Bryant & May - London's Glory: (Short Stories) (Bryant & May Collection) (29 page)

DOCTOR
You need to start acting your age, Mr Bryant.

BRYANT
If I did that, I’d be dead.

There are certain places in London that remain relatively unchanged, even now. I had long wanted to write something partly set in a London church, and here I had the perfect setting of St Bride’s, which proved to have a fascinating history (lead coffins! bombings!) that I could use. Soon I had Bryant and May investigating the strange story of Bedlam.

The trick, I suppose, was not to overload the narrative with history but to balance the fun with genuinely intriguing facts. The idea of codes had a double meaning: the Bletchley Park kind and the more secretive code of ‘fitting in’ in London, a device used by the upper classes to keep foreigners in their place.

Two illustrated untold cases for Bryant and May, ‘The Soho Devil’, which sees them coming face-to-face with a clown cult and a runaway rhino, and ‘The Severed Claw’, in which they go up the Telecom Tower to search for a celebrity’s missing hand.

BRYANT
Why do women always do that thing with you?

MAY
What thing?

BRYANT
The gooey-eyes.

MAY
They sense my charisma.

BRYANT
Smell your aftershave, more like.

I’m a huge comics fan, and had always wanted to create a comic version of the
Bryant & May
stories. Artist Keith Page was ideal for the job and the finished artwork was sumptuous. Keith modelled Arthur Bryant on photographs of my deceased business partner, so looking at the panels was rather eerie. The result was an artistic triumph and a marketing disaster. Crime readers don’t buy graphic novels. The
British
don’t really buy graphic novels. The rare slip-cased edition was a delight and is now fetching high enough prices to make me wish I’d hung on to a couple.

It was a fresh start for Bryant and May and the Peculiar Crimes Unit. Teenager Romain Curtis saw a dead man rising from his grave in a London park and heard him speak. The next night, Romain was killed in a hit-and-run accident. Stranger still, in the minutes between when he was last seen alive and found dead on the pavement, someone changed the boy’s shirt.

But Arthur Bryant was not allowed to investigate. Instead, he was sent off to find out how someone could have stolen the ravens from the Tower of London. It appeared that all seven birds had been snatched from one of the most secure buildings in the city. And legend says that when the ravens leave, the nation falls.

Meanwhile, the PCU uncovered a group of latter-day bodysnatchers, visited a strange funeral home and went to Bleeding Heart Yard, where a gruesome London legend involving a heart pierced with arrows seemed connected to the crime …

Death was all around. More graves were desecrated, there was another bizarre murder and the symbol of the Bleeding Heart started turning up everywhere. It was even discovered hidden in the detectives’ offices. It seemed as if the Grim Reaper was stalking Bryant, playing on his fears of premature burial …

BRYANT
I must take this call. If anyone wants me I shall be in my boudoir.

RAYMOND LAND
You haven’t got a boudoir, you’ve got an office!

Some of the tiniest London parks have gravestones in them that go unnoticed. Tie that fact to the city’s true history of bodysnatching, and you have a really creepy case. Then I had lunch with my publisher at Bleeding Heart Yard and heard the truth about Dickens and the legendary ghost said to haunt the area. At the same time I had dinner with the warders in the Tower of London, and they told me something about the ravens that would not have occurred to most people. Suddenly I had the makings of two impossible crimes: how could seven ravens vanish? They’re huge! And how could a corpse walk and talk? The solution to the latter came to me after visiting a very unusual vault … the finished novel ended up being full of surprises, even involving the staff cat.

London fell under a very modern siege. A banking scandal filled the city with violent protests, and as the anger in the streets detonated, a young homeless man burned to death after being caught in the crossfire between rioters and the police.

But all was not as it seemed; an opportunistic killer used the chaos to exact revenge, but his intended victims were so mysteriously chosen that the Peculiar Crimes Unit had to be called in to find a way of stopping him.

Using their network of eccentric contacts, Arthur Bryant and John May hunted down a murderer who adopted incendiary methods of execution. But they found their investigation taking an apocalyptic turn as the case came to involve the history of mob rule, corruption, rebellion, punishment and the legend of Guy Fawkes.

At the same time, several members of the PCU team reached dramatic turning points in their lives – but the most personal tragedy was yet to come, for as the race to bring down a cunning killer reached its climax, Arthur Bryant faced his own devastating day of reckoning.

BRYANT
People are sick of being treated as if they’re invisible, fit only to be used up and cast aside like any other exhausted commodity. The uprising is coming from something deep inside us, all of us.

MAY
Funny how upset you got when someone knifed the tyres on your Mini.

BRYANT
That’s different. One should never confuse legitimate protest with vandalism.

‘Torn from today’s headlines’ just about covers it. While I was thinking about a Bryant & May story that would be relevant to what was happening on the streets of London, I headed to a theatre matinée one Saturday afternoon and found the building engulfed in fire. Outside, police and protestors were clashing over the latest banking scandal, Occupy London was involved in the ensuing riot and shops were being smashed and set alight. Inside, the oblivious audience were watching a restoration comedy of English manners,
She Stoops to Conquer
. The scene was too bizarre to be believed, and from it I got the basics of
The Burning Man
. There was one plot casualty: I cut a new character who was terrific fun in order to improve the pace of the book. I’m saving him for a later date.

Bankers prove an irresistible target; the story of King Mob and the history of London rioting fitted neatly with press articles about the downfall of a prominent banker, and also tied together with a once-ubiquitous calendar event: Guy Fawkes’ Night, which survives in the shires but is vanishing from London, except for large council-organized displays. No longer do children ask for a ‘Penny for the guy’ on street corners, and backyard bonfires are largely forbidden.

