Blog

Happy new year! At long last I can unveil the new website we've been working on over the past six months. All of Chris's books are listed, together with: quotes from critics, links to reviews and options to purchase on Amazon. There are a number of options to sort the Bryant & May series including a recommended reading order for new readers. We've kept the blog archive for anyone who wants to read…

By the way, back in May Chris won the Last Laugh Award at CrimeFest, the International Crime Festival convention, for Bryant and May's Peculiar London. Really! Chris would have been both delighted and amused at the irony... The Husband

How Do I Write Now? On one side - a head full of ideas. On the other - permanent pain and exhaustion. How on earth am I meant to balance them? This is hardly a new problem for writers, but once I could have written my way through difficult patches, and I now have to fight for every every joule of energy. Nothing can be planned or taken for granted anymore. Two days ago I felt virtually normal…

I suspect we try to tidy up our lives as we go along, and prove our mettle when that fails. One could call it 'rolling with the punches', but by God there have been a few too many punches of late. An Eeyorish friend of mine said, 'life becomes easier if you remember that everyone is lying to you', and on bad days I suspect he may be right. Hilary Mantel wrote on through her illness and I've tried…

Fret not, for 'The Foot on the Crown' (official title) will be published, although now you have me thinking about splitting it into two volumes. I never write long, which makes me suspicious that I had too much fun with this - probably more than the average reader can stand. (Not, dear fellows, that I would consider any of you average.) What held me up for so long was that I revealed the novel's…

Hullo there. I put my glasses down a minute ago and now I can't find them. I've been asked by Transworld, who are publishing 'Bryant & May's Peculiar London' in July, to say something about the capital's places and its people that we can be proud of (not the lad above, thankfully). What they mean is they're trying to save a few bob by getting me to do their publicity on the cheap. They know this…

If you've been following this blog you'll know that 'Bryant & May's Peculiar London' is not a traditional murder mystery like the other volumes in the series but an investigation of an altogether different kind. The suspect is London itself, with the detectives, along with Janice, Meera, Colin, Dan, Sid, Maggie and various other characters expounding on (and arguing over) their specialist subjects…

One Bryant & May book didn't get published in the US. If you're a career writer and manage to sell a few books over the years, you'll be shocked at the space they take up. I live in a flat, so room is at a premium and international editions can't be kept. I tried separating the covers and storing them without the text but I somehow managed to throw those out by mistake. Once, an English language…

16 Bryant & May HALL OF MIRRORS In which Mr May Spends a Weekend in the Country And Mr Bryant Gives the Game Away In 1969, ten guests stay in an isolated country house, Tavistock Hall, for the weekend, but one of them is harbouring thoughts of murder… Young detectives Bryant & May are tasked with protecting Monty Hatton-Jones, a whistleblower turning Queen’s evidence against a corrupt architect…

(I'm publishing these each day now because we have lots of other subjects to discuss, so there's one more to come tomorrow) The Casebook Of Bryant & May (Graphic Novel) Two illustrated, untold and very silly cases for Bryant & May, ‘The Soho Devil’, saw 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…