How does a writer create a memorable 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. I decided that London would be the third character; not the tourist city of guidebooks but the city of invisible societies, hidden parks and drunken theatricals, the people and places I show to friends when they visit.
By making my own detectives old, I could make them simultaneously behave like experienced adults and immature children. Bryant, I knew, came from Whitechapel, was tortoise-like, scarf-wrapped, 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, miserable, erudite, bookish, while his 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.
Every night, the detectives would 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 great ferris wheel of the London Eye lending it a raffish fairground feel.
The hardest part was accepting the fact that after writing over 20 books I was once again a first-timer. 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 co-ordination 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. PC Ruby Gates in the St Trinians films was played by Joyce Grenfell. It was a very funny idea to have a lovestruck constable missing police broadcasts because she had retuned her radio to a romantic music station. There was also a hilariously stern WPC in a Norman Wisdom film who was forced to operate undercover in a hairdressing salon, and had to keep getting her hair permed to garner more information. Somehow, those characters, combined with Diana Dors and bits of people I knew, transformed into Janice Longbright.
I stuck by my character outlines, even though a couple of interviewers told me I should have made my characters 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 the odd killer serious moment.
The trouble with this is that, as Galton & Simpson once said, ‘People respect you more when you don’t get laughs.’ I think if the books played it absolutely straight, they would have wider appeal, but I’m not writing the series for supermarket shelves. I linked the Bryant & May novels with compounding clues and recurring characters as reward-points for loyal readers. 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.
The first of these ‘Golden Age detectives meet the modern world’-type mysteries was a success, and I got a two-book deal. For the second volume, ‘The Water Room’, the research was literally on my doorstep; my house was built on top of London’s forgotten rivers, so my tale concerned a woman found drowned in a completely dry room. The location was based on my old house, which sits over the River Fleet. You could often hear rushing water under the rooms. 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. ’77 Clocks’ is an adventure in the style 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, demonised 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 began with a cheeky homage to Edmund Crispin, then dived into the hidden secrets of London pubs. When you’ve got nicely established characters your readers root for, you can start playing games. The mysteries may look like ‘cosies’, but I’ve had Bryant & May release illegal immigrants into the social system, illegally disrupt government offices and even commit acts of terrorism in order to see that justice is done. This isn’t particularly profound stuff, but it’s real enough to place the stories just inside a world of recognizable prejudices.
In the latest instalments, ‘Bryant & May On The Loose’ digs into the murky world of land ownership in London, and ‘Bryant & May Off The Rails’ does something similar for the underground system. ‘The Memory Of Blood’ looks at how the English subverted the legend of Punch & Judy to their own ends. This year there’ll be a another volume, and it will tackle the class system from an unusual angle.
I fight to keep the series alive, but I’ve been supported by a good editor at Transworld who believes in quality over quantity. Still, I blog on my website every day for an hour and a half to encourage conversation about books in general, because an author who loses sight of his audiences is dead. The days of authors sitting back and letting their work and their publishers speak for them has gone, and now the onus is on us to deliver readership. As books are pre-chosen for promotion by publishers, and most titles don’t get the benefit of a Dan Brown budget, I need to stay on the social networks.
The Bryant & May series should never have worked. The good news is that there are now ten volumes and a graphic novel called ‘The Bryant & May Casebook’ comes out in November, so I did find a discerning readership. Did I succeed in creating memorable detectives? Only time will tell. But if having fun while unlocking knowledge is any sign of accomplishment, I guess the Bryant & May files will remain open for some time yet.
So far, in the process of finding Bryant & May subjects for investigation, I’ve so far covered the Blitz, London 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, Clerj]kenweel and the Knights Templar, and have created dozens of eccentric characters to elucidate on these topics to the police.
I hope the series continues, but in case it doesn’t I’m writing many other types of book. About a third of everything I write to a highly finished standard doesn’t get published. These books and stories go into drawers or onto flash drives, with the hope that they’ll one day find a readership. Readers are funny, though. They’ll accept, for example, that a murderer is stalking London according to the rules of a Victorian tontine, but will ask why they detectives aren’t ageing in real time. If you’re wondering how I cope with the fact that Bryant & May are ancient and getting older, I had a suitably outrageous solution for that too, in 'The Memory of Blood'.
