Bryant & May – England’s Finest

by Christopher Fowler

  Bryant & May and the Postman

  I thought it would be fun to show the PCU involved in the nuts and bolts of a case, persistently questioning a suspect until an answer emerges, but this was also a chance to show their shortcomings. My father never quite managed to become a modern man, although he did have a crack at using hair gel. It didn’t end well. He looked like a shampooed dog.

  Bryant & May and the Devil’s Triangle

  This is a real corner near my flat and a genuine accident black spot, although not designated as such. I’m interested in the areas that remain ignored because they appear to have nothing to offer. Developers leave them alone, the oddest tales often come from them and they have the weirdest shops (this corner boasted a rubber maid’s uniform store for many years).

  Bryant & May and the Antichrist

  A couple of years ago I moved flats for a while and had to keep memorizing different codes to get in (the property was on a canal with a series of gates). The only way I could remember them was by doing what Bryant does to solve the case. Plus, I like making the reader do a bit of work!

  Bryant & May and the Invisible Woman

  A combination of factors caused this: a visit to Dalí’s astonishing theatre-museum in Figueres and an open night at the Tate Modern, when a woman told me it was the best way to find a date in London. Plus, I’d been wanting to give the PCU women more of the spotlight for a while.

  Bryant & May and the Consul’s Son

  This is very much the centrepiece of the book, a long-gestating mystery that began as little more than a throwaway gag in Strange Tide. I was going to resolve it in the next novel but couldn’t find a place to fit it in – too long for a sub-plot, not long enough for a novel – so I decided to write it up as a separate case. The locations are all real; one spot is where I headed to record an audio version of a book, an odd little London corner hidden in plain sight.

  Bryant & May Meet Dracula

  Otto Penzler owns a wonderful store called the Mysterious Bookshop in New York, and after visiting all the locations mentioned I wrote him a Transylvania-set tale called ‘Reconciliation Day’. I thought it would be cool to adapt the research for the telling of a different story, one taking Bryant & May out of their comfort zone, and this is the result.

  Bryant & May and the Forty Footsteps

  I stumbled across the legend of the forty footsteps in several differing accounts in rare volumes of London history, and as it had happened near to me I set out to track it down. This proved harder than expected, as it’s mostly underneath the concrete of University College London. I think I located the exact spot, but I can’t be sure. As with all London legends it’s the idea that grips.

  Janice Longbright and the Best of Friends

  This started out very differently, as a synopsis for a novel that I never got around to writing. My editor at the time was unenthusiastic and I soon became excited by a different idea, so it was shelved. But writers never throw anything away, and stories can sometimes find their feet with a fresh look. Originally it was going to be entirely set in the Younger Woman clinic.

  Bryant & May up the Tower

  This started out as a vignette in The Casebook of Bryant & May, a graphic novel drawn by the excellent Keith Page, but I’d always felt I could have fun with it in written form. My first job was at a company based at the foot of the tower (then named the Post Office Tower) which always fascinated me. I managed to go up to the restaurant before they closed it. Sixties futurism rocks!

  Bryant & May and the Breadcrumb Trail

  Ah, a sadly ever-topical London subject, to which I added Arthur Bryant vs technology, a disgusting death and an odd little newspaper item. I was very much on home ground in this tale. As the modern policing world becomes ever more reliant on technology the detectives look increasingly out of touch, but at the root of all detection is the idea that human nature never changes.

  Murder on My Mind: An Afterword

  Golden Age detectives in a modern age? That’ll never work, said an editor. I remember thinking, Fair play, she’s probably right.

  I had a very exact idea in mind; when I thought of traditional Golden Age crime fiction, what came into my head were all the clichés: bodies in libraries, country house murders, butlers and maids, gentleman thieves, dowager duchesses losing their pearls, vicars and ‘flighty’ chorus girls, formal tales that could be enjoyable as brainteasers but which were also bloodless, class-ridden, recidivist and reactionary. I found the cap-doffing deference of servants and coppers to the untrained, entitled interferers who barged in and solved their crimes most off-putting. Today psychology is part of the writer’s arsenal, leaving many Golden Age mysteries looking like linear crossword puzzles, logical in plot terms but psychologically nonsensical.

