Review of Christopher Fowler's Bryant & May and the Burning Man

Bryant & May and the Burning Man, by Christopher Fowler (Bantam, December 15, 2015)

The Peculiar Crimes Unit’s decrepit offices are located in the City of London, that ancient square mile that was home to London’s original settlement and is now jammed full of the skyscrapers housing the metropolis’s financial institutions.

Hardly anybody lives in the square mile anymore, which makes the P in PCU seem like it should stand for Precarious at times. The PCU has very little in the way of modern technology; nothing like the kind of assets that would allow it to combat the financial crimes that are headquartered in the square mile.

But as this twelfth book in the series begins, a case arises that is right up the PCU’s alley. Financial shenanigans in the banking world have led to increasingly large and violent protests in the City. One bank is firebombed, killing a homeless man dossed down under cardboard boxes in its entryway.

credit: www.christopherfowler.co.uk.com

The PCU suspects this was murder, not accident, and their conviction is cemented when there are more murders; seemingly unconnected killings, executed in bizarre ways reminiscent of punishments common in more ancient times. As each day passes, demonstrations against the bankers and other presumed-to-be-corrupt wealthy people escalate. Arthur Bryant suspects that the mystery killer will take advantage of the upcoming Halloween and Guy Fawkes Day to pull off even more spectacular murders.

As always, the PCU gets no support––or even respect––from other police units. This time, their particular nemesis is Darren “Missing” Link, who hamstrings them, ostensibly to prevent their interference with an ongoing fraud investigation. Like everybody else, all Link sees in the PCU is a ragtag bunch of misfits, led by the spectacularly untidy and decidedly eccentric old man, Bryant. Like the rest of the force, he just doesn’t understand that Bryant’s encyclopedic knowledge of the history of London is what will make all the difference in the investigation.

Each member of the PCU faces a crossroads in this book, which gives it a bittersweet, even elegiac feel. After 12 books, the PCU members are like old friends. I hope to see them again, but if not, I wish them well and thank Christopher Fowler for letting us know them.

credit: www.christopher.co.uk.com

My Peculiar Summer

I don't mean that the summer has been odd; what I mean is that in just the last few weeks, I've read two books in Christopher Fowler's Peculiar Crimes Unit series. A few weeks ago, I reviewed the ninth in the series, Bryant & May and the Memory of Blood, here. Now I've just read––or listened to, to be more accurate––the tenth in the series, Bryant & May and the Invisible Code.

The latest tale begins in the churchyard of St. Bride's. On a bench sits a young woman, reading a book, while two children play nearby. When they annoy her, she goes into the quiet and deserted church. The children, who are playing a game called Witch Hunter, stealthily follow her in, because one of them is convinced she is a witch. Minutes later, the woman keels over, dead. The children believe that the witch-killing curse they cast on her did its job.

When the autopsy fails to identify a specific cause of death, Arthur Bryant, the nuttier half of the Bryant & May team and co-leader of the Peculiar Crimes Unit, naturally wants the case. But the City of London police have jurisdiction and the PCU, being personae non gratae in the Home Office, lack the political backing to muscle them aside.

Certainly, their enemy-in-chief, that satan in a three-piece suit, Oscar Kasavian, isn't about to lift a finger to help them. He has promised to wipe out the PCU and, particularly, its beyond-retirement-age leads. Imagine Bryant and May's surprise, then, when Kasavian almost humbly asks them to help him with a problem involving his wife, Sabira.

Sabira is much younger than Kasavian, and is an émigré from a working-class family in Albania. She's finding it trying to be the wife of someone whose job is full of secrets, and has begun thinking that she is being stalked and threatened. She is depressed and volatile. Sabira is also habitually and cruelly taunted by the mean-girl sorority of wives of Home Office top-level bureaucrats. Small wonder she has begin acting out in ways that could jeopardize Oscar Kasavian's position.

Bryant and May are hardly thrilled by what they see as a baby-sitting job and a no-win assignment but, as they and the rest of the PCU team begin to investigate, the case takes on ever larger proportions. Governmental corruption, whistleblowers in private industry, mental illness and its history in London, private clubs and their arcana, Russian gangsters, codes and ciphers, and the supernatural are all thrown into this heady mix. On top of all that, there are disquieting revelations of how the British class system, cronyism and the complete disregard of commercial/governmental conflicts of interest all conspire to ensure that a cabal of venal and ruthless men stay in power.

