London Bridges by Jane Stevenson

A Los Angeles Times Best Mystery

An exhilarating read . . . refreshingly lighthearted, urbanely witty, and evocative of place.
Sunday Telegraph


[Stevenson's] shrewd smarts and stinging way with a phrase are in ample evidence . . . She
makes palpable the layers of history waiting to be discovered in the very fabric of the
contemporary city. Chicago Tribune


London Bridges is White Teeth as it might have been written by Agatha Christie or A. S. Byatt
or Evelyn Waugh. Los Angeles Times


A superbly entertaining, high-spirited novel, London Bridges gives a modern spin to the classic
English detective thriller. Set in 1990s London, the plot centers on a treasure lost in the Blitz and
newly discovered by an unscrupulous lawyer, who is tempted by greed to commit a series of
crimes leading to murder. A very contemporary cast of characters assembles to confound him,
among them a charming and flamboyant gay academic, a community activist, an Australian
graduate student, a young Indian lawyer, and an endearing dog named Alice. But, the main
character is London itself, lovingly depicted in all its rich variousness. With elegant wit, keen
social observation, and dazzling intelligence, Stevenson explores the way that peoples lives
intertwine in a great city, often with startling results.

About the Author


Jane Stevenson is the author of the acclaimed novella collection Several Deceptions and The
Winter Queen, the first in a trilogy of historical novels. Born and bred in London, she teaches
comparative literature at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland.

Questions for Discussion


1. The novels title, London Bridges, refers to the unexpected ways that lives, events, and
interests intertwine in the great city. How are these connections forged in the novel and in the
larger world?


2. Jane Stevenson has said that she wrote the novel in part as a homage to the classic English
detective caper. One of the conventions of that genre is to begin a story in medias res, usually in
the act or upon the discovery of a crime that will be solved in the remainder of the book. How
does the opening scene in London Bridges converge with and diverge from this convention?


3. Another way in which London Bridges diverges from the traditional English detective novel is
by offering astute social commentary on issues such as the intersections between liberalism and
conservatism, wealth and poverty. How are social themes explored in the novel?


4. One of the novels themes is the conflict between progress and preservation. Must the two
always be mutually exclusive, or is there a way to preserve history without impeding change?
How do the characters in London Bridges resolve this conflict?


5. At one point, Dilip Dhesi notes, Social justice and self-interest coincide, if you think about
it. How is this idea supported by the events of the novel?


6. Each character has an eye on a different treasure. All of their collective treasures may be
traced back to the Mount Athos Lavra, but the characters regard their treasures as such for
wholly different reasons. What do the characters want, and why do they value what they do?


7. The classic thirties thriller represented an England that was cozy because it excluded everyone
who didnt assent to an upper-class English value system. London Bridges takes that idea of
pleasure, shared values, and community into a modern urban milieu in which people have to
learn to trust one another. In what ways does the concept of trust come into play? What is the
significance of the St. Michaels Graecorum trust? How is that connected to the trust that
Eugenides places in Sebastian and Lupset?


8. The classic game-theory conundrum of the Prisoners Dilemma demonstrates that even self-
interested crooks need to learn to be social beings. How does this idea play out in London
Bridges?

A Conversation with Jane Stevenson about London Bridges


Q) Why did you start writing fiction?


A) Ive always wanted to, from as early as I can remember. I used to frighten my little brother
into fits when we were something like six and four, respectively, telling him stories about
horrible little creatures who lived in the legs of his bed. From a bit later, my teenage notebooks
are full of scenarios and plots. But as I got older, I veered off into the academic life, and although
I continued to write from time to time, nothing quite jelled. In the end, what happened to push
me in this direction, I thought at the time (almost seriously), was that I had been possessed by the
spirit of Sir Walter Scott. Almost no one reads Sir Walter these days, but he is a wonderful
storyteller, and, as a fiction writer, I am more interested in storytelling than anything else.


Q) Why this particular novel?


A) I had a very strange childhood. My parents lived abroad for long periods, though we kept
coming back to London, and from about age five to age eight, I was in Germany. I learned to
read very early, and I was very nearsighted, so I had a natural tendency to live in a world of my
own. I rapidly went through all the English-language childrens books that I could get hold of,
from English Ladybird Books to Marvel Comics (which we used to swap with the American kids
on the school bus). Then I graduated to adult books at a ridiculously early age because I had run
out of things to read. I came across the detective stories of Margery Allingham, which both my
parents liked, and devoured them in the way that only a child can do. I loved the stories, the
feeling of being somewhere in particular, the wide sympathy with all different kinds of people
I can say only that I felt at home in these books.