  Equally, I didn’t want to write a modern police procedural, there being too many fine practitioners of the art already. Besides, too many crime novels revel in degradation and pain, with a particularly unpleasant emphasis on cruelty to helpless women. Crimes involve tragedy and poverty, of course, and police work is rule-bound and repetitive, but I wondered if I might not employ a sense of playful trickery and still score a few relevant points.

  Mystery authors are notorious tricksters; the wonderful, underrated crime novelist Pamela Branch used to drive about town in an old taxi with its ‘For Hire’ light on, and would mail out blood-smeared postcards and boxes of poisoned chocolates purportedly from her characters. Some of us like to hide puzzles, jokes and references inside our books – we can’t resist it. Musicians do it all the time. I think of Gerard Hoffnung tricking an audience into standing for the national anthem with a muted drum roll that turned into a completely different tune, and the crime novelist Edmund Crispin (real name Bruce Montgomery) hiding musical jokes in the scores of Carry On films. I tuck peculiar running gags into the Bryant & May novels in the hope that it makes somebody laugh in recognition. Mystery writing is not just about the gradual revealing of information, it’s also about making connections where there were none before, so I love it when readers make those connections.

  There’s something about mixing esoterica with low comedy that’s very appealing. The most obvious joke is that the names of my detectives were taken from a matchbox. Throughout their adventures Arthur Bryant mentions other cases, a habit I adopted in deference to Arthur Conan Doyle, whose consulting detective named other ‘affairs’. Conan Doyle’s son Adrian teamed up with John Dickson Carr and produced another collection out of the missing cases in The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes.

  For Bryant & May’s first collection of lost cases the UK title was London’s Glory, a phrase deliberately altered from the old black and yellow matchbox labels. Of course, another word for a match is a lucifer; it’s a self-igniting one that’s coated in phosphorus and sodium chlorate, and they’re now banned. Conflagration, history, Englishness and a whiff of sulphur; it seemed a perfect way to describe my detectives.

  When you try to keep track of an ever-expanding number of characters, it’s helpful to name them after people or things you already know. Several of mine came from my love of barely remembered British comedies. For Janice Longbright I used a friend of mine, plus bits of Diana Dors, Liz Fraser, Sabrina and other pin-up models from the 1950s. There’s also a touch of Barbara Windsor’s toughness in Sparrows Can’t Sing and Googie Withers from It Always Rains on Sunday – this is the film in which Googie exudes sex appeal buttering an upright loaf and slicing it afterwards while dangling a fag from her lower lip. The film is explicitly mentioned in one of the PCU bulletins that always start off the novels.

  Arthur Bryant’s friend Maggie Armitage is a real person and even more peculiar in reality, while the name of Dame Maude Hackshaw, a member of her coven, is a homage to an old St Trinian’s film, as is the idea of the two Daves never leaving the PCU office.

  The Victoria Vanishes is a tribute to Edmund Crispin’s The Moving Toyshop, one of my favourite Golden Age mysteries. I’ve also broken the fourth wall a few t
imes in the style of Crispin. The Commando Comics artist Keith Page made some of these homages explicit in his drawings for the Bryant & May graphic novel, The Casebook of Bryant & May, packing his scenes with recognizable character actors from the past.

  Why would I have chosen to pay homage to forgotten B movies instead of, say, serious-minded British literature? Because I like the peripheral pleasures of small independent enterprises. I grew up with the last series of home-grown British films that were made without Hollywood interference. They tend to be rather stagey and have too many scenes of middle-aged men in offices, but many have strange moments and quirky characters. In the bizarre mystery Miss Robin Hood, about a stolen beer formula, a taxi driver tries to impress girls by learning entire segments of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. British people are portrayed as inherently odd and unfathomable, but few books and films explore this national notion, let alone celebrate it. My father adored The Man in the White Suit because, as an experimental back-room scientist, he completely identified with Alec Guinness.

