RAYMOND LAND This office is starting to look like your old room in Mornington Crescent.
BRYANT Of course. It’s the contents of my head.
RAYMOND LAND It certainly contains the contents of a head, unless you’ve had the brainpan of that stinking Tibetan skull cleaned out.
Backstory
This book was born from my discovery that London had its own Grand Guignol theatre like the one in Paris – I located the scripts for the sinister plays that were performed there, and thought it would make a great basis for a novel. At the time of writing the book I was rehearsing a play on the same stage where the Grand Guignol scenes had been tried out.
The British versions of the plays were different from their French counterparts because the Lord Chamberlain wouldn’t allow explicit violence, so we did something typically British – we made the plays about mental cruelty, which was far worse than seeing a rubber hand chopped off.
Also, after the dark realities of the previous two books I needed to write something lighter and funnier, so this is one of Bryant and May’s ‘sorbet stories’ – something refreshing after a big meal.
THE INVISIBLE CODE
In Which Mr May Breaks the Law And Mr Bryant Cracks the Code
As Arthur Bryant’s memoirs were published, he started to feel his age. But a case came in that changed his life. A young woman called Amy sat in the quiet London church of St Bride’s, off Fleet Street, and was found dead in her pew after the service. But no one had been near her. She had no marks on her body and the cause of death was unknown. The only odd thing was that she had a red cord tied around her left wrist.
Then, at a government dinner party to welcome heads of state, the wife of businessman Oskar Kasavian got drunk and insulted the gathering. She believed she had been made a social outcast by her husband’s friends because she was a foreigner from a lower class. Angered at being affected by the invisible code governing British behaviour, she continued to behave so badly that she was eventually locked up in a private clinic in Hampstead.
Her husband’s circle closed ranks against her. ‘Women of our social standing remain by our men,’ one politician’s wife reminded her. But Bryant suspected that the wife was being victimized. Especially when she told him that she was the victim of witchcraft. The detectives started investigating Hellfire clubs, secret codes and the history of London’s oldest madhouse.
DOCTOR You need to start acting your age, Mr Bryant.
BRYANT If I did that, I’d be dead.
Backstory
There are certain places in London that remain relatively unchanged, even now. I had long wanted to write something partly set in a London church, and here I had the perfect setting of St Bride’s, which proved to have a fascinating history (lead coffins! bombings!) that I could use. Soon I had Bryant and May investigating the strange story of Bedlam.
The trick, I suppose, was not to overload the narrative with history but to balance the fun with genuinely intriguing facts. The idea of codes had a double meaning: the Bletchley Park kind and the more secretive code of ‘fitting in’ in London, a device used by the upper classes to keep foreigners in their place.
THE CASEBOOK OF BRYANT & MAY
(Graphic novel)
Two illustrated untold cases for Bryant and May, ‘The Soho Devil’, which sees them coming face-to-face with a clown cult and a runaway rhino, and ‘The Severed Claw’, in which they go up the Telecom Tower to search for a celebrity’s missing hand.
BRYANT Why do women always do that thing with you?
MAY What thing?
BRYANT The gooey-eyes.
MAY They sense my charisma.
BRYANT Smell your aftershave, more like.
Backstory
I’m a huge comics fan, and had always wanted to create a comic version of the Bryant & May stories. Artist Keith Page was ideal for the job and the finished artwork was sumptuous. Keith modelled Arthur Bryant on photographs of my deceased business partner, so looking at the panels was rather eerie. The result was an artistic triumph and a marketing disaster. Crime readers don’t buy graphic novels. The British don’t really buy graphic novels. The rare slip-cased edition was a delight and is now fetching high enough prices to make me wish I’d hung on to a couple.
THE BLEEDING HEART
In Which Mr May Faces Premature Burial
And Mr Bryant Confronts His Childhood Fears
It was a fresh start for Bryant and May and the Peculiar Crimes Unit. Teenager Romain Curtis saw a dead man rising from his grave in a London park and heard him speak. The next night, Romain was killed in a hit-and-run accident. Stranger still, in the minutes between when he was last seen alive and found dead on the pavement, someone changed the boy’s shirt.
But Arthur Bryant was not allowed to investigate. Instead, he was sent off to find out how someone could have stolen the ravens from the Tower of London. It appeared that all seven birds had been snatched from one of the most secure buildings in the city. And legend says that when the ravens leave, the nation falls.
Meanwhile, the PCU uncovered a group of latter-day bodysnatchers, visited a strange funeral home and went to Bleeding Heart Yard, where a gruesome London legend involving a heart pierced with arrows seemed connected to the crime …
Death was all around. More graves were desecrated, there was another bizarre murder and the symbol of the Bleeding Heart started turning up everywhere. It was even discovered hidden in the detectives’ offices. It seemed as if the Grim Reaper was stalking Bryant, playing on his fears of premature burial …
BRYANT I must take this call. If anyone wants me I shall be in my boudoir.
RAYMOND LAND You haven’t got a boudoir, you’ve got an office!