But this is no grim, cynical, deadly serious police procedural. With the PCU, that's just not possible. Arthur Bryant is the absent-minded fellow with his latest meal evidenced down the front of his rumpled clothes, his cell phone rendered unusable by the melted sweets all over it, and a brain that defines "nonlinear." He can't understand why people take exception to his insults––or to his conducting experiments at home and in the office involving things like pig carcasses and explosives. John May is Bryant's opposite: sartorially impeccable, careful to massage egos when necessary, and a believer that the simplest answer is usually the right one.

Despite their vast differences, Bryant and May make an effective team and, as always, they go right down to the wire in their investigation. I was listening to the book while walking and was so riveted by the book's last chapters that I walked a lot further than I'd intended. (Hmm, how about a new marketing approach for audiobooks: So enthralling you won't even notice you're exercising while listening!)

Most modern police procedurals remind us how reliant current investigations are on database searches, GPS, phone and internet records, forensics and all the accoutrements of our technological age. Bryant and May operate in our world, but their methods are refreshingly old-fashioned. You will never have to read about establishing time of death by analyzing the life cycle of maggots, for example. Arthur Bryant may find some other way to gross you out, but you'll be laughing at the same time.

Christopher Fowler just tells a good, entertaining story and doesn't gum it up with attempts to show he is knowledgeable about the latest gadgetry and techniques (that will all be hopelessly outdated in about five minutes anyway.) And he doesn't use protagonists who we know are supposed to be cool because of the way they dress, or talk, or listen to edgy music, or seduce people, or take or give a beating. Bryant and May are old, they wouldn't know what a lifestyle is if it smacked them upside the head, and yet they are cooler than any other detectives I can think of because they know what's right and they're going to keep on doing it, just the way they've done it since they got together way back in World War II, with blithe disregard for all that's changed around them.

Like so many books in the Peculiar Crimes Unit series, this one is also notable for its use of London settings in the story. Fowler tells us that St. Bride's Church is known as the journalists' church because of its location on Fleet Street, traditional home of London newspapers. It sits in the oldest part of London, known as the Square Mile, or the City of London, which is still a city in its own right, and has its own Lord Mayor––who, by the way, is not Boris Johnson, the flamboyant Mayor of London we saw during this summer's Olympics. The City is also home to the legal community's Inns of Court, which also play a dramatic part in the story, along with Sir John Soane's Museum, across from Lincoln's Inn Fields, and home to Hogarth's A Rake's Progress.

Fowler's descriptions of churches, museums, streets and history bring the city alive. He clearly loves London, especially its hidden places, like alleyways, mews, back passages of old buildings and tunnels. If you're fascinated by London, too, you might want to spend some time visiting Christopher Fowler's blog, especially this London walk, or this one, or this one with teeny tiny statues, or this collection of 15 excellent London websites. And these are just from 2012.

If you're already a fan of the PCU series, I can give you a preview of what's coming up, courtesy of Fowler's blog. He wrote recently that this latest book wrapped up a story arc, and he asked for comments to help him solidify his ideas about where to go for his next book. Here's his conclusion:

"One of these [next two PCU novels] will definitely feature an incapacitated Bryant and lots of old cases in the course of uncovering a new one, while the other book will be pretty sinister and dark-themed.

Plus, more eccentric characters, strange bits of London, oddments of history, arcana, sleuthing, impossible murder and general weirdness. Oh, and something impossible happening in the ultimate locked room, the Tower of London."

I can hardly wait.

Note: Mysteriously, Bryant & May and the Invisible Code is not yet published in book form in the U.S., even though the audiobook is. Being a naturally impatient person and a big fan of both this series and the narrator of the books, Tim Goodman, I got it as soon as it was available. Based on the U.S. publication date of the preceding book, I'd guess that this one will be published in the U.S. sometime in the first half of 2013.

The next-to-last image and the two Bryant & May cartoon images in this post are from Christopher Fowler's blog. Versions of this review appear on the Amazon and Audible product pages, under my username there.

