Christopher Fowler

BIO

Chrisopher Fowler is the acclaimed author of fifteen previous novels, including the award-winning FULL DARK HOUSE, and four other Peculiar Crimes Unit mysteries, WHITE CORRIDOR, THE WATER ROOM, SEVENTY-SEVEN CLOCKS, and TEN SECOND STAIRCASE. He lives in London.

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AUTHOR TALK

October 31, 2008

Mystery and thriller writer Christopher Fowler's latest release, THE VICTORIA VANISHES, is the sixth installment in a series featuring two elderly detectives in London's Peculiar Crimes Unit, Arthur Bryant and John May. In this Author Talk, Fowler provides a bit of background information about the series, including how his protagonists got their names and the real-life inspiration behind the unusual police division where they work. He also discusses his fascination with London's underbelly, shares details about his writing process and names some of the writers who have influenced his work.


The History of Christopher Fowler’s Bryant & May Series

New readers of the series can start here and get a little bit of history about my detective duo…

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, because several such units were founded during the war. There was a great deal of experimentation with crime, communication and scientific units at the time. In fact, 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 whodunits.

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.

I use a lot of comedy in my stories, especially as I develop the private lives of my characters. Here’s Arthur Bryant in a pub, seeing a woman friend he’s been trying to avoid.

‘You said you’d call on me again after our date, Arthur,’ said Jackie. ‘You never came back.’

‘Hullo, fancy seeing you here,’ Bryant stalled, eyeing the little historian, the only person dressed more haphazardly than himself. ‘Er, there was a rather important case to deal with, I was very tied up.’ He searched for an escape route.

‘I wouldn’t mind, but I’d made the most enormous kidney casserole because you said you were a big eater. Did I misread the signs? Am I too old for you? I know I’m not very smartly turned out. It’s funny; I don’t mind men of my age, but men don’t like women of my age, they all want someone younger, and that strikes me as profoundly unfair.’

‘I’m sorry, I can’t hear you,’ replied Bryant, pretending to fiddle with a non-existent earpiece.

‘Why is it,’ asked Mrs Quinten, ‘that we’re expected to put up with old men’s ways, their nose-hair and toenails clippings never wanting to go anywhere, yet when it comes to the reverse…’

‘What we men have to do in return,’ Bryant interrupted, ‘is eat our own body-weight in dessert while you hoover the curtains forty three times a week. Curtains hang vertically, for Heavens sake, they don’t need hoovering.’

‘I thought you said you’d never lived with a woman,’ said Jackie suspiciously.

‘I haven’t --- I don’t think of Alma as a woman, she’s my housekeeper and merely happens to be of the female gender, like a ship.’

‘So you have someone to take care of all your…personal requirements.’

‘It’s not like that at all. Alma is a respectable widow whose duties include washing my clothes whenever they’re left without somebody inside them for more than twenty minutes, and the insertion of mothballs into my socks when I least expect it.’
‘But every man has other needs,’ Jackie pressed on.

‘Possibly, but my needs are not every man’s. They involve the prompt delivery of my breakfast milk and finding a shop that still sells sherbet lemons, although I assume you’re presumptuously referring to sex, to which all I can say is Self Control, madam.’

Bryant’s partner, John May, is more enigmatic and private. He keeps secrets. Here are the two detectives talking about the things they want.

‘Now that we’ve regained respect for the unit,’ said Bryant, ‘I want a raise. And bigger bookcases. And new hips. And the return of everything we’ve lost. Kindness, grace, taste, politeness, self-restraint, dress sense, Fry’s chocolate bars, the BBC Home Service, pensioners’ cinema on Monday afternoons and at least five more years spent successfully solving horrendous crimes. What do you want?’

May’s gentle, melancholic smile was lost in advancing shadows. ‘I want, more than anything --- ’ But he stopped himself from speaking, and allowed himself to be engulfed in the encroaching darkness.

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.

© Copyright 2008, Christopher Fowler. All rights reserved.

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INTERVIEW

June 4, 2004

Christopher Fowler talks to Joe Hartlaub and Wiley Saichek about FULL DARK HOUSE, the first book in a riveting new series. Fowler explains how he weaves the rich history of London in the 1940s into his story and how growing up in the city has influenced his work. He also addresses the future of protagonists Arthur Bryant and John May and shares his experiences as the creative director of a film and design company.

BRC: FULL DARK HOUSE is the first in a series of novels featuring Arthur Bryant and John May, partners in the London Police Department's Peculiar Crimes Unit. This is perhaps one of the most unusual series to be introduced this year, considering that Bryant is killed at the beginning of FULL DARK HOUSE and we only come to know him in retrospect. Why do you begin the series in this fashion?

CF: I wanted to start in a completely unexpected manner. I'm very interested in upending the traditional approach to mystery fiction, even though the story is careful to use traditional devices, like the planting of clues, mistaken identities and an exciting denouement. Also, it's appealing to tell the reader that something is impossible before setting out to show why it's not! For Bryant & May's first book, I thought I should create both a beginning and an end. It seemed the logical place to start...

BRC: A great deal of FULL DARK HOUSE takes place in London in 1940, during the blitzkrieg bombing. Your penchant for historical detail is one of the most enjoyable aspects of FULL DARK HOUSE. Is the history of early and mid-20th century London of particular interest to you? What drew you to set so much of FULL DARK HOUSE in that era?

CF: London is a city with over 2000 years of history, but I find it's not served well in mystery fiction --- stories rarely used the landscape to its best effect. I wanted to take Bryant & May back to their first meeting and their first case, which conveniently placed me at a very crucial time for London. Also, it's the last era one can still research by just talking to people about their experiences. The week in which the book is set is very well covered from a historical point of view --- the daily events are taken from each day's newspaper headlines, then personal reminiscences were added for authenticity.

