BRYANT You must be Mr May. What should I call you?
MAY John, sir.
BRYANT Don’t call me ‘sir’, I’ve not been knighted yet. And at this rate I never will be.
Backstory
My father was a scientist who worked in an experimental wartime communications unit. He and his colleagues were very young, and could not have realized that they were working towards a discovery that later changed the world. The full story is told in my memoir Paperboy, which he sadly didn’t live long enough to read. This series starter was created in the memory of the stories he told me about his job, one of which was about the way he and his colleagues used to blow each other up with exploding paint as a joke.
THE WATER ROOM
In Which Mr Bryant Goes under the Street
And Mr May Hunts a Killer above It
Bryant and May’s investigation of a secret world beneath London began when a woman was found dead in a dry basement with her throat full of river-water. In the quiet London street where she lived, the residents were unsettled by the ghostly sound of rushing water and some particularly unpleasant spiders. Further impossible deaths, including a man suffocated by soil, revealed a connection to the lost underground rivers of London and a disgraced academic who hunted an ancient secret that might soon be lost within the forgotten canals.
Meanwhile it refused to stop raining, the weatherman warned of a coming flood, and nobody’s house was safe as Bryant and May headed beneath the city to stop a murderer from striking again. What was the connection between the victims, an old lady, a builder, a TV producer and a homeless alcoholic? And what did forgotten artworks and the four elements have to do with it?
MAY You cannot act against the law, Arthur!
BRYANT You can when the law is an ass.
Backstory
Bryant and May’s investigation of the world beneath the London streets came from the fact that the North London house in which I used to live had a room exactly like this, built with a break-panel in the floor over an underground river. For years I had trouble with crayfish jumping out of my drains, which overflowed from the Fleet during storms. I sent one to the Natural History Museum, whose experts told me that Turkish crayfish were forcing British crayfish out of the sewage systems. Who knew there was a war going on beneath our feet? The map in the front of the book was an exact copy of my street.
SEVENTY-SEVEN CLOCKS
In Which Mr Bryant Runs into Evil
And Mr May Runs out of Time
Arthur Bryant, writing his memoirs, recalled a case from 1973. As strikes and blackouts ravaged the country, a rare painting in the National Gallery had acid thrown over it by a man in a stovepipe hat. Soon, the members of a high-born Whitstable family were being knocked off in a variety of lunatic ways – by escaped tiger, by clockwork bomb and by demon barber … Bryant and May set out to investigate the family.
As the hours of daylight started to diminish towards winter’s shortest day, the detectives discovered that a forgotten Victorian legacy held the key to the strange deaths. It was a mystery that would lead behind the sealed doors of London’s most ancient and secret guilds – and to the murderous legacy of British imperialism. Time was running out for the detectives, unless they could find seventy-seven clocks. It was when Bryant uncovered the mystery of ‘Chandler’s Wobble’ and had to babysit a horribly rich family that all hell broke loose …
PC How long have you been a policeman, Mr Bryant?
BRYANT Longer than you’ve been alive, mate.
PC That must make you the oldest team on the force.
BRYANT Not if we keep lying about our ages.
Backstory
This book came about because I stumbled upon an amazing snippet of London history, an event that occurred in the late nineteenth century. It was a moment well documented at the time, a source of great wonder and excitement, but then utterly forgotten. Obviously, it would make the basis of a great B&M adventure. Also, Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Wrong Box had a bit to do with it. This is by far the most outrageous of all the cases, yet there really is a nugget of truth at its heart.
TEN-SECOND STAIRCASE
In Which Mr Bryant Suffers for Art
And Mr May Hunts a Highwayman
When a controversial artist was found dead, floating face down in her own art installation inside a riverside gallery with locked doors and windows, the only witness turned out to be a small boy who insisted that the murderer was a masked man in a tricorn hat riding a stallion.
Then a television presenter was struck by lightning while indoors, and another victim was immolated in a public swimming bath … clearly, they were the kind of impossible crimes that only Bryant and May could solve. But Bryant had lost his nerve following a disastrous public appearance, and May was busy fighting to keep the unit from closure.
With a sinister modern-day highwayman bringing terror to the London streets, the detectives tracked their suspects to an exclusive school and a deprived housing estate. But then the highwayman started to become a national hero, and the public turned against the policemen.
Exploring the dark side of celebrity, the conflicts of youth and class, and the peculiar myths of old London and its cut-throat highwaymen, Bryant and May dived into the case with a vengeance …
BRYANT That’s what happens when you get older. You become irritated by the views of others for the simple reason that you know better, and they’re being ridiculous … Some silly man will start complaining about police brutality until I want to beat him to death with my stick.
Backstory
It was a time when the public started to venerate vacuous celebrity over anything controversial or demanding to think about. I wanted to write about the subject in the context of an enjoyable novel, and this was the result. Celebrity fever has waned to a point where we can understand its implications and be a little more wary of its effect on the young.