Book Reviews of Christopher Fowler's Bryant & May and the Memory of Blood and Rebecca Cantrell's A City of Broken Glass

Bryant & May and the Memory of Blood (also published as The Memory of Blood: A Peculiar Crimes Unit Mystery) by Christopher Fowler

In Christopher Fowler's Peculiar Crimes Unit series, the PCU is the red-headed stepchild of London policing, despite the fact that its case clearance rate is stellar and its budget tiny. The PCU's unpopularity with the police and government establishment is largely due to its chief, Arthur Bryant. Bryant is an ancient, shambling man in shabby and soup-stained clothing who is fascinated by history, the occult and odd phenomena, but who lacks any people skills or ability to deal with the real world.

In Bryant's world, phones malfunction after being smothered by toffee melting in his pocket, important evidence is tainted or goes missing, and entire buildings may be accidentally destroyed. After losing track of his car countless times, his solution is to make a habit of parking it in places that make people really angry, since that means when he's searching for it, people will remember having seen it. His way of dealing with a potentially troublesome journalist is to pretend to show her an iron maiden torture device, lock her in it and stroll off, forgetting all about her.

Bryant's principal colleague and best friend is John May, who is as dapper as Bryant is disheveled, and spends much of his time smoothing over ruffled feathers after Bryant has unfortunately been allowed to speak to witnesses or superiors. Other members of the PCU staff register on the misfit scale, too, just at a much lower level than Bryant.

In the latest PCU book, Bryant & May and the Memory of Blood, the PCU is called in on a horrific case of the murder of a theater producer's infant son that is committed while the producer and his wife host a party to celebrate a new play with the production's cast and crew. What puts this crime within the PCU's remit is its bizarre and challenging circumstances. The boy was throttled and thrown out a sixth-floor window without anyone having witnessed any of the crime. The boy's nursery door was locked from the inside, and there is no evidence that will help identify the murderer. The crime scene is turned from puzzling to grotesque and eerie by the Punch puppet on the floor near the crib, and the fact that the impressions on the boy's neck match Punch's wooden hands.

While the rest of the PCU interview the party guests, construct timelines and analyze alibis, Arthur Bryant immerses himself in the arcana of puppetry, stage props and devices, and the history of the theater and of London buildings. He consults with carnies and Wiccans, and even a Victorian automaton of the seer Madame Blavatsky.

Bryant has a few other matters to distract him along the way. He and his housekeeper are being evicted from their longtime residence immediately––actually, it's only "immediately" because Bryant has spent months successfully avoiding paying any attention to the notices and his housekeeper's warnings. On another front, Bryant is dismayed when the appealing young woman who is helping him with his memoir is killed, and a CD of highly inflammatory and top-secret material culled from the memoir goes missing. To round off the distractions, hints begin to appear that someone in government is taking steps to discredit the PCU badly enough to force it to disband.

Bryant is convinced that a psychological drama is being played out by the staging of the murder and the use of the Punch puppet. The killer is trying to send a message. But what is the message, and for whom is it intended? Bryant's conviction grows as other guests at the party are murdered; their deaths also bizarre and apparently staged with reference to the Punch and Judy plays. As time goes by with no solution in sight, Bryant risks it all on one throw of the dice. He gathers the suspects and vows to his team that he will have his murderer by midnight or retire.

There is nobody like Christopher Fowler for combining dark, even horrifying, crime with comedy. Within seconds after wincing at a description of a crime scene, you may burst out laughing at one of Bryant's scathing observations.

Despite the contemporary setting and the (very occasional) use of modern forensic tools, PCU books harken back to classic mysteries, where a careful analysis of the clues and the suspects' movements––and the ability to spot red herrings and deceit––allow the reader to engage in the detection of the killer alongside the PCU team. Bryant & May and the Memory of Blood also provides the bonus of an entertaining education in the history of Grand Guignol plays and puppetry. I never had any particular interest in those subjects before, but I was fascinated. Now, that's the sign of a masterful writer.

This is the ninth book in the Peculiar Crimes Unit series, but if you haven't read the previous books, you'll be fine starting with this one. Bryant & May and the Invisible Code, the next book in the series, will be published in the UK by Doubleday in August. It's no mystery whether I'll buy it or wait for the US publication, which looks like it will be at least six months later.

