The excellent black and white Bryant & May artwork is by artist Keith Page.
New readers of the series can start here and get a little bit of history about my detective duo. The list of books at the end is in the correct chronological order in which they appear, although the books can be read in any order – in fact, I encourage new readers to jump around in the series…
Bryant & May are a pair of elderly, argumentative detectives who work in London’s Peculiar Crimes Unit. The names Bryant and May are instantly recognisable to many who remember boxes of Bryant & May matches. The Peculiar Crimes Unit is a police division founded during the Second World War to investigate cases that could cause public unrest. This isn’t so far-fetched as several such units were founded during the war. There was a great deal of experimentation with crime, communication and scientific units at the time – my father belonged to one such unit. These men and women were all in their late teens and early twenties, and were encouraged to think in radical new directions.
So, many years down the line, my books find Bryant and May past their retirement age, heading a team of equally unusual misfits who are just as likely to commit crimes as solve them. They’re all based above a London tube station, and led by the technophobic, irascible Bryant and smooth-talking modernist John May.
My idea was to take the classic English murder mystery and reinvent it for modern times. Those old stories were written for the well-heeled middle classes, and can seem rather smug now, so I take a more enlightened approach to subjects like class, race and government interference in our lives, adding a little social comment to my locked-room mysteries and whodunnits.
As a kid I was always drawn to creepy stories and tales of London. I knew that the streets of the ancient city followed the lines of hedgerows and underground rivers. The lowlands were poor areas largely because they were damp. Water and fog brought illness and early deaths created superstitions; that’s why ghost stories were more associated with say, the poor East End than the prosperous North of the city. The London of my early childhood was a city of ghosts.
I was fascinated by the city’s underground rivers and lost theatres, its secret societies and private clubs. Over the years, a little digging has produced some wonderful results – it seems everyone likes to talk about their particular kingdoms. So I found I’d stumbled on a goldmine for my fiction. I met the elderly archivist of the Palace Theatre, where the Marx Brothers and Fred Astaire had performed. The guardian of the Goldsmiths Hall showed me the throne of a Roman goddess and she expressed surprise that anyone should be interested. I spoke to a Police Officer whose beat took her through the site of a lost Pagan temple. Londoners in particular love to share this stuff.
Whenever I do a signing in a bookstore, there’s always someone in the queue who will say something like ‘Did you know there’s a statue of Mercury hidden on top of a fish shop near here?’ And I’ll set out to find it, and discover why it’s there. London’s peculiarities are peppered through all my books, and the most unbelievable parts of the stories are often the truest. I make up very little of the background material.
I never show anyone work in progress, but always deliver the book completely finished. I’d already written about 25 books before embarking on a mystery series. I like to change styles and genres to keep me fresh. People always ask me how hard it is to surprise readers with the solution to a mystery. There’s a wonderful quote by Barnes Wallis, the man who invented the bouncing bomb that blew up the impregnable German dams featured in the classic war movie ‘The Dam Busters’. He said that there’s nothing more satisfying than showing that something is impossible, then proving how it can be done. And for me, that’s the appeal. I loved many of the great classic mystery writers, from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to John Dickson Carr, GK Chesterton, Stanley Ellin, and the rather forgotten Edmund Crispin. But I also like authors such as James Lee Patterson and James Ellroy.
The pair are surrounded by a gallery of characters who might seem very unusual, but most are based on friends of mine. I often add the characters of people I’ve just met, or even readers who have written to me. I always write three drafts of a book, and this usually comes out to 50 chapters. My first draft is about getting the characters through the plot, the second is where I add colour to the events, and the third is for improving my use of language. My favourite part of the process is sitting down to write the second draft, as I’m doing at the moment. My study overlooks St Paul’s Cathedral, a building that’s a great inspiration for any writer. My aim is always to try and create entertainment on every single page, and leave the reader with a little food for thought at the end. If I’ve achieved that, it feels like a job well done.