  I admire outsider writers like Magnus Mills, who explores something rarely encountered in fiction: the inability of human beings to put their idealism into practice. I wanted to do this in a series of crime novels that suggested the ending might turn out differently if the main characters could get their act together.

  There are other references to mysteries in the Bryant & May books, most notably to those by Robert Louis Stevenson and R. Austin Freeman. For a long time I couldn’t find a way to parody Agatha Christie because of her recognizable style, but Mrs Christie was quirkier than perhaps even she realized. Her obsession with clockwork plots gave her a strange view of life. No room is ever described without its egress minutely detailed. If she saw my study she’d say it was a wooden-floored room with two means of entry, neither of them locked, when the first two things you actually notice are that it’s made of glass and overlooks St Paul’s Cathedral. Every work of fiction, however lowly, gives away a little of its author’s heart. I’ve been asked a number of times to catalogue all of the jokes and puzzles tucked in the pages, but that would spoil the fun.

  Someone I hadn’t caught up with for a while said to me, ‘So, you’re still churning out those Bryant & May books, are you?’ as if it was something I had to do occasionally between my more avowedly ‘serious’ novels. I pointed out that yes, mystery novels were one type of book I wrote, although there were many others. Never one to give up when he was behind, he added, ‘Then why do you bother with the crime stuff? They’re all the same, aren’t they?’

  I explained that the mystery novel, which is after all just one branch of the crime genre, can be a Trojan Horse for whatever you want to smuggle inside the gates of the reader’s mind. It can be a vehicle for zeitgeist stories and subversive themes, or simply a method for dropping in forgotten historical facts. The genre is a doorway to pretty much any kind of dramatic story.

  The crime genre generates tales about secrets, lies and betrayal, of extreme emotion and acts committed under stress, of passion, death and survival, but they can also be unreliable and subject to reinterpretation. Examples include Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Trent’s Last Case by E. C. Bentley, The Iron Gates by Margaret Millar and Snowdrops by A. D. Miller. Characters can change depending on the angle from which they are viewed. It’s said that if you’re writing about Charles Manson, you should remember that he doesn’t wake up each morning thinking he’s crazy. He wakes up each morning thinking you’re crazy.

  Worried that I would start to repeat myself with the Bryant & May series, I’ve been keen to constantly ring the changes, trying different types of mystery story, regularly altering the line-up of characters and even the style of writing.

  Traditionally, authors who write a large number of stories featuring specific detectives survive over ones who write fewer (Dorothy L. Sayers was an exception, writing only 11 Lord Peter Wimsey novels). 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 novels, while her contemporary, the far less well-remembered Gladys Mitchell, used her wonderful detective Mrs Bradley in 66 books. Robert van Gulik wrote 25 Judge Dee volumes (although as these contain several cases in the Chinese style do we count them as more?).

  However, when it comes to totals Christie wrote an additional 50 short stories featuring Hercule Poirot, so she wins on volume. Critical mass is clearly important as readers develop a loyalty, but it also creates its own problem – critics generally stop reviewing you after the first few outings, and every time you have a fresh title out new readers buy the first volume, which is logical but may (as in my case) be very different from the rest of the series. It’s tricky finding the balance between offering up familiarity and evolving to provide new surprises.

  It’s not all about numbers, of course. Colin Dexter did not write a huge number of Inspector Morse novels, but an exemplary TV series kept his character alive with fresh, character-driven stories often created by respected playwrights, and, despite the death of the superlative actor John Thaw, continued into both the future and the past with spin-off series. The Bryant & May books are slightly unusual in that they’re simultaneously pastiches and full of real London history (I never make anything up when it comes to research, which I regard as sacrosanct), but they also contain an ever-expanding cast of characters – what I term ‘the Springfield effect’ – all of whom I have to keep annotated.