*  *  *  *  *

A City of Broken Glass by Rebecca Cantrell

In Rebecca Cantrell's Hannah Vogel series, Hannah is a Berlin reporter in the 1930s who runs into trouble––a lot of trouble––with a variety of Nazi brownshirts and members of the regime, and ends up having to leave Germany for Switzerland and live under an alias. In this fourth book in the Hannah Vogel series, it's late 1938 and Hannah is on a reporting assignment to Poland from her Swiss newspaper. She's supposed to cover a local festival––not exactly hard-hitting stuff––and has brought her 13-year-old adopted son, Anton, along. Hannah drops her festival assignment when she learns that thousands of Jews of Polish heritage have been violently driven from Germany by the Nazis and are being held by Polish authorities in barns and factory buildings, with little food and no facilities.

Gestapo officer

A risky phone call back to Berlin on behalf of one of the victims leads to Hannah's arrest by the Gestapo and transport in a car trunk back over the border to Germany. Rescued by her old lover, Lars, she and Anton must hide out in Berlin until they can plan an escape from this country where they will be in grave danger if discovered. Despite the risk, Hannah can't resist investigating the case of a missing child, a murder, and the mystery of who betrayed her to the Gestapo.

It's a challenge to review this book in a way that will be helpful to potential readers, because this series has two very different potential audiences. One audience is readers who enjoy romantic mysteries, or at least mysteries with a strong focus on the protagonist's personal life and concerns. If you're in this category, it's likely you'll enjoy A City of Broken Glass. And, if you've enjoyed previous books in the Hannah Vogel series, this is the best since the first book, A Trace of Smoke.

The second potential audience is readers who seek out mysteries, thrillers and espionage books dealing with the Nazi and World War II eras. This group may well be less than enthusiastic about the book. I'll tell you why, but first a little background.

Herschel Grynszpan

The historical events that this story is built around begin with the mass deportation of Polish Jews from Germany in October, 1938. The "aktion" was sudden and violent, leaving 12,000 Jews stranded in the town of Zbaszyn, population about 6,000. One family, the Grysnzpans, had a son, Herschel, then living in Paris. When Herschel received a postcard from his sister describing the family's treatment, he was so frustrated and furious that he went to the German embassy in Paris and shot Ernst vom Rath, a member of the staff. (Reportedly, vom Rath was actually a bit of a Nazi critic and was under Gestapo investigation at the time of the shooting.) Two days later, vom Rath died. Nazi propaganda chief Josef Goebbels used the death as a pretext to invite attacks on Germany's Jews by announcing that "spontaneous demonstrations" against the Jewish community would not be interfered with. This set off the orgy of violence known as Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass.

Synagogue on fire on Kristallnacht

The book begins with Hannah interviewing deportees in Zbaszyn and ends with the dramatic resolution of her investigations as the horrifying violence of Kristallnacht begins. These bookends of the story are well done and historically accurate (except that, as author Cantrell is quick to point out, she leaves more time between the mass deportation and Kristallnacht than there was in actuality.) Though Cantrell is known for her thorough research and evocative period atmosphere, in this book the history is Wikipedia-level stuff. Anyone who regularly reads Nazi-era history or fiction will find no new facts or insights here.

The story between the two historical events that begin and end the book is the place where the two potential reader audiences may part ways. While Hannah investigates, she has plenty of time to devote to her troubled relationship with Lars, and learning what he has been doing in the two years since they parted. It's an interesting enough story, and their troubled romance is well presented. This will be satisfying to the first type of potential audience. For those who prefer a focus on the history, rather than the personal, though, the emphasis on the Hannah/Lars relationship may feel like unnecessary filler.

A City of Broken Glass will be published by Macmillan on July 17, 2012.

Note: I received a free review copy of A City of Broken Glass. Versions of these reviews appear on each book's Amazon product page under my Amazon user name.

A Little Night Fright

Halloween is a night my kids look forward to all year. Dressing up in costumes. Going door-to-door, trick-or-treating with friends. Lugging home bags full of candy to be examined, traded with others and eaten until the kids are sick.

