a phone book.’ The crowd started playing the theme from
Star Wars
on their ukuleles, led by Uke Skywalker. And then Iain Banks wandered in. After that my friend concluded that perhaps I had not exaggerated the books’ quirkiness.