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

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