Backstory
Some of the tiniest London parks have gravestones in them that go unnoticed. Tie that fact to the city’s true history of bodysnatching, and you have a really creepy case. Then I had lunch with my publisher at Bleeding Heart Yard and heard the truth about Dickens and the legendary ghost said to haunt the area. At the same time I had dinner with the warders in the Tower of London, and they told me something about the ravens that would not have occurred to most people. Suddenly I had the makings of two impossible crimes: how could seven ravens vanish? They’re huge! And how could a corpse walk and talk? The solution to the latter came to me after visiting a very unusual vault … the finished novel ended up being full of surprises, even involving the staff cat.
THE BURNING MAN
In Which Mr May Finds a Firestarter
And Mr Bryant Misplaces His Mind
London fell under a very modern siege. A banking scandal filled the city with violent protests, and as the anger in the streets detonated, a young homeless man burned to death after being caught in the crossfire between rioters and the police.
But all was not as it seemed; an opportunistic killer used the chaos to exact revenge, but his intended victims were so mysteriously chosen that the Peculiar Crimes Unit had to be called in to find a way of stopping him.
Using their network of eccentric contacts, Arthur Bryant and John May hunted down a murderer who adopted incendiary methods of execution. But they found their investigation taking an apocalyptic turn as the case came to involve the history of mob rule, corruption, rebellion, punishment and the legend of Guy Fawkes.
At the same time, several members of the PCU team reached dramatic turning points in their lives – but the most personal tragedy was yet to come, for as the race to bring down a cunning killer reached its climax, Arthur Bryant faced his own devastating day of reckoning.
BRYANT People are sick of being treated as if they’re invisible, fit only to be used up and cast aside like any other exhausted commodity. The uprising is coming from something deep inside us, all of us.
MAY Funny how upset you got when someone knifed the tyres on your Mini.
BRYANT That’s different. One should never confuse legitimate protest with vandalism.
Backstory
‘Tor
n from today’s headlines’ just about covers it. While I was thinking about a Bryant & May story that would be relevant to what was happening on the streets of London, I headed to a theatre matinée one Saturday afternoon and found the building engulfed in fire. Outside, police and protestors were clashing over the latest banking scandal, Occupy London was involved in the ensuing riot and shops were being smashed and set alight. Inside, the oblivious audience were watching a restoration comedy of English manners, She Stoops to Conquer. The scene was too bizarre to be believed, and from it I got the basics of The Burning Man. There was one plot casualty: I cut a new character who was terrific fun in order to improve the pace of the book. I’m saving him for a later date.
Bankers prove an irresistible target; the story of King Mob and the history of London rioting fitted neatly with press articles about the downfall of a prominent banker, and also tied together with a once-ubiquitous calendar event: Guy Fawkes’ Night, which survives in the shires but is vanishing from London, except for large council-organized displays. No longer do children ask for a ‘Penny for the guy’ on street corners, and backyard bonfires are largely forbidden.
But I wanted something more from this twelfth volume. It was a chance to dig a little deeper into the lives of the characters and spend as much time with them as I did with the mechanics of the plot. I’m addicted to change, and felt it was time to burn a few bridges. What ended up getting burned this time was London itself. And so the twelve volumes came full circle with another conflagration, and two carefully planned six-volume story arcs dovetailed. The first story arc had involved a Ministry of Defence conspiracy based on a number of real incidents involving the suicides of several MoD workers. By this time I realized I had created a weird subgenre of my own, not as comfortable as ‘cosy’, fanciful but within the realms of possibility.
The individual novels are designed to stand alone and be read in just about any order except for On the Loose and Off the Rails, which I think benefit from being read one after the other. What will happen next? Well, I’ve given you all the clues …
ARTHUR BRYANT’S SECRET LIBRARY
Arthur Bryant uses his collection of rare, abstruse and deeply peculiar books to help him solve cases. Here are some of the bizarre volumes to be found on his shelves. (NB: Not all of these titles are imaginary; I’ll leave you to work out which ones are real.)
Bats of the British Isles
The Everyman Book of Wartime First Aid (with haddock bone bookmark)
Common Folk Remedies of the Onka-Wooka Tribe
How to Perform Occult Rites Using Everyday Kitchen Items
Incurable & Unnatural Vices of the Third Sex
Fifty Thrifty Cheese Recipes
Nachtkultur and Metatropism
How to Spot German and Italian Aircraft
Whither Wicca? The Future of Pagan Cults
The Apocryphal Books of the Dead
Tibetan Skulls and Their Supernatural Uses
Mystical Diagrams of Solomon’s Temple (Colouring-in edition)
Criminal Records from Newgate Gaol (32 volumes)
Kabalistic Pentagrams of the Absolute
Seymour’s British Witchcraft and Demonology (Rare, limited edition)
RAF Slang Made Easy (Uncensored paperback edition)
The East Anglican Book of Civil Magicke
Gardening Secrets of Curates’ Wives (Privately circulated volume)
The Oxford Handbook of Criminology (First edition)
Mayhew’s London Characters and Crooks
J. R. Hanslet’s All of Them Witches
Deitleff’s Psychic Experience in the Weimar Republic
Another Fifty Thrifty Cheese Recipes
Brackleson’s Stoat-Breeding for Intermediates
The Luddite’s Guide to the Internet
Me & Chaos Theory, by Arthur himself
The History of Gog and Magog
Dental Evidence in Body Identification (Volume 1: Bridgework)
The Vanished Rivers of London
The Mammoth Book of Druid Lore
Great Boiler Explosions of the Ukraine
The British Catalogue of Victorian Naval Signals
The Fall of Jonathan Wild, Thief-Taker
Tribal Scarification (Volume 3: M–R)
London’s Most Notorious Highwaymen
Ordnance Survey map of London (1911 edition)
Malleus Maleficarum (The Witches’ Hammer) (1486 edition)
The 1645 Omens of the Apocalypse
Grow Your Own Hemp
The Beano Christmas Annual, 1968
Laugh, I Thought I’d Die: Reincarnation and Comedy
Victorian Water Closets: A Social History
Sumerian Religious Beliefs and Legends
Colonic Exercises for Asthmatics
Shazam! The Adventures of Captain Marvel
Mend Your Own Pipes!
