London's Glory (2015) by Christopher Fowler

Christopher Fowler was a British author of some fifty novels and short story collections, covering everything from fantasy, horror and science-fiction to none-fiction, but what he'll be remembered for the most is the creating the first "Great Detective" series of the 21st century – recounting "the adventures of the two Golden Age detectives investigating impossible, modern London crimes." The two detective detectives in question are the nonagenarian Arthur Bryant and John May of the Peculiar Crimes Unit. A specialist police team created after the outbreak of the Second World War to ease the heavily burdened, overstretched Metropolitan Police Force originally intended to investigate sensitive cases that could cause scandal or public unrest. However, the "peculiar" in Peculiar Crimes Unit often brought problems to their desk of a decidedly odder, weirder and sometimes outright impossible nature. Just as odd, weird and impossible are Britain's weird and forgotten who worked for the PCU over the decades with Bryant and May as the unit's never-changing constants.

This series together with writers like Lawrence Block, William L. DeAndrea and Bill Pronzini helped thawing out my fundamentally-minded purist mindset that viewed everything published after the Golden Age as irredeemable trash. I enjoyed the first half dozen novels, but On the Loose (2009) and Off the Rails (2010) lost me. I briefly returned to the series in 2016 with a review of the excellent locked room mystery, The Memory of Blood (2011), but the burgeoning reprint renaissance and translation wave distracted my attention away from the PCU series. So had half-forgotten about the series when the tragic broke earlier this year that Fowler had passed away after battling cancer for three years. After mentioning the PCU series in "The Locked Room Mystery & Impossible Crime Story in the 21st Century: A Brief Historic Overview of the First Twenty (Some) Years," I decided a return was in order before the end of the year. Why not reacquaint myself with the series through one of the two short story collections?

London's Glory (2015) collects ten short stories, a bonus story, a lengthy introduction, introductions to the stories and some other extras – like an illustration of the PCU HQ and "Arthur Bryant's Secret Library." So quite the must-have volume for fans. Before the going over the stories, I should note that the short story format is perhaps a little too crammed and narrow for this particular series to thrive. A lot of the stories have great hooks and fantastic setups, but feel like they ended just a few paces after leaving the starting plot. Such as the first short story.

"Bryant & May and the Secret Santa"

Bryant and May are called to the Selfridges department store where a strange, potentially suspicious fatal accident occurred. An 11-year-old boy was brought to the department store by his mother to get a picture with Santa Claus and get an early Christmas present. After the picture was taken and the present received, the boy was seen in the store "holding the torn-open box in his hand and appeared to be in a state of distress." And then ran out into the street "where he was his by a number 53 bus." So the first question is what the kid found inside the box, but the odd part is that the box was found to be completely empty. This leads the two nonagenarian detectives to the St. Crispin's School for Boys and its culture of persistent bullying among the first-year students. But then the story just ends when the solution falls into their lap. This story feels like the initial idea for a novel-length mystery with the accident bringing the PCU to St. Crispin's School to bring clarity to the dark doings among the students and teachers. Just as a short story, it feels undeveloped and rushed.

"Bryant & May in the Field"

John May is given an opportunity to get Arthur Bryant out of the "musty deathtrap" doubling as the offices of the Peculiar Crimes Unit with the promise of a good, old-fashioned impossible crime. The body of Marsha Kastopolis is found on Primrose Hill with her throat cut ("a real vicious sweep") with “just her footprints leading out to the middle of the hillslope and nothing else" ("not a mark in any direction that he could see"). Phantasos Kastopolis is not to cut up about his wife's murder ("she was getting as fat as a pig") and already under scrutiny by the authorities over his real estate shenanigans, tax schemes and health-and-safety violations, but did he kill his wife or someone else? And how was it done? Well, the trick is a tricky one and difficult enough to present convincingly in a modern setting, but the complete lack of any kind of clue or even a ghost of a hint (whfg fubj fbzrbar sylvat n xvgr ba gur uvyyfybcr) made it a disappointing impossible crime story. A fun enough short story in other regards, but nothing more than that.

"Bryant & May on the Beat"

Something of a short-short: Bryant and May investigate the death of William Warren, a part-time musician, who ran a stall in Camden Market where sold homemade woolly hats and music instruments – apparently died of anthrax in his closely-shut apartment. A rather good short-short with something resembling fair play and the first one from this collection I liked. Interestingly, this and the previous story stand closer to the impossible crime fiction from L.T. Meade (A Master of Mysteries, 1898), Max Rittenberg (The Invisible Bullet and Other Strange Cases, 2016) and Keikichi Osaka (The Ginza Ghost, 2017) rather than G.K. Chesterton and John Dickson Carr.