The opening murder occurred at an event equivalent to that of Charles Saatchi’s innovative ‘Sensation’ exhibition in London. A number of statements made by the killer came from actual press reports, but the novel is still preposterous in places. After this, the more outlandish elements in the series were toned down.
WHITE CORRIDOR
In Which Mr Bryant Gets in a Jam
And Mr May Goes below Zero
One day the unthinkable happened at London’s Peculiar Crimes Unit. A key member of staff, the coroner Oswald Finch, was found brutally murdered in his own mortuary, and everyone who worked there was suddenly a suspect. But Arthur Bryant and John May weren’t on hand to solve the crime. They had become stranded on a desolate snowbound section of country road. As the blizzard grew more severe, they attempted to solve the crime long distance using only their mobile phones.
Unfortunately, their situation quickly worsened. Unknown to the stranded detectives, an obsessed killer had travelled from the French Riviera to Dartmoor, and was stalking the stranded vehicles, searching for one particular victim, coming closer to them with each passing minute.
As if it didn’t have enough trouble, the Peculiar Crimes Unit received a demanding royal visitor, and the Home Office prepared to shut the PCU down when the visit inevitably started to go wrong.
Two murderers, two incapacitated detectives, just six hours to solve two crimes and save the unit. Armed only with their wits, woolly coats and a stack of dubious veal and ham pies, Bryant and May braced themselves for a day trapped inside the white corridor …
BRYANT Look at the snow falling in the trees. It’s so postcard-pretty out there. I’d forgotten how much I hate the countryside.
MAY That’s because you never spend any time there.
BRYANT Why would I? Rural folk think they’re so superior just because they have a village pub and a duck pond.
Backstory
This was my take on the traditional Christie-style whodunnit. I wanted to limit my detectives’ abilities by imprisoning them somewhere without their staff. Then I recalled the
snowdrifts that had often cut off drivers in Devon (people die; it seems surprisingly extreme considering the English countryside is thought of as tame and safe) and the traffic jam seemed like the perfect place in which to hide a killer.
One of the biggest problems I had was finding a legitimate way to introduce other characters, when most of them wouldn’t want to get out of their vehicles and risk the elements. I had a lot of fun with the concluding royal visit, and based the visiting dignitary on a well-known and famously disliked minor regal personality.
THE VICTORIA VANISHES
In Which Mr May Goes after a Killer
And Mr Bryant Goes for a Beer
It began with a life lost on a London street; an ordinary woman collapsed outside a public house called the Victoria Cross in Bloomsbury. Yet it became one of the most disturbing cases the Peculiar Crimes Unit ever undertook …
Arthur Bryant passed the woman on the way back from his coroner’s wake just before she died. But when he returned to the scene a few hours later, nothing was how he remembered it. For a start, the busy nineteenth-century pub had turned into an Indian supermarket. The elderly detective’s greatest fear was that he might be suddenly losing his mind. After all, he had already managed to mislay the coroner’s funeral urn on the same night.
While Bryant faced some home truths about perception and memory, his partner John May investigated a similar death occurring in another busy London pub. It seemed that a killer was taking lives in the city’s safest and most convivial places, but how was he doing it, and why?
The detectives’ search came to involve arcane mysteries, secret societies, line-dancing, speed-dating, hidden insanity, and the solution to a forgotten London conundrum.
BRYANT I wish I remember what I did with Oswald’s ashes, because that was really where it all began – oh my God.
MAY What’s the matter?
BRYANT I just remembered what I did with them!
Backstory
This was the sixth book, and in it were planted the seeds of the next six. One of my favourite Golden Age mystery writers was Edmund Crispin, whose academic-detective Gervase Fen solved crimes in Oxford, and I wanted to make this book a direct homage to his novel The Moving Toyshop, one of his best. ‘Homage’ would just be a polite word for stealing if you didn’t bring something else to the tribute. In this case I wanted to take the idea further and explore the strange world of pub societies. Many London pubs have private rooms in which all sorts of odd clubs meet. I quickly came to the realization that many of the quirkiest pubs were vanishing, falling victim to rapacious property developers by nature of their sheer size, so the book turned into a testament and the title became ironic. A list of all the pubs I visited for research (drinking) went into the back, and became a sort of requiem as they vanished in real life.
BRYANT & MAY ON THE LOOSE
In Which Mr Bryant Hunts a Headsman And Mr May Digs Up Something Ugly
In rush-hour King’s Cross, one of the busiest crossing points in Britain, finding a murderer would have been a nightmare for any force. But when a decapitated body was discovered in a kebab-shop freezer, London’s Peculiar Crimes Unit was not summoned – because the unit had just been disbanded, and elderly detectives Bryant and May had no access to evidence that could help them find a killer.
With the team dispersed and Arthur Bryant retiring to his bed, depressed and determined never to work again, it seemed like the end of the line for the PCU. But then something began disturbing the area’s property developers. Half-man, half-beast, a terrifying figure with a head of knives appeared at night on building sites, his pagan horns the mystical image of a forgotten legend.
