An Air of Evil

Someone needs to buy Christopher Fowler a drink. I’d do it myself, except I’m not in the UK area. Here is a modern writer who understands that, generally speaking, a mystery is only as good as its story. And he comes up with a terrific plot idea in this one: Bryant and May and the Invisible Code. Two children are playing “Witch Hunter” outside a church, and decide that a sad-looking young woman is a witch. “So how are we going to kill her?” one of the kids asks. The woman then enters the church… and then, as the kids watch from the door, the woman drops to the ground, dead! Nobody approached her, and the CCTV cameras clearly show that she died alone.

Arthur Bryant gets to hear of this death from his doctor and is intrigued, but the Home Office refuses  to hand him the case. Instead, Oscar Kasavian calls Bryant and May to his office. Kasavian, it turns out, needs help. His wife has been going crazy of late—covering the mirrors in the house, talking to strangers on the street, and insisting that a coven of witches is after her life. Kasavian doesn’t understand what is going on, and he’s due to make a major speech in a week’s time. He asks Bryant and May to investigate his wife and try to help her—and if they succeed, Kasavian promises to stop trying to shut down the Peculiar Crimes Unit.

Return of the Peculiar

When I reviewed Christopher Fowler’s The Victoria Vanishes, I quickly recapped my opinion of the Bryant and May series of books. Although I loved the first ones, when White Corridor came, I was instantly turned off. Although White Corridor had a clever plot, it took forever to get anywhere, had plenty of psychotic characters, and was just dull, dull, dull. The Victoria Vanishes was an improvement of sorts, but had a laughable solution and some other problems.

But I was very intrigued by the plot summary of The Memory of Blood, the ninth Bryant and May novel. The extremely rich Robert Kramer hosts a party for the cast and crew of The Two Murderers, a lurid play with plenty of gratuitous sex and violence. Everyone is there: Robert’s wife Judith, the leading man Marcus Sigler, the director Russel Haddon, the scriptwriter Ray Pryce, and plenty more. Suddenly, Judith comes to Robert and tells him that the door to their baby Noah’s room is locked, and she had left it open. And to make a long story short (too late), the door is broken down and Noah is missing—he’s been thrown out of the window! But how was it done? A malfunctioning lock makes it impossible for anyone to have locked the door from the outside! But the most grotesque thing about this business is that the puppet of Mr. Punch is no longer on its hook—instead it is lying inside the room, as if he came to life and threw the baby out the window…

The Flying Inn

Christopher Fowler

How can I describe Christopher Fowler’s Peculiar Crimes Unit mysteries? I was expecting something rather like John Dickson Carr’s The Department of Queer Complaints: impossible murders and locked rooms being investigated by a police squad. Well, I was wrong—the series turned out to be just what it claimed. It was all about peculiar crimes. Some books, like White Corridor and Ten Second Staircase involve genuine locked rooms (or other impossible scenarios). Others, like The Water Room, are just bizarre crimes.

Since this is my first time reviewing a Fowler novel on the blog, I’ll give you a quick rundown of the previous entries I read in the series. Full Dark House has a brilliant atmosphere, a retrospective murder case in WWII London with a lunatic murdering people in a theatre. It has a lot of social commentary, but Fowler gets away with it because it’s good stuff. The only thing wrong with it is the solution, where the book falls apart, as some impossible occurrences are never adequately explained and the killer is just random.

The Water Room has a far less interesting set-up but an infinitely better solution. (With Fowler, it often seems that the better the set-up, the less interesting the solution, and vice versa.) Ten Second Staircase involves a lunatic serial killer dressing up as a Highwayman and killing minor celebrities, becoming one in the process.