But I wanted something more from this twelfth volume. It was a chance to dig a little deeper into the lives of the characters and spend as much time with them as I did with the mechanics of the plot. I’m addicted to change, and felt it was time to burn a few bridges. What ended up getting burned this time was London itself. And so the twelve volumes came full circle with another conflagration, and two carefully planned six-volume story arcs dovetailed. The first story arc had involved a Ministry of Defence conspiracy based on a number of real incidents involving the suicides of several MoD workers. By this time I realized I had created a weird subgenre of my own, not as comfortable as ‘cosy’, fanciful but within the realms of possibility.

The individual novels are designed to stand alone and be read in just about any order except for
On the Loose
and
Off the Rails
, which I think benefit from being read one after the other. What will happen next? Well, I’ve given you all the clues …

Arthur Bryant uses his collection of rare, abstruse and deeply peculiar books to help him solve cases. Here are some of the bizarre volumes to be found on his shelves. (NB: Not all of these titles are imaginary; I’ll leave you to work out which ones are real.)

Bats of the British Isles

The Everyman Book of Wartime First Aid
(with haddock bone bookmark)

Common Folk Remedies of the Onka-Wooka Tribe

How to Perform Occult Rites Using Everyday Kitchen Items

Incurable & Unnatural Vices of the Third Sex

Fifty Thrifty Cheese Recipes

Nachtkultur and Metatropism

How to Spot German and Italian Aircraft

Whither Wicca? The Future of Pagan Cults

The Apocryphal Books of the Dead

Tibetan Skulls and Their Supernatural Uses

Mystical Diagrams of Solomon’s Temple
(Colouring-in edition)

Criminal Records from Newgate Gaol
(32 volumes)

Kabalistic Pentagrams of the Absolute

Seymour’s
British Witchcraft and Demonology
(Rare, limited edition)

RAF Slang Made Easy
(Uncensored paperback edition)

The East Anglican Book of Civil Magicke

Gardening Secrets of Curates’ Wives
(Privately circulated volume)

The Oxford Handbook of Criminology
(First edition)

Mayhew’s
London Characters and Crooks

J. R. Hanslet’s
All of Them Witches

Deitleff’s
Psychic Experience in the Weimar Republic

Another Fifty Thrifty Cheese Recipes

Brackleson’s
Stoat-Breeding for Intermediates

The Luddite’s Guide to the Internet

Me & Chaos Theory
, by Arthur himself

The History of Gog and Magog

Dental Evidence in Body Identification
(Volume 1:
Bridgework
)

The Vanished Rivers of London

The Mammoth Book of Druid Lore

Great Boiler Explosions of the Ukraine

The British Catalogue of Victorian Naval Signals

The Fall of Jonathan Wild, Thief-Taker

Tribal Scarification
(Volume 3:
M–R
)

London’s Most Notorious Highwaymen

Ordnance Survey map of London (1911 edition)

Malleus Maleficarum
(
The Witches’ Hammer
) (1486 edition)

The 1645 Omens of the Apocalypse

Grow Your Own Hemp

The Beano Christmas Annual, 1968

Laugh, I Thought I’d Die: Reincarnation and Comedy

Victorian Water Closets: A Social History

Sumerian Religious Beliefs and Legends

Colonic Exercises for Asthmatics

Shazam! The Adventures of Captain Marvel

Mend Your Own Pipes!

Pornography and Paganism

Courtship Rituals of Papua New Guinea

Codebreaking in Braille

A History of Welsh Vivisection

The Secret Life of London’s Public Houses

Yoruba Proverbs

The Anatomy of Melancholia

Further Thrifty Cheese Recipes
(Edam and Red Leicester only)

Embalming Under Lenin

Cormorant-Sexing for Beginners

Apocalypsis Revelata
(Volume 2)

A Complete History of the Trouser-Press

Financial Accounts for the Swedish Mining Board, Years 1745–53

The Pictorial Guide to Chairman Mao Alarm Clocks

Letts Schoolboy Diary, 1952

Secret Codes & Urban Semiotics in Viennese Street Names

An Informal History of the Black Death

Intestinal Parasites
(Volume 2)

British Boundary Lines, 1066–1700

A Guide to the Cumberland Pencil Museum

Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers

The Pictorial Dictionary of Barbed Wire

Collectible Spoons of the Third Reich

Patient files for the Royal Bethlehem Hospital, Moorgate, 1723–33

The Time Out Guide to Alternative London, 1971

Mind the Ghosts: The London Underground & the Spirit World

Conjuring & Tricks With Cards
(Volumes 1–6)

Mortar and Mortality: Who Died In Your House?
(1923 edition)

Intestinal Funguses
(Volume 3)

A User’s Guide to Norwegian Sewing Machines

The Complete Compendium of Lice

Cross-Stitching in the Time of Edward the Confessor

Hungarian–British Trade Fairs of the 1950s

The International Handbook of Underwater Acoustics

Across Europe with a Kangaroo

The Complete Works of Edward Bulwer-Lytton in Braille

Churchill’s Favourite Engineering Problems

Recreating Renaissance Masterpieces with Cheese

Bombproofing for Beginners

An Informal History of Cow-Staining

Stipendiary Justice in Nineteenth-Century Wales

Unusual Punishments for Sodomy
(Volume 13:
Northern Portugal
)