About the Book
‘Do you remember that corpse we found in the snow with nobody else’s footprints around it?’ asked Arthur Bryant. ‘And the department store Santa Claus whose gift caused a death? I thought I’d write up some of our more curious cases.’
‘All right,’ said John May, ‘but don’t make them sound like a bunch of ridiculous old paperback mysteries this time . . .’
Bryant did, of course, and here they are: eleven missing cases from the files of London’s Peculiar Crimes Unit, with dark crimes, strange suspects and some added surprises. From the sinister circus ringmaster to the femme fatale who coolly announces she’s about to kill a man, from the foggy fifties to the swinging sixties and the present day, and including a story narrated by Janice Longbright, the unit’s long-suffering detective sergeant, these are tales of the PCU doing what it does best – solving the city’s most peculiar crimes.
Whether you’re a Bryant and May aficionado or a newcomer to their singular world, you’ll find a confounding story to suit your tastes in this collection from ‘the crime fiction series quite unlike anything else being produced in the UK’.
CONTENTS
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction: Still Getting Away with Murder
Illustration of the Peculiar Crimes Unit
Bryant & May: Dramatis Personae
Bryant & May and the Secret Santa
Bryant & May in the Field
Bryant & May on the Beat
Bryant & May in the Soup
Bryant & May and the Nameless Woman
Bryant & May and the Seven Points
Bryant & May on the Cards
Bryant & May Ahoy!
Bryant & May and the Blind Spot
Bryant & May and the Bells of Westminster
Bonus Story: Bryant & May’s Mystery Tour
Bryant & May: The Cases So Far
Arthur Bryant’s Secret Library
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by Christopher Fowler
Copyright
For Clare, with love and pride
Introduction
STILL GETTING AWAY WITH MURDER
Why have crime novels stuck around for so long? In theory they should have died out decades ago. After all, there’s nothing remotely realistic about them. In real life the murder rate is falling and there are very few clever killers, so why do we want to believe in fictional crime tales?
Let me try to answer this with an illustration of the problem.
Some years ago, I found myself locked inside a Soho taxi late at night while my driver was viciously attacked by a pair of City bankers. The driver had shouted at the men, who were drunk and had hammered on the bonnet of his cab, and the drunks had dragged him through the window of his vehicle and beaten him senseless. I agreed to act as the driver’s witness, but outside the courtroom the police persuaded the plaintiff to drop his case in exchange for enough cash to repair his vehicle and compensate for his injuries. The officers said court proceedings would only cause everyone more hurt and trouble. It was a reasonable solution, if an unexciting one. The police shifted a case off their books and the victim seemed happy, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that he had lost out.
In Britain, we have ‘equality of arms’, which allows the same resources to be made available to both defence and prosecution, and broadly speaking this idea of balance filters down through the system. There’s a reason why the Old Bailey’s statue of Justice holds scales. It means we don’t get such outrageous courtroom dramas as O. J. Simpson fiddling with a glove, but the end result is often fairer.
If you’ve ever been the victim of a crime, you’ll know that it’s a very different experience from its fictional equivalent. Police stations are like hospitals: utilitarian, brightly lit, overflowing with paperwork, staffed by overworked people who barely notice you, and most of what goes on takes place behind the scenes. The rest is just waiting around and trying to reconcile your anger and frustration with the orderly procedures you have to face. If crime fiction accurately reflected this reality it would be dead, so we augment it.
Yet we writers are still keen to convince you that our latest murder mysteries are grittily realistic. They aren’t. They never were and never will be. How many killers are captured while they’re in the middle of their slaughter sprees? How many have ever planned a series of murders according to coded biblical signs? How many leave abstract clues for a single detective and get caught just as they’re about to strike again? Only some of the psychological-suspense writers are exempt from these lunacies.
Crime fiction is a construct, a device for torquing tension, withholding information and springing surprises. Yet every month dozens of crime novels appear that promise us new levels of realism, when they patently supply the reverse. We’ll happily believe that the murder rate in Morse’s Oxford equals that of Mexico City if the story is told with conviction, or that the villages of the Midsomer Murders are thatched-roof hellholes more like the Bronx in the 1970s.
The latest census data about Britain reveals that the country is changing fast, and economic mobility is a major catalyst. However, there is a part of England that forever has an alcoholic middle-aged copper with a beloved dead wife, investigating a murdered girl who turns out to be an Eastern European sex worker. This idea might have surprised us a couple of decades ago, but it’s still being sold to us with monotonous regularity. It’s not gritty, it’s a comforting cliché.
While judging the CWA Gold Dagger Award I had to read a great many books which were interchangeable. It was shocking to think that they made it through the process of agent, reader, editor, commissions panel and proofer without anyone pointing out that opening a novel with a detective being called to a patch of waste ground to look at a slaughtered girl was not original. Originality has a tendency to decrease one’s popularity.
