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

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 & Ma
y
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