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| Cor, strike a light! |
Lobsters on the lawn and an elderly crime-fighting
duo. Welcome to the world of author Christopher Fowler, writes Kim
Janssen
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Christopher Fowler
The Pineapple pub in Kentish Town
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WHEN an uncooked lobster mysteriously appeared on author Christopher
Fowler’s Kentish Town lawn, it set him thinking.
How had it got there, and what would Bryant and May, his comic,
elderly crime-fighting duo make of it?
Sitting in The Pineapple pub in Leverton Street, Kentish Town –
the much loved boozer he and other locals saved from property developers
a couple of years ago – his steady stream of anecdotes is,
if anything, even more colourful than the riddles faced by Bryant
and May’s Peculiar Crimes Unit.
He explains: “It was just sitting there on the lawn in Cathcart
Street.
“There was a fish restaurant a bit further up the street and
I thought that maybe someone had thrown it over the fence for a
joke.
“But, really, it was too far – they’d have had to
throw it really hard and it probably would have been damaged, so
that didn’t make sense.
“Then, a few months later, I had some friends round for dinner
and I was out the back and I noticed the drain cover moving.
“A crayfish crawled out and onto the lawn. In case my friends
didn’t believe me I sent it to the Natural History Museum and
a zoologist there wrote back and told me yes, it was a Turkish Crayfish
and they now lived in our canals, drains and sewers and they were
forcing out our Great British Crayfish.
“He was actually quite nationalistic and upset about it but
the story ended up in the Fortean Times.
“London is full of these interesting people – you start
talking to them and they reveal all of these incredible secret passions;
it’s a wonderful place to be a writer.”
The crayfish incident prompted the further discovery that the River
Fleet ran underneath his home of 25 years, and that in turn led
to the idea for the second of his Bryant and May books, The Water
Room, which begins with a woman found drowned in her bone dry basement,
with river water in her mouth.
Deep currents run through all three of the so-far published novels,
which owe as much to the more literary work of Peter Ackroyd and
Iain Sinclair in their fascination in a London alive with secret
or soon-forgotten history as they do to the more traditional detective
fiction Fowler himself cites as inspiration.
Each of the familiar sets used in the novels – Bryant and May’s
tiny office above Mornington Crescent Tube station, The Pineapple
Pub and indeed Fowler’s own home – seem to be the site
of some arcane or occult interest that has a bearing on the plot.
And keen readers of the New Journal may notice stories from its
pages cropping up in the books; Fowler and his pals have a habit
of noting down grizzly headlines from local papers and texting them
to each other.
He said: “There’s an economy that I can’t help but
admire, they manage to fit the maximum amount of misery into the
minimum number of words. The worst I’ve seen was ‘Yardie
Torches Tot’ but my friend sent me some great ones recently,
including ‘Crackhouse Gets Government Funding’, which
I never got to the bottom of.”
But if it’s the murders, arcane references and clever plotting
keep the pages turning, it’s the eccentric pairing of the crusty
Bryant and the suave May that have seduced readers.
Like the matchboxes they’re named after, the pair are full
of bright sparks but is perhaps not quite as efficient as a modern
lighter.
Fowler would love to see Sir Ian McKellen take the part of the womaniser
May, while Michael Gambon would be his ideal rude Bryant, if the
series ever makes it onto TV.
He said: “I’ve always wanted to create a pair of extremely
unorthodox – and elderly – detectives.
“Those crime shows on TV that show incredibly efficient young
cops somehow ring false with me.”
In the books, the pair’s unusual methods and penchant for taking
on weird cases – a fighter pilot strapped to the back of a
cow in Regent’s Park, to mention one – leaves them in
constant battle with senior officers, who view them as an anachronism.
Fowler’s attraction to the eccentric side of Camden life is
plain; the villains in his work are property developers and soulless
yuppies; the victims, misunderstood artists and the poor.
King’s Cross redevelopers get a particularly rough ride in
The Water Room, described as “men in cuff-links” and compared
unfavourably with the campaigners who save The Pineapple.
So it’s surprising to hear that Fowler, who is 52 but could
pass for ten years younger and dresses like a man half his age,
plans to move to a King’s Cross warehouse.
Despite the apologetic admission and the occasionally folksy slant
of his books, he insists he feels no guilt over his success in his
day job as the director of Creative, a leading film marketing firm
that promoted movies including Trainspotting, Pulp Fiction and Star
Wars.
He said: “Now is the time to go because it’s obviously
on the up.
“But I’ve always lived in poor or mixed areas because
they’re much more interesting.
“My business partner lives in Highgate but I couldn’t
stand it there for long – it’s mums picking up their kids
in four-wheel drives and not much else.
“I’ve always been a city person and the older I get, the
nearer the centre I want to live.
“I can’t stand the countryside; I don’t know what
to do with all that fresh air. I’ve always lived by the maxim
that I don’t like to breathe anything I can’t see.”
Fowler has scooped several prestigious awards, including last year’s
BFS August Derleth Award for best novel for the first Bryant and
May book, Full Dark House, and has written 11 novels, but he has
no plans to give up his other work.
But his determination to preserve the idiosyncratic and parochial
side of London life has seen him help host a series of literary
evenings at The Pineapple this summer, which has drawn crowds to
hear authors including the American Augusten Boroughs and controversial
British writer Toby Litt.
He said: “You can’t go ten yards in Kentish Town without
bumping into a writer so it seemed worthwhile.
“It’s a bookish part of the world, isn’t it?”.
• Seventy-Seven Clocks by Christopher Fowler is published
by Doubleday priced £12.99. |
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