Bryant & May – England’s Finest
Page 28
Once again my plans were rerouted, because writing Bryant & May and the Invisible Code provoked a sea-change in me. From that point on the books were fundamentally altered; they trusted the reader and had more confidence. What had changed?
There’s an old story: year after year, a boy paints terrible pictures in art class, until he gets a new teacher and starts coming top every term. His mother asks, ‘What do you do to make my son paint such wonderful pictures?’ The teacher replies, ‘I know when to take them away from him.’ This is what my agent Mandy Little did for me. She intervened and instructed me to set aside new characters and concentrate solely on what I’d already started in the novel. It proved to be great advice.
Most of the crime writers I know don’t really write about crime at all. They write about people. It’s just as well, because real-life crime is sad and sordid, a combination of poverty, stupidity, sexual frustration, hatred and sheer bad fate that has very little to do with the world of fictional crime writing. Most serious crimes are not planned, but happen in a momentary flash or gradually, over time. Even men who deliberately stalk girls are often unable to acknowledge that they set out with a plan. They don’t understand themselves, let alone other people. Murderers don’t leave corpses arranged according to Masonic rituals or Da Vinci paintings; if they could do that they wouldn’t be murderers, they’d be museum curators or company directors.
It’s when you visit the collection colloquially known as Scotland Yard’s Black Museum and see the sad, cheap little square-cut cloth masks worn by house-robbers that you realize just how little real crime had in common with its fictional equivalent. As you walk through the rooms and study all the usual suspects – Haigh, Crippen, Christie, Ellis, trunk murderers and poisoners, guns and nooses, knives and knuckledusters, spying equipment, drugs, an umbrella gun and the Krays’ execution suitcase – it’s shocking to realize how mundane, makeshift and small everything appears. Could this ridiculous little knife really have cut a throat? Could this tiny pistol have actually shot someone through the heart? Victorian criminality is desperate and depressing – and perhaps that’s the point: crime has none of the grandeur we afford it, not then, not now.
Of course it’s more fun to think that murderers might be playing complex, abstract cat-and-mouse games with their investigators instead of battering their poor girlfriends to death before lying pathetically to the police. So crime writing is almost always a construct, no matter how often authors insist that their gritty thrillers are truthful. The true parts – the parts with which we readers identify – come from unchanging human nature.
Mysteries are everywhere. Hamlet is one, of course, and so is Bleak House. Although Hamlet’s actions remain a deeply human mystery to us, he’s a messed-up thirty-year-old and it would not be hard to find, in our present society, those who think and behave like him today.
Bryant & May have elements of my father, my grandfather and friends I’ve known. The investigations are based on the London myths and scandals I grew up with, and still hear all around me, although I worry that much of it is disappearing as the city changes. I do a lot of research in libraries but I also talk to a great many Londoners, so the books become a patchwork of the city’s lore and life, each one reflecting the London – and the Londoners – of its time.
Acknowledgements
I was caught by surprise when my first collection of missing Bryant & May cases found an enthusiastic readership. I wasn’t sure if short-form mysteries would work, but I’ve always felt that the Sherlock Holmes short stories were better than the novels, so I decided I should at least try. I had such fun writing the first collection, London’s Glory, that it seemed impossible not to write another volume of cases. My editor Simon Taylor enthusiastically waved them through, sterling agent James Wills agreed that there should be a further set of bizarre cases and sharp-eyed Kate Samano and Richenda Todd kept my timelines untangled. Team B&M makes sure that the decrepit duo live to fight another day!
Twitter: @Peculiar
www.christopherfowler.co.uk
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First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Doubleday
an imprint of Transworld Publishers
Copyright © Christopher Fowler 2019
Cover illustration by Max Schindler
Cover design by Beci Kelly/TW
Christopher Fowler has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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BRYANT & MAY AND THE INVISIBLE WOMAN
1 Homicide and Serious Crime Command.
BRYANT & MAY AND THE BREADCRUMB TRAIL
1 Razor cuts to the corners of the mouth