It was time to gather the gang once more, even though they had no resources and could not be paid. With the appearance of a second headless body, the detectives uncovered the pre-Christian secrets of the historic streets and found a pattern to the deaths. But the sinister solution led them back to the heart of the city’s oldest mystery: who really owns the London landscape? As they got closer to the truth, Bryant and May made a very bad enemy. A man known only as Mr Fox, who could seemingly change his identity and vanish at will …
RAYMOND LAND You can’t tell me what to do. I’m your superior officer.
BRYANT Oh, that’s just a title, like labelling a tin of peaches ‘Superior Quality’. It doesn’t mean anything.
Backstory
This book was born from two ideas. First, I moved to King’s Cross, an inner-city spot I’d hung around as a child, now one of the most manic areas in London, and I’d watched as public housing developments were torn down and replaced with luxury private apartments for overseas investors, just as the neighbourhood’s slums and child-labour factories had been torn down before them.
Also, I wondered, who really owns the London landscape? Extraordinary stories emerged from various archives about lost deeds, stolen properties and outrageous government dishonesty. In fact some of the cases proved too upsetting to be added to the book, and with so much ground to cover I was in danger of packing too much research material into the novel. Even after trimming it back, I realized that some of it would spill over into a sequel.
BRYANT & MAY OFF THE RAILS
In Which Mr Bryant Goes Underground And Mr May Leads the Chase for a Fox
London’s Peculiar Crimes Unit was given a week to clear its backlog of investigations. But the only mystery on their books looked like a mundane accident: a young mother had fallen down the escalator in a rush-hour tube station, in full view of commuters and cameras. Still, Arthur Bryant and John May were nagged by the suspicion that a wicked deed had occurred. There was something strange about the way she fell …
When a young student went missing on the last train home one night – impossibly vanishing between stops on the train – the detectives headed into the London Underground. Bryant needed no excuse to start investigating the strange history of forgotten stations, ghosts and suicides, as a seemingly trivial clue sent him searching for a clever killer who always covered his tracks. With the suspect list spreading to include an entire household of students, it seemed that everyone had secrets to hide. And who was the sinister Night Crawler spotted in the tunnels after the last train had pulled out?
With the Peculiar Crimes Unit roaring back into business in new premises, the detectives headed down on to the darkened platforms of the world’s oldest underground railway to hunt the murderer. To solve the puzzle they explored an unseen world, uncovering hidden histories in order to stop the ruthless, invisible Mr Fox from striking again. But the biggest surprise was discovering that nothing is ever quite as it appears …
BANBURY A serial killer. That’s what I reckon we’ve got here. We’ve not had many of them at the PCU, have we?
BRYANT Not proper saw-off-the-arms-and-legs-boil-the-innards-put-the-head-in-a-handbag-and-throw-it-from-a-bridge jobs, no.
Backstory
I’d long wanted to write in detail about the London Underground system, and this picked up on themes that were explored in the previous book, but now I decided to take my detectives below the level of the streets, into the strange new world.
It was also a chance to confront the urban crime writer’s greatest problem: how do you hide a criminal in the world’s most spied-upon city? Saying that mobiles and CCTV aren’t working is a cop-out. I decided to confront the problem head-on and create an impossible crime occurring in plain sight, dependent on your point of view and the assumptions you make.
The ending was a risky challenge. It even took me by surprise, and I grew quite upset writing it because so much of it was true, culled from news reports and my own experience.
THE MEMORY OF BLOOD
In Which Mr May Pulls the Strings
And Mr Bryant Performs an Illusion
On a rainswept London night, the wealthy unscrupulous theatre impresario Robert Kramer hosted a party in his penthouse just off Trafalgar Square. But something was wrong. The atmosphere was uncomfortable; the guests were o
n edge. And when Kramer’s new young wife went to check on their baby boy, she found the nursery door locked from the inside.
Breaking in, the Kramers were faced with an open window, an empty cot, and a grotesque antique puppet of Mr Punch lying on the floor. It seemed that the baby had been thrown from the building, but it had been strangled, and the marks of the puppet’s hands were clearly on his throat … What’s more, there was a witness to tell them that the puppet killed the baby.
As Bryant and May’s team interrogated the guests, Arthur investigated the secret world of automata and stagecraft, illusions and effects. His suspicions fell on the staff of Kramer’s company, who had been employed to stage a gruesome new thriller in the West End. As a second impossible death occurred, the detectives uncovered forgotten museums and London eccentrics, and took a trip to a seaside Punch and Judy show.
Then Bryant’s biographer suddenly died. Was it a tragic accident, or could the circumstances of her death be related to the case? With just one hour left to solve the crime, Bryant buried himself away with his esoteric books. The stage was set for a race against time with a murderous twist …
Bryant & May - London's Glory: (Short Stories) (Bryant & May Collection) Page 22
