Christopher Fowler (http://www.christopherfowler.co.uk/blog/) has been chronicling
the adventures of Bryant & May for some time now and I have to admit that
it was David here at the Corvus Rookery who introduced me to the delights of
London’s Peculiar Crimes Unit. I have so enjoyed following their endeavours to
rid the city of such criminals as the Leicester Square Vampire while having to
contend with increasingly hostile management from the Home Office, that I want
to let you into the secret.
Initially set up during the Second World War to deal with cases that
could adversely affect the nation’s morale, the Peculiar Crimes Unit handles bizarre
cases and find connections that anyone else would have missed. As with any
series there is continuing delight from the characters that people the PCU, especially
the two elderly detectives who refuse to be either promoted or pensioned off. They each personify a different approach to
detective work, one modern, tech savvy, suave and a ladies’ man; the other
intuitive, sensitive to the psychogeography of the city, it’s history and
liable to involve mystics, witches and all manner of unorthodox methods.
Fowler is a class act. His love of the city shines through each
paragraph, London is the third character in this series, as we read, we learn
of the history of this city, the layer upon layer of half remembered events and
people that still influence the present. I have savoured every one of the
series, and I wait impatiently for the new volume The Invisible Foe to be released on 2nd of August.
Fowler writes beautiful prose and weaves complex plots that yield their
secrets slowly. His characters are believable, their motivations like our own.
Each novel wears its’ research easily, it aids the telling of the tale, it is
not flash, or merely an information dump that you come across in inferior
authors work. You have a week to catch up on the first nine books, so you’d
better get on with it, hadn’t you.
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