"Bryant & May in the Soup"

This is the first short story in the collection drawing on the long, ramshackle history of the PCU, "Arthur Bryant's memoirs are unreliable in the extreme, especially when it comes to dates," stretching from World War II to the first decades of the 21st century – taking the reader this time to the days of the Great Smog of London. A lethal smog that descended on the city from December 5 to December 9, 1952. There were thousands of fatalities, "the young and the elderly died from respiratory problems," while staining "London's buildings black for fifty years." An already sick coach driver, Harry Whitworth, braves the deadly fog to go to work, but, shortly after arriving, climbed up into the driver's seat of the nearest coach. Placed his hands on the wheel, sighed and died. Bryant and May have to figure whether it was the fog that killed him or whether there was some other, more nefarious cause. The murder method is undeniably clever, but another instance of a potentially excellent detective novel wasted on a short story. Those five days are the perfect backdrop for a dark, moody detective novel with an atmosphere and plot as a thick as the fog that clings to the streets and buildings.

"Bryant & May and the Nameless Woman"

The introduction names Margery Allingham as one of Fowler's favorite Golden Age writers, praising The Tiger in the Smoke (1952) as "a dark, strange read that leaves its mark," which rang some alarm bells. Allingham wrote a couple of solid short stories, but I'm not a fan of her novel-length mysteries. So imagine my surprise when having to conclude "The Nameless Woman" turned out to be the standout of London's Glory. A woman, who refuses to give her name, comes to John May to tell him that she intends to kill a man, Joel Madden, nothing he can say or do will change her mind. So why bother coming and expose her murderous intentions? She figured the police would come for her regardless. Just a week later, May learns that a Joel Madden had been found dead, drowned, in the rooftop swimming pool of an exclusive city club and the mysterious woman was picked up on the building's CCTV. What follows is May interrogating the woman interspersed with flashbacks to murderer with puzzle consisting of anticipating the exact murder method and the name of the nameless woman. An excellent, quasi-inverted mystery ending on a surprisingly lighter, typically PCU note.

A note for the curious: the strange swimming pool drowning recalls similar problems from Ronald Knox's "The Motive" (1937) and Joseph B. Commings' "Murder of a Mermaid" (1982), but Fowler came up with an entirely different method.

"Bryant & May and the Seven Points"

This short story is simply modern-day pulp thriller. Bryant and May are called upon to investigate the disappearance of Michael Portheim, "an MI5 officer and mathematician specializing in codes," who was caught on CCTV entering a park – no footage of him coming back out again. A subsequent investigation turned up nothing and the authorities began to fear Portheim was either murdered or kidnapped. So without any further leads forthcoming, they began to clutch at straws and turned to the PCU. Bryant and May pick up a trail ("...as part of his training he also learned circus skills") that brings them to a sideshow revival of the old freak shows, which has been reinvented as a magic show of body horror ('You'll Be Jolted by Electra the 30,000-Volt Girl," "Nothing Can Prepare You for Lucio the Human Pin-Cushion," and "Prepare to Be Horrified by Marvo the Caterpillar Boy"). Lording over this Arcade of Abnormalities is a villainous Russian dwarf with bright-red horns surgically mounted to his skull. This story almost reaches comic book levels of villainy, but it's a fun story and has a really good, truly horrifying explanation for what happened to Portheim. I wonder if Fowler read Nicholas Brady's The Fair Murder (1933).

"Bryant & May on the Cards"

This is another modern-day, pulp-style thriller, but less darker and more fun than the previous story. Ian McFarland is a down on his luck, complete broke man whose wife unceremoniously and cruelly left him ("his life, over at the ripe old age of twenty-nine"). One day, McFarland finds a fancy looking credit card with a phone number and passcode to activate the card. Evidently a mistake, but he calls the number anyway and learns they offer a very particular service, "we could kill your wife." Mandy McFarland is shot death behind the reception desk of the posh restaurant The Water House by a masked man and her murder puts the PCU on the trail of a sinister figure who setup a so-called Elimination Bureau. A very fun, old-fashioned pulp-thriller resettled in today's London. Fowler was really good at these "new pulp" stories.

Regrettably, the remaining four short stories are all fairly minor and not especially interesting. "Bryant & May Ahoy!" has Bryant and May going on a long overdue, shipboard holiday in Southern Turkey, but Bryant eyes his fellow passengers suspiciously and eventually has to solve an attempted poisoning. "Bryant & May and the Blind Spot" is a Detective Sergeant Janice Longbright story recounting her disastrous, short-lived stint as part of Adrian Dunwoody's security detail. "Bryant & May and the Bells of Westminster" is the second historical taking place in the 1960s as Bryant and May investigate the classically-styled murder of Simon Montfleury, stabbed in the library of Bayham Abbey, but somehow, this story simply didn't do it for me. Finally, "Bryant & May's Mystery Tour" is a fun short-short in which Bryant takes May aboard a double-decker bus to go and meet a murderer, but it's obvious in which direction the solution is headed.

So, all in all, London's Glory is like most short story collections a mixed bag of tricks. Surprisingly, it's the least traditional stories like "The Nameless Woman," "The Seven Points" and "On the Cards" that stole the show. However, they served their purpose in refreshing my memory and will return to the novels next year. I just have to decide whether I'll pick up where I left with The Invisible Code (2012) or first dip into a novel like The Bleeding Heart (2014) or Wild Chamber (2017).