Christopher Fowler revisits his quirky collection of crime fighters in their seventh adventure: “Bryant & May on the Loose.” They are the members of the aptly named Peculiar Crimes Unit; the peculiarity is a toss-up between the crimes and those pursuing the criminals.
The unit has been disbanded. Pinned on the door of their empty London offices, written on the “back of a flyer for the Tease to Please Burlesque Cabaret, Soho,” is a note “To The Incoming Team Taking Over From Us.”
It sounds as though the offices have been vacated in a hurry and the team has left behind a number of loose ends. Specifically, there are warnings about Room 6, where there is always “too much loose electricity knocking around when Mr. Bryant is in the room,” and where a particular jar, which must never be opened, is stored — “In the event of spillage, you’ll find the number of a good epidemiologist pasted to the lid.”
The promise set up in the early pages is huge, and in terms of whimsy, somewhat unfulfilled. The early statements are enticing: “From these rooms the city’s longest-serving detectives, Arthur Bryant and John May, controlled an investigation team that handled the stuff you lot couldn’t begin to deal with; the cases that caused public panic, the ones that upset the status quo, the unsolved murders that were just too confusing, weird or embarrassing for our mates in the Met.” Though the operatives in this novel are inventive, they are also decidedly earthbound.
The unit’s behavior has long been considered “anti-establishment and subversive.” Its two senior members, Bryant and May, who are well past retirement age, are under investigation. The rest of the force has been placed on “permanent gardening leave.”
The former members are engaged, with varying degrees of success, in Doing Something Else. Detective Sgt. Janice Longbright is selling retro lingerie. Detective Constable Colin Bimsley is picking losing battles in pubs. John May seems to have accepted his fate and is shouldering the blame, but Arthur Bryant has slipped into apathy, visibly aging in a matter of weeks and refusing to leave the comfort of his armchair.
The group is given a new sense of purpose by a pair of seemingly unrelated events. Bimsley is working as day laborer when he finds a decapitated corpse locked in a freezer. And Meera Mangeshkar, former constable, is returning from a night of socializing with a friend when a man dressed like a stag, wearing antlers made of kitchen knives, accosts the pair.
May and Mangeshkar approach Bryant about coming out of retirement, certain that the tale of the headless body will pique his interest. But it’s news of the stag that brightens his eyes. The unit is reunited and given a week to solve the murder and keep the news under wraps.
The team is convened in a derelict building in Kings Cross, home to both the body and the stag sighting. The neighborhood is being revitalized in preparation for the London Olympics, and it is a study in contradictions. Major commercial construction is set against dodgy bars and derelict warehouses. The Peculiar Crimes Unit is truly at home.
More headless bodies turn up, and repeated stag sightings put construction workers on edge; Bryant’s suspicion that the two are related is correct. He and his team, lacking official status, are deprived of the databases and forensic tools that are the backbone of current police procedure. They must work this crime the old-fashioned way, through intuition and deduction.
Fowler is compared with Jasper Fforde, but his characters and settings are quietly off-beat as opposed to over-the-top inventions. They inhabit a real world, and Fowler’s London is as vibrant as his characters. The plot swirls, pulling in Bryant’s encyclopedic and occasionally bombastic historical knowledge and the services of a white witch.
Although there is a race against time, a push to find the murderer before he kills again, “Bryant & May on the Loose” moves forward with deliberation. This is not a high-tech and breathless reportage, it is a careful, old-fashioned working of the clues. It’s an approach that suits the characters, throw-backs all to a less technology-driven time.
In that sense, this is a comfortable and interesting read, which carries the reader at a quiet pace.
Robin Vidimos is a freelance writer who lives in Centennial.
FICTION
Bryant & May On the Loose
by Christopher Fowler
$25