BRC: On a related note you also demonstrate a great deal of familiarity with the live theater in London before and during the years of World War II. Some of your details, such as the manner in which the affordability of the cinema adversely affected live theater and actors, were fascinating. Do you have any background or interest in the live theater?

CF: To grow up in London is to be surrounded by theaters; they were cheap and easy to get into, so kids like me had no special attitude about going to see a play --- it was something you did like going to the movies or a football game, no big deal. We never thought of it as high art, but we wondered how it worked, and I became interested in the mechanics.

BRC: What made you decide to have your main characters work for the London Police Department's Peculiar Crimes Unit? For readers who may not be familiar with the book, can you please share what the Peculiar Crimes Unit does?

CF: There are two ways to write about the police --- you can take a very gritty, realistic point of view, using only factual details, or you invent your own special way of tackling crime, which to me was far more appealing. During the war, many experimental units were set up (for example, the world's first therapy unit was created to help bereaved and bombed-out residents). The Peculiar Crimes Unit handles the cases that the regular police are not equipped to deal with: cases that could cause social panic, ones that require sensitive handling, ones that the regular police simply don't understand, and those that fall into the gray area of possibly not being crimes at all. Such divisions existed, but their existence was denied.

BRC: Have any of your previous works featured recurring characters? If not, why did you decide to begin this series? If so, why did you decide to create this new series? What are the challenges involved with developing a new series?

CF: I have actually used Bryant & May several times before (most notably in the novels RUNE and SOHO BLACK) and felt I could do much more with them, especially because their working methods are so unorthodox and unusual. This series has given me the chance to place them center stage and have some fun. I think mysteries should be so much fun to read that reaching the solution should be almost an added attraction. The hardest part is bringing continuity to the books, yet making sure that each one stands alone.

BRC: What sort of plans do you have for future Bryant & May mysteries? Will you be relating their cases in sequential order? Have you planned any future novels around any of the cases you alluded to in FULL DARK HOUSE?

CF: I may well move back and forth in the detective's time together --- after all, you know from the first book that they work together for fifty years, so I'm not too worried about being sequential. I've delivered the second Bryant & May mystery, THE WATER ROOM, and am currently working on the third, entitled SEVENTY SEVEN CLOCKS. There will also be a case investigating the bizarre origins of the so-called Leicester Square Vampire.

BRC: Will you concentrate exclusively on writing Bryant & May mysteries for the foreseeable future, or do you intend to alternate them with "stand-alone novels?

CF: No, I produce an anthology of short stories every other year, and have also written a very different crime novel called PLASTIC --- with a small cameo from Arthur Bryant!

BRC: What drew you to writing in the suspense/historical suspense genres?

CF: Actually, it seems as if I have been writing in the genre for years, as several other of my books would qualify as suspense thrillers or perhaps very dark comedies. The historical element is appealing, but I generally prefer to work in the present --- the past is hard to catch accurately.

BRC: What British and American mystery writers have influenced you the most?

CF: My tastes are extremely eclectic, from Dickens, MR James, Robert Harris and JG Ballard in the UK to John Collier, Harlan Ellison, Tennessee Williams, Tobias Wolff and William Faulkner in the US, but there are hundreds of other authors I admire.

BRC: You have written a number of novels as well as a great number of short stories. Out of all of your work, which is your favorite novel and short story?

CF: Tough one, as there are over a hundred published short stories to begin with. I'm very proud of two stories called TALES FROM BRITANNICA CASTLE, which I wrote as a homage to Mervyn Peake, and my favourite novels are a coin-toss between the very dark mystery thriller PSYCHOVILLE, and a lighter, less successful book I wrote called CALABASH. I got the most fan mail from these two, and they represent parts of my childhood memories. CALABASH still makes me laugh.

BRC: Although you have an extensive bibliography, we were very interested to learn that writing novels is not your only work. We understand that you also are creative director for a film and design company called Creative Partnership, which creates campaigns for films in the UK. What is involved in creating such a campaign? And can you give us some examples of some films for which you've created campaigns? How do you balance your creative directing work with your writing?

CF: Everyone asks how I find the time to run a large company and write. The easy answer is that I don't watch TV (actually I watched the whole of "Six Feet Under" and "Dead Like Me" so that's not strictly true). Creative Partnership has created national and sometimes global campaigns for films like Thunderbirds, Love, Actually, Moulin Rouge, Tomorrow Never Dies, Pulp Fiction and Trainspotting. We write and produce all kinds of elements from the one-hour TV specials, title sequences, TV and radio campaigns, and of course, movie posters. It teaches you to write quickly and succinctly, marrying craft with art.

BRC: How does your film work influence your writing?

CF: I love film and tend to think visually. If I can't picture a scene in my head, how can I expect my reader to? I make strong use of locations in my novels, almost as if they were extra characters, and I try to under-write scenes, leaving room for the imagination. I also have music in mind when I write, to give me a tone to work with.

BRC: What is your daily writing/research schedule like?

CF: It's rather erratic, owing to my work commitments, but I tend to write best when I haven't done too much for a day or so --- I feel there are more ideas knocking around inside my head.

BRC: What are you working on now and when can readers expect to see it?

CF: You'll have THE WATER ROOM when the paperback for FULL DARK HOUSE arrives, and SEVENTY SEVEN CLOCKS not long after that. I'm hoping that there will be at least six books in the series, and maybe many more. It depends how popular I prove to be in America!

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