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.
‘A Lovely Bit of Dialogue’
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 & May 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.
Londoners remember Soho’s Coach & Horses pub for its rude landlord Norman Balon, but few realize that it was the drinking hole of the Prince Edward Theatre’s scenery-shifters. One evening I overheard a huge tattooed shifter at the bar telling his mate, ‘I says to ’im, call yourself a bleeding Polonius? I could shit better speeches to Laertes than that.’
Well, write such dialogue down and you follow authors like Margery Allingham, Gerald Kersh, Alexander Baron and Joe Orton, who were clearly
fascinated by London’s magpie language and behaviour.
In the process of finding subjects for investigation, I’ve covered the Blitz, theatres, underground rivers, pre-Raphaelite artists, tontines, highwaymen, new British artists, the cult of celebrity, London pubs and clubs, land ownership, immigration, churches, the tube system, the Knights Templar, King Mob, codebreaking and Guy Fawkes, and still feel as if I’m only scratching at the surface of London history.
All writers are influenced by the things they’ve experienced, read and watched, by people they’ve met or heard about. The resulting books should not, I feel, reveal the whole of that iceberg. There must always be something more for the reader to discover.
Which brings me to this volume. Short fiction is rather out of favour these days, but I couldn’t resist the opportunity of fleshing out some of the missing cases from the files of the Peculiar Crimes Unit. Think of this as a Christmas annual, a throwback to the days when such collections came with a few tricks and surprises. Ideally I would have included a selection of working models you could cut out. Maybe next time …
BRYANT & MAY: DRAMATIS PERSONAE
Raymond Land, Acting Temporary Unit Chief
The Temporary Unit Chief dreams of escaping the PCU, but never manages to get away. An obsessive, meticulous member of the General and Administrative Division, he graduated in Criminal Biology, but often misses the point of his investigations. It’s said of him that ‘He could identify a tree from its bark samples without comprehending the layout of the forest.’ He can’t control his detectives. Or his wife.
Arthur Bryant, Senior Detective
Elderly, bald, always cold, scarf-wrapped, a wearer of shapeless brown cardigans and overlarge Harris tweed coats, Bryant is an enigma: well-read, rude, bad-tempered, conveniently deaf and a smoker of disgusting pipe tobacco (and cannabis for his arthritis, so he says). He’s a truly terrifying driver. He wears a hearing aid, has false teeth, uses a walking stick, and has to take a lot of pills. Once married (his wife fell from a bridge), he worked at various police stations and units around London, including Bow Street, Savile Row and North London Serious Crimes Division. He shares a flat with long-suffering Alma Sorrowbridge, his Antiguan landlady.
John May, Senior Detective
Born in Vauxhall, John is taller, fitter, more charming and personable than his partner. He’s technology-friendly, three years younger than Bryant, and drives a silver BMW. A sometimes melancholy craver of company, he leaves the TV on all the time when alone. He walks to Waterloo Bridge most nights with Bryant for ‘thinking time’. Vain and a bit of a ladies’ man, he lives in a modernist, barely decorated flat in Shad Thames. He’s divorced; his son and granddaughter now live in Canada.
Janice Longbright, Detective Sergeant
Janice is a career copper; her mother Gladys worked for Bryant. She models herself on 1950s and 1960s film stars, and prides herself on looking glamorous. She’s smart but tough, and hates to show her true feelings. Dedicated to Arthur and John, she always puts work before her personal life. She lives a solitary existence in her flat in Highgate, and keeps a house brick in her handbag for dealing with unwanted attention.
Dan Banbury, Crime Scene Manager/InfoTech
The unit’s crime scene manager and IT expert is almost normal compared to his colleagues. He’s a sturdy, decent sort, married with a son, although he gets a little overenthusiastic when it comes to discussing crime scenes and can bore for England on the subject of inefficient internet service providers.
Jack Renfield, Desk Sergeant
This sturdy former Albany Street desk sergeant is a brisket-faced by-the-book sort of chap who used to be unpleasant and dismissive of the PCU. Blunt but honest, he tends to think with his fists, and had an ill-fated relationship with Janice Longbright. He plays footie for the Met.
Meera Mangeshkar, Detective Constable
The stroppy, difficult, Kawasaki-driving DC comes from a poor South London Indian family, but beneath the (very) hard shell she has a good heart. However, she’s determined to resist the advances of Colin Bimsley, her co-worker.
