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 pinup 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 times 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 homegrown 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 backroom 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 lineup 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 sinister 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 re-create 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 noncrime novels, each of which requires the creation of an entirely separate reality.
By this time I realized I had constructed a weird subgenre 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 postwar 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.
Once again my plans were rerouted, because writing 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.
For Mandy Little
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!
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