I’ve always reckoned that Arthur Bryant and John
May are Golden Age detectives who’ve been left behind in the modern world. By
now quite a few readers know that they head the Peculiar Crimes Unit, London’s oldest
specialist police team, a division founded during WWII to investigate cases
that could cause national scandal or public unrest. (I got the idea because my scientist
father worked in something very similar.)
The latest volume, ‘Hall of Mirrors’, is the 16th
featuring my senior detectives. This one is set in swinging London, when the
detectives were young and energetic - they’re always playing silly word games,
which I had great fun constructing - and
are tackling a proper country house murder.
Except that this being a Bryant & May novel,
it’s neither a traditional Christie-esque take, nor a postmodern pastiche. It’s
a fair-play murder mystery with a little something to say about the time’s social
politics, set at the end of the country house era, as lords die off and hippy
squatters move in. The grand homes of England had become insolvent and their
owners were desperate to offload them. They vanished at a phenomenal rate; some
1,200 were torn down. By the 1960s the remainder were in their death throes.
They say if you can remember the sixties you
weren't there. I wasn't. By which I mean I was at school, buried in history
books, some of which had last been taken out in 1873. I didn't get taken
out until 1973. By which time the swinging sixties had ceased to swing and were
left dangling, as Mr Edward Heath, the bachelor yachtsman, took the helm and
ran the SS Britannia aground. The idealistic dreams of the sixties were abandoned.
So of course I wanted to write about it, and drop
my detectives into that world. Bryant is already unable to adjust to the new
swinging era, while May fits into it perfectly and loves every minute.
I have writer friends who are on their third or
fourth book in a crime series and worry about running out of things to make
their detectives do. I never seem to hit that problem because there are so many
types of crime novel, and I use the series to explore all the different
sub-genres – so in a way I’m not writing a series but inserting familiar
characters into a set of crime novels.
The trick with a whodunnit-inspired tale is to
avoid the boredom that leaves us stranded on say, a train while a detective
interviews every suspect in clockwork rotation before announcing the killer.
The answer, I came to realise, is not to trick out the tale with chases but to
make the characters enjoyable to be with and very much of the era. This latest
volumes turned out to be the most fun I’ve had yet.
When you read a murder mystery, do you read it to
find out who did it, or because you like the main character? I don’t usually
care very much who the murderer was. I can name only three of Agatha Christie’s
villains but I know exactly what Poirot and Miss Marple are like. Detectives
always need to have something memorable about themselves. Sherlock Holmes has
his deductive powers, Miss Marple listened to village gossip. Arthur Bryant
uses his age to get away with being extremely blunt, erratic and annoying. So I
thought it would be interesting to see him as a young man, where the seeds of
later life are already sprouting.
I’ve also started writing under a pseudonym, LK
Fox, so that I can produce some darker crime novels. I read a lot of murder
mysteries, old and new, and it’s a thrill when a real knockout comes along, like ‘The Dry’, ‘Dodgers’ or
‘Snowdrops’. They make me realise
there’s so much more to aspire to in the crime genre. I won’t dumb down and I
don’t care for procedural crime because it’s done so well on TV. I admire the
outrageous styling of Lee Child, the atmospheric prose of Ann Cleeves and the
balls-out gutsiness of Val McDermid, so I know where I stand regarding
influences and tastes. The Bryant & May novels are meant to be an acquired
pleasure for real readers – they’re filled with puzzles, hidden jokes and
arcane bits of history. Why shouldn’t they be fun? It’s this sense of mischief
that made ‘Hall of Mirrors’ such a joy to write.
Bryant & May - Hall of Mirrors by Christopher Fowler (Published by Transworld Publishers)
The year is 1969 and ten guests are about to enjoy
a country house weekend at Tavistock Hall. But one amongst them is harbouring
thoughts of murder. . . The guests also include the young detectives Arthur
Bryant and John May - undercover, in disguise and tasked with protecting Monty
Hatton-Jones, a whistle-blower turning Queen's evidence in a massive bribery
trial. Luckily, they've got a decent chap on the inside who can help them - the
one-armed Brigadier, Nigel `Fruity' Metcalf. The scene is set for what could be
the perfect country house murder mystery, except that this particular
get-together is nothing like a Golden Age classic. For the good times are, it
seems, coming to an end. The house's owner - a penniless, dope-smoking
aristocrat - is intent on selling the estate (complete with its own hippy
encampment) to a secretive millionaire but the weekend has only just started
when the millionaire goes missing and murder is on the cards. But army
manoeuvres have closed the only access road and without a forensic examiner,
Bryant and May can't solve the case. It's when a falling gargoyle fells another
guest that the two incognito detectives decide to place their future
reputations on the line. And in the process discover that in Swinging Britain
nothing is quite what it seems...
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