2,227: Bryant and May and the Bleeding Heart by Christopher Fowler

Bryant and May and the Bleeding Heart is the eleventh outing for one of the oddest detective duos in literature.  Since the last instalment, Bryant and May and the Invisible Code, Arthur Bryant and John May, together with the other members of the Peculiar Crimes Unit, have been moved from the Met to the City of London Police, a force more accustomed to solving financial crime.  A fresh start?

Or maybe not, as their new, PR-savvy boss, Orion Banks sees the PCU as a potentially embarrassing anachronism and OAP detectives Bryant and May as being ripe for retirement.  On top of this, the first crime they begin to investigate is definitely not the kind of thing Orion thinks proper.

Two teenagers have, apparently, seen a dead man rising from a grave in a London graveyard, something which doesn’t look much like a real crime, even when one of the teenagers is killed in a hit and run accident a few days later.  Nevertheless, the interest of the PCU has been aroused and Bryant’s curiosity is even more piqued when it transpires that the dead youth’s shirt has been swapped between the moment he was last seen alive and the moment his body is discovered.

Frustratingly for Bryant, he is banned from investigating this situation and is, instead tasked with finding out who has stolen the ravens from the Tower of London, something which leads him to cross paths again with Mr Merry, a kind of Welsh Aleister Crowley.

Of course, the two crimes are destined to connect with each other and our two detectives end up getting involved with some 21^st Century bodysnatchers, a dodgy waste disposal company and trying to figure out what the secret of Bleeding Heart Yard has to do with things, whilst Bryant is forced to confront his fear of being buried alive.

For various reasons, I’ve been picking up the Bryant and May books piecemeal and in no particular order, which is a shame as they do benefit from being read in order.  I have promised myself to go back and read (or, in some cases, reread) them from the beginning as I have become a little addicted to them, with this new episode being the best I’ve read so far.

The interplay between the members of the PCU is entertaining and often amusing and there is a real life to the characters, centring on Bryant and May themselves whose different but complementary personalities have created a distinctive and engaging partnership.  They are, in essence, old-fashioned detectives who would fit perfectly into a Golden Age novel but who are forced to deal with the modern world, with varying degrees of success, as Bryant’s tendency to destroy technology demonstrates.

On top of this, Christopher Fowler enriches the stories by steeping them in the arcana of London’s thousand year history.  The books almost scream London and I have rarely read books that have such a strong sense of place and of belonging.

All this only goes so far though and Fowler’s master trick is to underpin the eccentricity, the arcana and the whiff of the occult that suffuses the Bryant and May books with a solid police procedural and a proper investigation.  This grounds the novels and stops the other elements from turning them into implausible fantasy tales.

Bryant and May and the Bleeding Heart is an excellent detective novel.  It is, like the detectives themselves quirky but solid.  Superior stuff.

I would like to thank Random House (UK) for allowing me to read this via Netgalley.

2,488: Bryant and May and the Invisible Code by Christopher Fowler

Last summer and autumn I took part in the Transworld Reading Challenge, in which I got to choose four novels from a selection of their titles and then review them.  One of the titles I chose was The Water Room by Christopher Fowler, featuring his slightly odd detective duo, Arthur Bryant and John May.  Having thoroughly enjoyed it and intending to read some more of the series, I then promptly moved on and forgot all about it.

Fast forward almost a year and I arrived home the other day to find a package waiting for me.  Tearing off the wrapping eagerly, I discovered that the lovely people at Transworld had very kindly sent me a copy of Bryant and May and the Invisible Code, the latest book in the series.

For those of you not acquainted with the series, Bryant and May are the two senior detectives in the little-known Peculiar Crimes Unit of the Metropolitan Police, whose function (other than its perennial fight for existence) is to solve, well, peculiar crimes really.  Bryant and May are both old men who have somehow avoided mandatory retirement.  Bryant is irascible, fascinated by the esoteric and prone to ruining technology by some mysterious innate ability.  May is the “people person” of the duo, a bit of a ladies’ man and seemingly forever doomed to play straight man to Bryant.  They are assisted in their endeavours by a small but devoted crew of police officers and some decidedly odd acquaintances.  It is definitely possible to read Bryant and May and the Invisible Code as a stand-alone novel but I think there’s more to be gained from it by reading others in the series first.

The story opens with the death of a young woman in a church, apparently from natural causes, despite two children claiming that they had cursed her to death for being a witch.  Bryant’s curiosity is piqued but he can’t manage to finagle the case into the Peculiar Crimes Unit.  Conveniently for him, the PCU’s nemesis, the saturnine Oscar Kasavian, needs their help as his spouse has begun to behave in a most peculiar fashion, jeopardising his chances of heading a major government initiative.

As the two situations become increasingly interlinked, Bryant and May take us on a romp through London involving witchcraft, codes, the Rakes Club and secret nooks and crannies around London as the case starts to threaten not only the future of the PCU but even the lives of its members.

