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).

Child's Play

"Why, you little blockhead, I'll whittle you down to a coat hanger..."

- W.C. Fields

Thirteen years ago, Christopher Fowler's Full Dark House (2003) was published and introduced what, arguably, are the first Great Detective of the 21st century: two nonagenarian detectives, named Arthur Bryant and John May, who have been leading a contingent of special investigators since the 1940s – known as the Peculiar Crimes Unit.

Peculiar Crimes Unit was founded "soon after the outbreak of the Second World War" as "part of the government initiative to ease the burden on London’s overstretched Metropolitan Police Force."

Staff members have always comprised of outsiders and radical freethinkers who were, initially, tasked with handling investigations "deemed uniquely sensitive" and "a high risk to public morale." But over the decades, not everyone understood that peculiar was originally meant in the sense of particular. 

Consequently, the unit found themselves in charge of a large number of extraordinary, bizarre and seemingly impossible crimes – which even included several locked room murders. So it's not surprising the series was part of the first wave of contemporary mysteries that slowly convinced me that, perhaps, not everything written after the Golden Age was complete tripe.

I discovered the Peculiar Crimes Unit series in 2007 and was an unapologetic, fundamental classicist in those days, but, despite my rabid hatred for modern, character-orientated and socially concerned crime novels, I plunged headfirst into Full Dark House, The Water Room (2004), Seventy-Seven Clocks (2005) and Ten Second Staircase (2006). They challenged my preconceived notion of the genre and genuinely loved the journey, but, sadly, my interest began to wane after White Corridor (2007). The books morphed from wildly imaginative, neo-Victorian crime novels into regular police procedurals with some weird elements.

After reading Off the Rails (2010), I decided to take a break from the series, which continued until this very blog-post, but only a year after dropping out I began to read how The Memory of Blood (2011) had reinvigorated the series by cutting back on the social commentary and refocused on the plot – going back to what the series originally was. And it only took me about five years to verify this for myself.

The Memory of Blood is the ninth entry in the series and, just like the first book, has a theatrical setting. So it really is a rebirth, of sorts, for the PCU.

Robert "Julius" Kramer is a self-made man who became a millionaire before his twenty-fifth birthday, which he celebrated by "informing his loyal girlfriend that he was now rich" and "dumping her." Kramer is not a pleasant person, but that’s to be expected from someone whose role model is Mr. Punch. It allows him to be as "pugnacious, amoral, murderously strong-willed" as he wants in order to "rise above mere morality" and he bought the New Strand Theatre to indulge in his theatrical hobby. He even slapped his own theater company together.

The first of his lurid, trashy and sensational plays, The Two Murderers, is about to open and to celebrate the occasion Kramer is hosting a party at his London penthouse, but there's a bad and tense atmosphere – amplified by the gloomy weather outside. You would expect this to be the moment a steak knife is plunged in Kramer's back, but the murderer among them has struck somewhere else in the house.

Kramer's second, much younger wife, Judith, finds the door to the upstairs room of their infant son, Noah, locked from the inside and the door has to be broken down. What they found is unsettling: a window that was supposed to be locked was wide open and an antique, grotesque-looking puppet of Mr. Punch was lying in the middle of the room. The small body of Noah was found beneath the window and a post-mortem examination reveals he was violently shaken, strangled and flung out of the window, but what's really remarkable is that Mr. Punch's hands "exactly fit the bruises on Noah Kramer's neck" – suggesting that the Victorian-era puppet had come to life to fulfill "his mythical destiny to become a murderer." All of that happened inside a locked nursery with an open window affording no escape to a murderer.

It's a dark, grisly and gruesome murder, but finding the person who's responsible turns out to be very similar to "playing some elaborate version of Cluedo" and they’ve some work to do before they can identify their "Colonel Mustard in the sodding library with the lead pipe."

There's no shortage of potential suspects: there's the leading man, Marcus Sigler, who has been having an affair with Judith and sneaked out of the party with the new assistant stage manager, Gail Strong, which gave Robert Kramer a strong motive as well. Ray Pryce is the "archetypical angry playwright" and part of the anger comes from the greediness of the producer, Gregory Baine, who has stopped salaries and put everyone on a profit-share. Something that can be manipulated by fiddling with the books and therefore Kramer and Baine would've to payout less to the cast and crew. One of them is a brilliant set-designer, Ella Maltby, who's responsible for bringing a wax dummy to life during the first act of the play and that's an interesting talent when you're dealing with an apparent homicidal puppet, but these are only a handful of people who were present at the party and could've fulfilled the role of killer – since everyone in close proximity to Kramer seems to have had a reason to harm or hurt him.

The investigation takes place while the PCU is settling into their new office building, which was once the dwelling of the infamous Aleister Crowley, but their situation seems to get gradually a bit better. Bryant found a new member to the team hidden in the attic: a dusty, cobweb-covered automaton of a fortune-teller that spits out cards with vague, cautiously worded predictions on them. Of course, Bryant has a pocketful of old coins to feed to automaton. Even Raymond Land, who has been the temporary acting head of the PCU for many years, seems to finally come to peace with his fate of being stuck there.

However, there are some things that never change: the ever-subversive Oskar Kasavian is still attempting to get the PCU shutdown and a new, ongoing sub-plot appears to have been set-up in the background, which happens when the editor of Bryant's memoirs succumbs to bacteria poisoning and something rather important is missing – a disc containing information of a number of important cases from the unit's past. The Leicester Square Vampire, who killed John May's daughter, and the storyline about Mr. Fox from the previous two books, covered such previous plot-strands that ran through several books. I have no idea which direction this storyline will take, but, as of now, it seems interesting.

But all of that takes place in the background. The Memory of Blood is a very plot-oriented detective story, but one with sharp characterization and a great theatrical background that's steeped in puppet lore and London's unique history. That has always been a major asset to the PCU series: Fowler's deep-rooted love for London's history. I don't remember any of the other books to be as sound in plot as this one. The clueing is a bit clunky here and there, they were too obvious or given too late, but they were present and Fowler provided answers as to why (and how) the handprints of a puppet were on the throat of a dead baby. Or how the murderer was able to improvise a locked room trick on the spot. It's a simple method that's derived from an old trick, but I rather liked it when place in the overall plot of the book.

So, all in all, to cut this overlong, drawling review short, I would mark The Memory of Blood as my favorite entry in the PCU series and the only downside is that I waited so long to return to Arthur Bryant and John May.