Colin Bimsley, Detective Constable
The fit, fair-haired, clumsy cop is hopelessly in love with Meera, and suffers from Diminished Spatial Awareness, which can make him a liability. His father was also a former PCU member. Colin trained at Repton Amateur Boxing Club for three years, and will only give up trying to date his co-worker if there’s a restraining order placed on him.
Giles Kershaw, Forensic Pathology
The Forensics/Social Sciences Liaison Officer is naturally curious, winning, posh and plum-voiced. Promoted to the position of Chief Coroner at the St Pancras Mortuary, he has relatives in high places who can occasionally help the unit out of tight spots.
Liberty and Fraternity DuCaine
These virtually identical West Indian brothers are auxiliary officers who help the detectives in key cases. After Liberty was brutally murdered, his brother Fraternity stepped in to help out at the unit.
April May
May’s granddaughter was severely agoraphobic until resolving issues about her mother, killed by a man the press dubbed the Leicester Square Vampire. Thin and ethereally pale, she joined the unit and was good at making connections, but left after the stress became too much for her. She now lives in Canada near John May’s estranged son.
Crippen, staff cat
Everyone thought he was a boy-cat until he had kittens. Named after the first murderer to be caught by telegraph.
Maggie Armitage
The good-natured Maggie runs the Coven of St James the Elder, in Kentish Town. A Grand Order Grade IV White Witch, she is permanently broke but lives to help others in need of her dubious services. She’s part of a network of oddballs, academics and alternative therapists who help the unit from time to time.
Leslie Faraday
The government’s most pedantic civil servant, an outspoken, thick-skinned Home Office Liaison Officer who is thoughtlessly rude and never forgets a grudge. The Peculiar Crimes Unit makes his life miserable, so he tries to return the favour.
Surrounding these main characters are what could loosely be described as Arthur Bryant’s ‘alternatives’, consisting mainly of fringe activists, shamans, shams and spiritualists, astronomers and astrologers, witches both black and white, artists of every hue from watercolour to con, banned scientists, barred medics, socially inept academics, Bedlamites, barkers, dowsers, duckers, divers and drunks, many of them happy to help the unit for the price of a beer or a bed for the night.
When I was a child the highlight of the year was to visit Santa Claus at Gamages department store in Holborn. There was always a magical journey to reach him (knocked together with rotating bits of scenery and hand-rocked modes of transport) and when you arrived His Ho-Ho-Holiness would sit you on his knee and ask you if you’d been good all year. Gamages began with a tiny shop front in 1878, but by 1911 its catalogue ran to nine hundred pages. In the early 1970s it was replaced by offices and ‘exciting retail spaces’. It went the way of other great London department stores – Swan & Edgar, Marshall & Snelgrove, Bourne & Hollingsworth, Derry & Toms and Dickins & Jones. The idea for this story came from something that actually happened to me.
BRYANT & MAY
AND THE SECRET SANTA
‘I blame Charles Dickens,’ said Arthur Bryant as he and his partner John May battled their way up the brass steps of the London Underground staircase and out into Oxford Street. ‘If you say you don’t like Christmas everyone calls you Scrooge.’ He fanned his walking stick from side to side in order to clear a path. It was snowing hard, but Oxford Circus was not picturesque. The great peristaltic circle had already turned to black slush beneath the tyres of buses and the boots of pedestrians. Regent Street was a different matter. Virtually nothing could kill its class. The Christmas lights shone through falling snowflakes along the length of John Nash’s curving terrace, but even this sight failed to impress Bryant.
‘You’re doing y
our duck face,’ said May. ‘What are you disapproving of now?’
‘Those Christmas lights.’ Bryant waggled his walking stick at them and nearly took someone’s eye out. ‘When I was a child Regent Street was filled with great chandeliers at this time of the year. These ones aren’t even proper lights, they’re bits of plastic advertising a Disney film.’
May had to admit that his partner was right. Above them, Ben Stiller’s Photoshopped face peered down like an eerie, ageless Hollywood elf.
‘We never came to Oxford Street as kids,’ Bryant continued. ‘My brother and I used to head to Holborn with our mother to visit the Father Christmas at Gamages department store. I loved that place. You would get into a rocket ship or a paddle steamer and step off in Santa’s grotto. That building was a palace of childhood magic. I still can’t believe they pulled it down.’
Bryant & May - London's Glory: (Short Stories) (Bryant & May Collection) Page 2