As with the other Bryant and May book I’ve read, Bryant and May and the Invisible Code is a many-layered tale, a little like the London to which this is a bit of an extended love letter.  It is a genuine detective story on one level, an affectionate parody of detective tropes on another and even a little bit of a supernatural tale on yet another.

But, permeating the whole of the book, London is Fowler’s true subject.  Like China Mieville, Dickens and others, Fowler captures a number of London’s myriad faces.  His London is not the bright lights of the West End or the aristocratic enclaves of Belgravia and Kensington but a moodier, more hidden London where, even when it’s sunny, there is an impression of shadow.  It’s a London filled with the quirky, a London that sits on layer upon layer of history and life.

Having failed to follow up with Bryant and May once before, I’m not going to make that mistake again and will be catching up with their earlier cases very soon.

2,549: The Water Room by Christopher Fowler

Well I didn’t see that coming!  I’d seen others in Christopher Fowler’s Bryant and May series in bookshops and on Amazon and had filed it away at the back of my mind for future investigation.  So, when I saw The Water Room, the second in the series in the Transworld Book Challenge selection, I knew I had to pick it.

And, it turns out I’ve been labouring under a complete misapprehension about it.  You’ve probably not heard of Charters and Caldicott.  They were jolly old buffers, obsessed with cricket, who appeared as minor characters in the film, The Lady Vanishes, proved surprisingly popular with audiences and made recurring cameo appearances in a number of films, the most notable of which is Night Train to Munich.  They were resurrected as bumbling amateur detectives in the 1980s by the BBC in a series and a couple of spin off novelisations.

I’ve always had something of a soft spot for them and so, seeing that Fowler’s detectives were named after an iconic brand of matches and that the cover art images of them are of old men of a certain era, I jumped to the conclusion that Bryant and May would be similar to Charters and Caldicott and that I was in for an amiable detective diversion with maybe some cricketing trivia thrown in.  Oh, how wrong I was and how glad I was to be wrong as, for all their period charm, Charters and Caldicott were pretty flimsy and lightweight whereas The Water Room has a satisfying depth to it.

Bryant and May are the senior members of the Peculiar Crimes Unit, a specialist police unit set up to handle those crimes that are too odd, too difficult or too, well, peculiar for the mainstream Met to bother with.  Our two heroes are both senior citizens who have somehow avoided being pensioned off.  Bryant is curmudgeonly, expert in the arcane and prone to destroying technology through some in-built talent.  May, on the other hand, is fascinated by gadgetry, a bit of a ladies’ man and far more personable.  Despite being polar opposites, they have managed to maintain a partnership for over forty years and run a team of junior detectives and forensic experts including their key assistant, Janice Longstreet, a retired sergeant with a penchant for dressing as a ‘50s Hollywood screen goddess. 

In The Water Room, Bryant gets interested in the mysterious death of an old Indian lady at number 5 Balaklava Street, the sister of one of his contacts.  The lady in question is found seated in her basement bathroom with a mouth full of river water, apparently drowned yet completely dry.  At the same time, an old girlfriend of May has roped him in to investigating the strange activities of her academic husband, who has been furtively exploring the hidden rivers of London in cahoots with a dubious collector of Ancient Egyptian artefacts.  There follows a complex storyline interweaving the two mysteries in which it becomes apparent that the hidden rivers are the linking factor until our detectives solve the cases with a classic last chapter explanation.

Although the relationship between Bryant and May and them and their subordinates is at the heart of The Water Room and, I suspect, the other books in the series, I can’t help but feel that the real star of the book is London itself.  Like some authors, notably China Miéville, Christopher Fowler has captured something of the soul of the city.  The book almost reeks of it.  The London of The Water Room is a damp, grey city, dark and oppressive, drawing out the petty crimes and misdemeanours that lie behind the net curtains of its residential streets.  This level of atmosphere gives rise to an almost melancholic feel in much of the book and Fowler’s insights into human nature lift The Water Room above the usual run of the mill detective novel.  I’m glad I finished it before I went on holiday as I’m not sure it would have worked as well on the beach.

Although a detective story, this is not the kind of book where the reader can follow a set of carefully planted clues, avoiding authorial sleight of hand, in order to unmask the murderer.  Instead, it is very much the kind of detective story where one simply has to relax into the plot and enjoy the journey of Bryant and May.  It is a novel and not a puzzle.  Part of this, of course, is down to Fowler’s writing style but much of it is a reflection of the way Bryant’s mind works.  In the same way that their personalities differ, so too do the thought processes of Bryant and May.  May is the classical detective, relying on logic and deduction to make progress.  Bryant is a more intuitive thinker, making leaps of thought and being open to all kinds of esoterica in his investigations.  Although The Water Room is emphatically not a novel of the supernatural or paranormal, there is a whiff of the arcane about Bryant’s methods and sources.

The Water Room is most definitely not the book I thought it was going to be when I opened it but it has brought a whole new series into my reading life.  I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys crime writing or novels set in London, although you should probably start with Full Dark House, the first in the series, as I think some of the back story given in The Water Room relates back to it and could act as a spoiler.