  For a long time these factors, and the rather esoteric plotlines, kept the books below the parapet of mainstream awareness, but it may just result in the series being long-lived. There’s a terrific writers’ maxim: When you think a story has reached the end, take it further. It would have been easy to stop after six Bryant & May novels (do you have any idea how much of my life these annoying seniors consume?) but I was intrigued about new possibilities, and the more urban life changes the more I have for them to do.

  When the first Bryant & May book was written as a stand-alone novel for the publishers Little, Brown, it was turned down. To be fair, they had supported an author who was chronically unable to settle into any style or genre, and who pushed aside all attempts to be pigeonholed. All I can say in my defence is that I had a demanding day job, and writing novels came a distant second after making sure our staff got their wages on time. When members of your company start planning their babies around the safety of their jobs, the question of priorities is instantly resolved and writing vanishes.

  So, armed with a murder mystery my publishers did not want, I reluctantly left and looked for somebody new. Transworld immediately ‘got’ Bryant & May, thanks to their editor, Simon Taylor, who saw a future in them that I hadn’t considered. He enthusiastically suggested a sequel, and since the first book had started out as a period romp I rewrote it as an origin story. I’d planned to stop at six books, with a story arc buried within the separate plots that involved a man called Peter Jukes (the real-life Jukes is a political journalist) and a Ministry of Defence conspiracy covering up a series of deaths. The arc was based on a number of real incidents occurring at the time of writing which involved the strange suicides of several Indian workers. A now-defunct website asked what it was about scientists working at Porton Down that made them want to commit suicide. One was found in a field, another drowned …

  When I closed the arc of six tales in The Victoria Vanishes, I adopted a wait-and-see approach to the books, which were selling to a small group of dedicated fans but were certainly no threat to the big names in the genre. I started to trim down the history lessons within the books, and began enjoying myself with the subsidiary characters. The first Bryant & May cover had been created by a wonderful artist, Jake Rickwood, who was represented by Meiklejohn Illustration. Coincidentally, I had known Chris Meiklejohn for years, and could have put him in a B&M novel; a darkly handsome man missing a hand, he always wore a sini
ster black leather glove that fascinated me.

  I loved the cover of Full Dark House, which seemed to perfectly catch the tone of the books. There’s a rare misprinted cover in circulation, on which May is smoking a pipe, not Bryant, but it was withdrawn and replaced with the corrected version (hang on to it if you have a copy).

  When I came to write the second book, Mr Rickwood announced that he was retiring, so we had no artist to take the series on. There were several attempts to recreate the first cover, leading to one known as the ‘Simpsons’ artwork, because Bryant & May had become bright yellow. We finally discovered the brilliant David Frankland, who understood the semiotics required for the books: a hint of those old railway carriage posters, an appealing Englishness, a balance of architecture and humans and a touch of darkness. But he retired too, and now I have the excellent Max Schindler combining old and new elements beautifully.

  Over the books, one of the greatest pleasures for me has been confounding readers who said ‘you can’t surely get any more out of this situation’ by proving that I could. What’s more, I found that they came more naturally to me than my stand-alone non-crime novels, each of which requires the creation of an entirely separate reality.

  By this time I realized I had constructed a weird sub-genre of my own, certainly not as comfortable and timeless as so-called ‘cosy crime’, which was fanciful but weirdly within the realms of possibility. Festival organizers get especially confused and put me on panels with fantasy writers, even though the books contain no fantasy elements. The original concept had been rooted in hard fact, my father having worked in just such a post-war unit. The earliest research I included in the books had come from him. Still, I planned to end the series at Volume 12 because it was where the second arc finished, and I had an idea for a new crime series. When I ran the idea for this new series past agents they all hated it, which was enough to make me want to prove them wrong and make it work.