Bryant & May - London's Glory: (Short Stories) (Bryant & May Collection) Read Free

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.
    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