The Brixton Brothers is a series of detective novels, and for me, I loved detective series when I was a kid. The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Encyclopedia Brown – I loved these books. And The Brixton Brothers is sort of a love letter to those books, but also a spoof in the sense that so much of what I learned from those books – because those books made me want to be a detective when I was a kid.
Especially The Hardy Boys. I wanted to be a detective like the Hardy Boys. And, you know, the difference between the Hardy Boys’ life and my life was giant. They were 17 and 18 years and good at everything, and I was like eight years old and good at one thing, reading. And, you know, at the moment of greatest peril, their dad would come in and rescue them, and then they would like fist-fight their way out of some sea cave together.
My dad was a dermatologist who I didn’t see very much. My life was so different from those books. And that’s sort of what The Brixton Brothers is about. It’s about a kid who loves an old mystery series called The Bailey Brothers, and he tries to solve crimes using old Bailey Brothers detective techniques, but they never work, so he ends up embarrassing himself and injuring himself.
Because a lot of the techniques – they’re terrible. They’re things that – like I was saying, like, oh, if you’re like jumping off a tall building or a moving train, just, you know, roll as soon as you hit the ground. I was like, that is not a technique that actually works in moving trains, right? They’re always like – they lock themselves into car trunks and then just pop out, and you’re like, there’s a latch.
And this is not like a Volvo with a safety catch. Like this – these are 1950s Bel Airs that – it’s going to get hot in there. There is some very bad information, and Steve uses all this bad information and suffers because of it. But I think it’s really, at its heart – it’s about a kid who’s trying to figure out what it means to be a person.
And the best place he can go to for this information is books, and the books that he chose are maybe the worst books to try to figure out how to be a person with.
The Brixton Brothers is illustrated with kind of, yeah, full-page illustrations and the frontispiece at the beginning and lines of text, and all of that is sort of based on the way those Hardy Boys books worked. The illustrations in those books were always funny – like the frontispiece would sometimes be something that never even happens in the book.
The cover often is something that never even happened in the book. Sometimes like the illustration would come like four pages too early and really give something away, and then there would always be a sentence underneath the illustration, a very exciting sentence that also appeared nowhere in the text. One of the most fun things in writing The Brixton Brothers for me was like, the last thing I would do after Adam Rex, who illustrated the book, would send in all of his illustrations.
We were always informed also by that sort of Hardy Boys line drawing style, and everything was set. I got to then go through and write whatever the most exciting sentence I could think of was with absolutely no relationship to the story or the text we were telling.