How does a writer create a memorable 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. I decided that London would be the third character; not the tourist city of guidebooks but the city of invisible societies, hidden parks and drunken theatricals, the people and places I show to friends when they visit.
By making my own detectives old, I could make them simultaneously behave like experienced adults and immature children. Bryant, I knew, came from Whitechapel, was tortoise-like, scarf-wrapped, 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, miserable, erudite, bookish, while his 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.
Every night, the detectives would 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 great ferris wheel of the London Eye lending it a raffish fairground feel.
The hardest part was accepting the fact that after writing over 20 books I was once again a first-timer. 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 co-ordination 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. PC Ruby Gates in the St Trinians films was played by Joyce Grenfell. It was a very funny idea to have a lovestruck constable missing police broadcasts because she had retuned her radio to a romantic music station. There was also a hilariously stern WPC in a Norman Wisdom film who was forced to operate undercover in a hairdressing salon, and had to keep getting her hair permed to garner more information. Somehow, those characters, combined with Diana Dors and bits of people I knew, transformed into Janice Longbright.
I stuck by my character outlines, even though a couple of interviewers told me I should have made my characters 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 the odd killer serious moment.
The trouble with this is that, as Galton & Simpson once said, ‘People respect you more when you don’t get laughs.’ I think if the books played it absolutely straight, they would have wider appeal, but I’m not writing the series for supermarket shelves. I linked the Bryant & May novels with compounding clues and recurring characters as reward-points for loyal readers. 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.
The first of these ‘Golden Age detectives meet the modern world’-type mysteries was a success, and I got a two-book deal. For the second volume, ‘The Water Room’, the research was literally on my doorstep; my house was built on top of London’s forgotten rivers, so my tale concerned a woman found drowned in a completely dry room. The location was based on my old house, which sits over the River Fleet. You could often hear rushing water under the rooms. 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. ’77 Clocks’ is an adventure in the style 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, demonised 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 began with a cheeky homage to Edmund Crispin, then dived into the hidden secrets of London pubs. When you’ve got nicely established characters your readers root for, you can start playing games. The mysteries may look like ‘cosies’, but I’ve had Bryant & May release illegal immigrants into the social system, illegally disrupt government offices and even commit acts of terrorism in order to see that justice is done. This isn’t particularly profound stuff, but it’s real enough to place the stories just inside a world of recognizable prejudices.
In the latest instalments, ‘Bryant & May On The Loose’ digs into the murky world of land ownership in London, and ‘Bryant & May Off The Rails’ does something similar for the underground system. ‘The Memory Of Blood’ looks at how the English subverted the legend of Punch & Judy to their own ends. This year there’ll be a another volume, and it will tackle the class system from an unusual angle.
I fight to keep the series alive, but I’ve been supported by a good editor at Transworld who believes in quality over quantity. Still, I blog on my website every day for an hour and a half to encourage conversation about books in general, because an author who loses sight of his audiences is dead. The days of authors sitting back and letting their work and their publishers speak for them has gone, and now the onus is on us to deliver readership. As books are pre-chosen for promotion by publishers, and most titles don’t get the benefit of a Dan Brown budget, I need to stay on the social networks.
The Bryant & May series should never have worked. The good news is that there are now ten volumes and a graphic novel called ‘The Bryant & May Casebook’ comes out in November, so I did find a discerning readership. Did I succeed in creating memorable detectives? Only time will tell. But if having fun while unlocking knowledge is any sign of accomplishment, I guess the Bryant & May files will remain open for some time yet.
So far, in the process of finding Bryant & May subjects for investigation, I’ve so far covered the Blitz, London 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, Clerj]kenweel and the Knights Templar, and have created dozens of eccentric characters to elucidate on these topics to the police.
I hope the series continues, but in case it doesn’t I’m writing many other types of book. About a third of everything I write to a highly finished standard doesn’t get published. These books and stories go into drawers or onto flash drives, with the hope that they’ll one day find a readership. Readers are funny, though. They’ll accept, for example, that a murderer is stalking London according to the rules of a Victorian tontine, but will ask why they detectives aren’t ageing in real time. If you’re wondering how I cope with the fact that Bryant & May are ancient and getting older, I had a suitably outrageous solution for that too, in 'The Memory of Blood'.