Once I had started writing fiction in a serious way, I thought that one of the things I very much
wanted to do was to write something that was as much fun as one of Margery Allinghams
prewar thrillers, as aware of London as a strange and attractive place, as engaging and, in a
similar way, partly serious, partly playful and above all I wanted to learn from that master
craftswoman and tell a really good story.


Q) Where did the characters come from?


A) The really important thing about a detective story is the plot, and it seemed to me that the first
thing you need to sort out in order to make an interesting plot is people who can move from one
social group to another (which is one of the basic ways in which you start out with a mystery,
and someone, usually the detective, is able to produce some piece of information to straighten
things out). I had two close friends who let me use aspects of their lives. One is now a lecturer at
the University of Leiden, but she started her life in the Australian outback and then did a Ph.D. in
Old English philology at London while working as a pharmacist to support herself. I didnt want
to tell her personal story, but it struck me that the basic scenario that in a pharmacists you
can easily find a very intelligent, observant person, whom customers think of as a shop assistant
and therefore will talk in front of in an uninhibited way was a really good ingredient in a
detective story, especially if the pharmacist had more than one side to her.


Therefore, I turned her into the classicist Jeanene Malone in order to mesh her story with that of
another friend of mine, who is an Egyptologist but is also involved with the academic world and
the world of dealers in antiquities, and who has a knack for making all kinds of odd friends in
unexpected places: he is Sebastian Raphael in the novel. Again, from a storytelling point of view,
he was a person to whom coincidences could come naturally. The character of Hattie Luke is an
affectionate homage to Margery Allingham.


Mr. Eugenides is also based, up to a point, on someone I knew. She was a really marvelous
woman, a very old lady. Her three great passions were the Catholic Church, the Communist party
in Great Britain, and the Railway Preservation Society. She was full of loving kindness,
absolutely realistic about people, and completely independent. I loved and admired her.
Eugenides, of course, is a lonely person, whereas my old friend could hardly walk down the
street without meeting someone, but she was a fabulous London eccentric, and she taught me
something important about how older people in London can just go on with a completely
obsolete way of life, without really having to notice how everything has changed.


Q) Why did you want to write about London?


A) I love London. It has all kinds of problems, but its a complex, interesting, satisfactory place.
I have friends with teenage children in London, and it seems so different from when I was
young. At fourteen or so, I was able to spend a summer Saturday walking for miles and miles,
looking and listening, with the equivalent of a dollar in my pocket for the bus if I got tired. I
dont think thats possible anymore, but it was in the seventies, so London is very much part of
me. A bit later in life, at twenty or so, I think its easy to get seduced by developing your own
fascinating personality, but if you have the freedom to wander in your midteens, and if you have
an interest that way, you are perhaps less involved with the impression you are making on the
world and more involved with the impression the world is making on you. Be that as it may,
London is, in my life, the city I was first conscious of being much, much bigger and more
interesting than I was.


Q) Why London Bridges?


A) Two reasons. The really important one is that its a story about human bridges if you
move to a big city on your own, one of the first things you think about is the impossibility of
ever meeting anyone. Hundreds of people brush past you, and none of them says hello. So this is
a story about how people meet; that is, metaphorically bridge the gap social activism, sexual
orientation, religious affiliation, common workplace and somehow end up finding others they
really like or, in the case of some people in the story, fall in love with. The other reason has to do
with the way the story started. I heard a lecture whose key statement for me was that the upkeep
of London Bridge was funded by an endowment set up by William the Conqueror in 1066 and
was perhaps the oldest capital fund in the country. I was greatly struck by this and started
thinking about the way that ancient trusts, because of the changing value of money, can
sometimes generate incredibly large sums.


Q) How did you research this book?


A) I gave myself the huge pleasure, in my middle years, of walking around London as I had as a
teenager, AZ in hand, soaking up atmosphere. My brother, who had long since forgiven me for
my early experiments in fiction, is now a lighting designer for several London theaters; he
introduced me to some areas I hadnt known, such as the Columbia Road flower market. I have
friends now in Islington, Hampstead, and other areas that werent part of my personal village,
so I got to know a variety of regions.


I spent a lot of time in Southall, where my hero, Dilip, comes from: it was a very mixed
community when I was growing up, but it has become very strongly Asian. Its now one of my
favorite bits of London. The Asian community is mostly very well integrated and strongly
upwardly mobile: Ive very often found, eating in Southall, that the waiter is a college kid
helping out the family during his vacation, and its that upward mobility that Ive looked at in
this novel. Thats not to say that there arent problems, but Dilip is, I hope, a fair portrayal of
some of the attitudes of British Asians I knew at Cambridge University, seen in the context of
various people I have talked to in Southall itself.


The only place described in the novel which I havent personally seen is Mount Athos the
monks claim that nothing female larger than a bee has set foot there for fifteen hundred years.
But I do have a friend who makes retreats on the mountain, and he vouches for the details!