I won't be escorting my kids tonight and my husband and I aren't attending a costume party. Instead, we're having a few friends over for movies. We'll offer a choice of tried-and-true nail biters: Psycho (has anyone not heard of Janet Leigh's shower scene or how much Norman Bates loves his mother?), Carrie (Sissy Spacek shows everyone it doesn't pay to annoy her), John Carpenter's Halloween (who in the history of movies screams better than Jamie Lee Curtis?), The Shining (Jack Nicholson gets creepier and creepier as the movie progresses) and The Thing (Carpenter's 1982 movie starring Kurt Russell about a shape-shifting alien).

To accompany the movies we'll serve this hummus from Noble Pig and chips.


Pizza Hummus (Makes about 4 cups)
1 Tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil
1/4 cup tomato paste
2 teaspoons dried oregano leaves
1 teaspoon dried basil
2 to 3 cloves garlic
3 cups canned chickpeas, drained & rinsed, 1/2 cup liquid reserved
1/4 cup tahini
1/4 cup fresh lemon juice
1 teaspoon Kosher salt

Heat the olive oil in a small skillet over medium-high heat. Add the tomato paste, oregano and basil, cooking until slightly toasted, about 2 minutes. Transfer the tomato paste mixture to a food processor. Add the garlic, chickpeas, chickpea liquid, tahini, lemon juice and salt.  Puree until smooth and creamy.

If you'd like to read while waiting for trick-or-treaters, you might try one of the books below. I've given a couple of horror and other suggestions.

Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez. The first sentence of this slim book tells all you need to know: "On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming in." Atmospheric and relentless. By the author of One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Drood by Dan Simmons. People either love or hate this 800-page book of steampunk/horror/historical fiction. Too long, but I enjoyed it. A story unreliably narrated by Wilkie Collins involving Collins, Charles Dickens and a mysterious figure named Drood who materializes from the scene of a train accident.

Dracula by Bram Stoker. Hey, I'm sick of vampires too, but this is the classic gothic fantasy and you must read it. Memorable characters in a tale of ever-increasing tension set in Victorian England and the spooky wilds of Transylvania. I've read it several times and still shiver when the Transylvanian peasants cross themselves.

Sherlock Holmes vs. Dracula: The Adventure of the Sanguinary Count by John H. Watson, M.D. as edited by Loren D. Estleman. This is one of those books I had to read based on the title alone but I enjoyed this pastiche. It's for Holmes fans who've read Dracula. In this book, a schooner runs aground in an English harbor. The dead captain has lashed himself to the steering wheel and his cargo is 50 boxes of earth. The only living passenger is a large black dog. Sound familiar? Somebody better alert Holmes, and luckily for London, somebody does.

Full Dark House by Christopher Fowler. The Peculiar Crimes Unit investigates London crimes with elements of the macabre or supernatural. This is the first book in an unusual series and it involves elderly detective John May's look back at the first case he and Arthur Bryant investigated during the London Blitz.

Savages by Don Winslow. Ben and Chon are happily supplying marijuana to their customers in Laguna Beach, California until a Mexican drug cartel decides to muscle in. Winslow is a great story teller. This book is thrilling rather than scary. It will keep you reading as you mindlessly reach for candy from the bowl for the little trick-or-treaters. (I hope you bought enough. What kind did you get?)

Appleby's Answer by Michael Innes. Priscilla Pringle is a well-known writer of clerical mysteries and, when a local rector dies mysteriously, her ears prick up and her nose begins to sniff. Her investigations are aided and abetted by the odd Captain Bulkington, who is interested in a real-life perfect murder. Soon Sir John Appleby, retired Commissioner of London's Metropolitan Police, gets an SOS. As usual, this book, the 27th in the John Appleby series, is a witty and literate gambol.

Make sure you put your leftover candy out of reach of your pets before you go to bed. This is a good night to keep your cats and dogs in the house where they'll be safe and where they can protect you from things that go bump in the night.

Oh, yes. You might want to sleep with a night light on, have a garlic clove on your bedside table and a heavy-duty flashlight under your pillow. You never know when some unannounced visitors will come tap-tap-tapping against your windowpane or ooze into the bedroom from under your closet door. It is Halloween after all. Sleep if you can.