Pornography and Paganism
Courtship Rituals of Papua New Guinea
Codebreaking in Braille
A History of Welsh Vivisection
The Secret Life of London’s Public Houses
Yoruba Proverbs
The Anatomy of Melancholia
Further Thrifty Cheese Recipes (Edam and Red Leicester only)
Embalming Under Lenin
Cormorant-Sexing for Beginners
Apocalypsis Revelata (Volume 2)
A Complete History of the Trouser-Press
Financial Accounts for the Swedish Mining Board, Years 1745–53
The Pictorial Guide to Chairman Mao Alarm Clocks
Letts Schoolboy Diary, 1952
Secret Codes & Urban Semiotics in Viennese Street Names
An Informal History of the Black Death
Intestinal Parasites (Volume 2)
British Boundary Lines, 1066–1700
A Guide to the Cumberland Pencil Museum
Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers
The Pictorial Dictionary of Barbed Wire
Collectible Spoons of the Third Reich
Patient files for the Royal Bethlehem Hospital, Moorgate, 1723–33
The Time Out Guide to Alternative London, 1971
Mind the Ghosts: The London Underground & the Spirit World
Conjuring & Tricks With Cards (Volumes 1–6)
Mortar and Mortality: Who Died In Your House? (1923 edition)
Intestinal Funguses (Volume 3)
A User’s Guide to Norwegian Sewing Machines
The Complete Compendium of Lice
Cross-Stitching in the Time of Edward the Confessor
Hungarian–British Trade Fairs of the 1950s
The International Handbook of Underwater Acoustics
Across Europe with a Kangaroo
The Complete Works of Edward Bulwer-Lytton in Braille
Churchill’s Favourite Engineering Problems
Recreating Renaissance Masterpieces with Cheese
Bombproofing for Beginners
An Informal History of Cow-Staining
Stipendiary Justice in Nineteenth-Century Wales
Unusual Punishments for Sodomy (Volume 13: Northern Portugal)
How to Cook Bats
Take My Wife, Please: Negotiation Techniques in Abduction Cases
NB. Some of the above titles are real.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I blame Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for this book’s existence. He mentioned a number of his consulting detective’s missing cases in the pages of the Sherlock Holmes stories, and these were later explored in more detail by his son Adrian Conan Doyle and co-writer John Dickson Carr in The Exploits of Sherlock Holmes. Over the years a number of Bryant & May investigations have been mentioned in passing but not unearthed, and it seemed like the perfect time to look into them.
I can’t quite remember whose idea it actually was, but between the unholy triumvirate of my editor Simon Taylor and my agents Mandy Little and James Wills (or possibly even me), the idea was born and is here in your hands. Easing it int
o print were Kate Samano, Lynsey Dalladay and Sophie Christopher. I’d also like to thank the book clubs, bloggers, librarians and booksellers who have supported me over the years – you know who you are. Let me know if you’d like to see more cases at www.christopherfowler.co.uk.
About the Author
Christopher Fowler is the award-winning author of more than forty novels – including twelve featuring the detectives Bryant and May and the Peculiar Crimes Unit – and short-story collections. The recipient of the coveted CWA ‘Dagger in the Library’ Award for 2015, his most recent book is the Ballard-esque thriller The Sand Men. Other works include screenplays, video games, graphic novels and audio plays. His weekly column ‘Invisible Ink’ runs in the Independent on Sunday. He lives in King’s Cross, London, and Barcelona.
Also by Christopher Fowler,
featuring Bryant & May
FULL DARK HOUSE
THE WATER ROOM
SEVENTY-SEVEN CLOCKS
TEN-SECOND STAIRCASE
WHITE CORRIDOR
THE VICTORIA VANISHES
BRYANT & MAY ON THE LOOSE
BRYANT & MAY OFF THE RAILS
BRYANT & MAY AND THE MEMORY OF BLOOD
BRYANT & MAY AND THE INVISIBLE CODE
BRYANT & MAY: THE BLEEDING HEART
Bryant & May - London's Glory: (Short Stories) (Bryant & May Collection) Page 23
