Bryant and May
‘The Lonely Hour’, Bryant & May’s latest murder mystery, is out in paperback from today. I won’t be celebrating as I’m fasting prior to a hospital exploration – bad timing perhaps but life is full of bad timing, n’est pas? If you’re planning to buy a copy, you can help your local bookshop by ordering through […]
Dear diary, this week was rather more up and down than I’d hoped for. I bounced back from a debilitating virus that had lingered since January only to be knocked over by a courier bike in Bloomsbury, and am now laid up with a torn thigh muscle. But I’m doing better than my freelance friends […]
I now have a publication date for ‘Oranges & Lemons’, the next Bryant & May mystery. It’ll be out on July 23rd in time for your summer holiday reading. That’s a tad later than usual because last year there were two new B&Ms, so the paperback versions of both ‘The Lonely Hour’ and ‘England’s Finest’ […]
‘It’s all stored away up here.’ Arthur Bryant tapped his temple. ‘My head’s like an attic full of ephemera, old record albums, paperbacks you can’t bear to throw out and those moulds dentists used to make of your teeth.’ May sighed and pulled his chair closer to his desk. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘do you want […]
Over the years I’ve come to think of the commenters on this site as friends and relatives, albeit quirky and occasionally annoying ones like your auntie who drank too much gin on Christmas Day and didn’t make it to the bathroom. I still miss Mike Cane, Dan Terrell, Anne Hill Fernie and many others. What […]
ARTHUR BRYANT: ‘I once considered having a tattoo on my right bicep but I couldn’t make up my mind between Sir Robert Peel or Diana Dors.’ There are two required traits for any career writer, originality and consistency (and patience. THREE things, originality, consistency, patience and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope – FOUR […]
The sun was starting to set here in Barcelona – it will set almost an hour earlier by the end of this month, but for now it’s still 27C outside, even though some Spaniards have decided it’s autumn and are wearing black, maroon and grey puffa-jackets. I put the wine in the fridge (Spanish wines […]
Monty Python understood a key national trait. The British don’t hate. We dislike, we are annoyed, or we Don’t Care Terribly Much For This Sort Of Thing. We rather like silly. But thanks to a set of algorithms that placed a tiny number of confused questionnaire-answerers into the grasping hands of an even tinier […]
I had always imagined – and been fully prepared – to turn into my creation one day, even though I’d originally intended to become John May. When you spend so long inside someone else’s mind it becomes second nature to compare and contrast their nature with your own. I hadn’t expected to be trapped with […]
I’ve described the struggles of creating a long-term detective series, and you sent back some very interesting comments, so let me go through some of the main points. The idea of favouring Bryant over May goes to the heart of the problem with a series. There has always been a weight toward Bryant because every […]