Crime fiction accounts for more than a third of all fiction published in the UK, but there are relatively few contemporary London stories being told with audacity and flair. This is odd, because crime with an element of black comedy is something we do incredibly well, from films like The Ladykillers and Kill List to authors like Kyril Bonfiglioli, Joyce Porter and the wonderful, underrated Pamela Branch. Few crime writers stray from the narrow path set by publishers in the wake of Nordic Noir. Stieg Larsson’s books were proof that you could get away with anything if you said it with a straight face. They’re very enjoyable reads, but patently absurd. Shows like The Killing and The Bridge made for excellent television, but their success has only exacerbated the problem for authors. As Tony Hancock once said, ‘People respect you more when you don’t get laughs.’
We are told that readers want veracity, but readers will accept that a murderer is stalking London according to the rules of a Victorian tontine, even though they’ll ask why your detective doesn’t age in real time. I’ve coped with the fact that Bryant and May are ancient and getting older by providing a suitably outrageous explanation in one of the later books.
Britain’s Golden Age mysteries frequently featured surreal crimes investigated by wonderfully eccentric sleuths. From Gladys Mitchell and Margery Allingham in the thirties to Peter Van Greenaway and Peter Dickinson in the sixties, the form was treated as something joyous and playful. The Notting Hill Mystery, which many regard as the first detective novel, was republished by the British Library and consists of letters, reports, floor plans and notes. Dennis Wheatley created a s
imilar set of whodunnit-dossiers containing photographs, bloodstained material, a burned match, a lock of hair and other pieces of evidence in little bags. Even though his mysteries weren’t very good they were at least great fun.
They have been followed by too many doorstops of unrelenting grimness. Meanwhile, a handful of characters have become TV brands: Poirot, Holmes, Morse, Marple. Every year delivers another crate of old wine in new bottles. Kim Newman, whose own excellent Holmes books have a wonderful Gothic quality, has pointed out that TV doesn’t need to purchase new ideas so long as it can get away with stealing old ones.
I would argue that what we once loved, and what we’re not getting very much of these days, is murder mysteries which are as enjoyable from one page to the next as they are puzzling in their denouements. The beauty of crime tales from writers like Charlotte Armstrong, Edmund Crispin and Robert Van Gulik is that they were first and foremost fine reads, sometimes to the point where the solution to the crime was almost incidental.
Crime as a Confection
There’s a quote from Barnes Wallis, the inventor of the bouncing bomb that destroyed the Ruhr dams in the Second World War, who said, ‘There is nothing more satisfying than showing that something is impossible, then proving how it can be done.’ That was what interested me about mystery writing from an early age. Well, that and my mother saying, ‘If you write a book it will remain in the library long after you’re dead.’ If any of you have read my memoir Paperboy you’ll know it’s typical of her to say ‘after you’re dead’ to a nine-year-old.
I write a weekly column for the Independent on Sunday called ‘Invisible Ink’, about once massively popular authors who have now become a minority taste or who have disappeared altogether, and it’s surprising how many wrote over a hundred books before vanishing into collective forgetfulness. They fade from popularity because tastes change, or their readers change, or the authors themselves change.
While I was researching the now virtually unread but once incredibly popular crime writer Margery Allingham, I discovered that she regarded a crime novel as a box with four sides: ‘a killing, a mystery, an enquiry and a conclusion with an element of satisfaction in it’. Her plan – which I think is a good template for all popular novels – was to reduce books like stock, to boil them to a kind of thick broth of a language that tasted rich enough to satisfy and left you wanting to copy down the recipe. Allingham believed in the ‘plum pudding principle’: you provide your readers with a plum every few bites, to keep them interested in the whole pudding. Dickens famously did this, of course, and so in his own way does Mr Dan Brown. Allingham has an extraordinary richness to her writing – it’s allusive, witty, bravura stuff – but it’s a window to an English mindset that is now completely lost.
I fell for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle because he conveyed the creeping pallor of Victorian street life, the fume-filled taverns where a man might find himself propositioned by a burglarizing gargoyle, the Thames-side staircases where gimlet-eyed doxies awaited the easily duped. Even his cheerful scenes felt vaguely gruesome: shopkeepers would drape a Christmas goose around a character’s neck like a feather boa; and the welcoming yellow light of a first-floor window could somehow suggest that its tenant was lying dead on the floor. Fog muffled murderers’ footsteps and London sunlight was always watery. The Holmes adventures were virtually horror stories. Men went raving mad in locked rooms, or died of fright for no discernible reason. Women were simply unknowable.
And even when you found out how it was done or who did it, what kind of lunatic would choose to kill someone by sending a rare Indian snake down a bell-pull? Who in their right mind would come up with the idea of hiring a ginger-haired man to copy out books in order to provide cover for a robbery?
Graduating to the Agatha Christie books, the initial thrill of discovering such plot ingenuity also created a curious sense of dissatisfaction. How were you supposed to identify with any of the characters? On my street there weren’t any colonels, housemaids, vicars, flighty debutantes, dowager duchesses or cigar-chomping tycoons. Certainly, none of our neighbours had ever attended a country house party, let alone found a body in the library. Nobody owned a library, and country houses were places you were dragged around on Sunday afternoons. I never went shooting on the estate – although sometimes there was a shooting on an estate.
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 …
The Impossible Sleuths
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 & Mays 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.
Bryant & May - London's Glory: (Short Stories) (Bryant & May Collection) Page 1