Fowler's Bryant and May Tackle THE LONELY HOUR

 

Let me admit from the start that I love Christopher Fowler’s Bryant and May mysteries. His latest entry, titled Lonely Hour does nothing to change my preference for his dazzling, violent, esoteric fact filled, and dryly humorous depiction of that great city of which you can only be tired of if you are tired of life. Arthur Bryant and John May are aging or elderly, or really old London detectives depending on how you feel about the mantle of years. They work in the Met’s Peculiar Crimes Unit along with an ethnically diverse group of mainly devoted assistants. Bryant follows cases with his heart and an intellectual breadth that both confuses and boggles the mind of his fellows. He is a loner who often appears befuddled with his lint-tinged pockets filled with candy, his distressing disappearances at critical times, and his conversations with the strange and occult minions of underground London.  For Arthur the city has more dark alleys and tunnels than the tube itself.  Mr. May's sleuthing takes a more rational and technological path, but the mysterious killer who strikes viciously only at 4:00 AM in the morning, confuses both detectives.  Finding a motive when there appears to be no connection between the victims make this a particularly difficult case. 

Solving the crime is imperative in order to keep the Peculiar Crime Unit from extinction.  It is always under fire in the earlier books as well because the higher up's on the command chain cannot tolerate the Unit's ability to manage high solution rates in spite of their unconventional and often illegal methods. 

The plot reveals the identity of the killer early-on though the motives for the killings are obscure. The reader is left with plenty of time to concentrate on the disparate solution methods used by each partner. I will avoid narrating the full carnival of twists and turns that arrive as the finish nears as they depend on the introduction of two modern and difficult social problems.  Talking about them now would let the surprising denouement  out of the bag too soon.  

What I will say is that Fowler peppers his tale with an encyclopedic knowledge of London history and street geography and combines it with an equally deep familiarity with the history and nature of London’s historic theatre scene. As a theatre historian myself, who has written his own book on theatre history walking tours in London*, I can only say that my research background looks like P.T. Barnum’s Tom Thumb in comparison to Fowler’s Paul Bunyan. The only quibble might be that unless you have at least some working knowledge of London you might be lost in the amount of detail. For instance, only someone who has actually traversed those London streets can fully appreciate the wild Bullit/Steve McQueen like vehicle chase that takes two cars and a motorcycle careening along the Embankment, then cutting into Queen Victoria Street, and finally tearing up St. Andrew’s hill toward St. Paul’s . 

In sum, I highly recommend this book. If you like it as much as I do, there are several others in the series waiting to give you many hours of pleasant entertainment.   

*London Theatre Walks by Jim De Young and John Miller was last updated in 2002 and is now out of print, but can be found on Amazon. Some of the streetscapes have changed, but most of the sites covered are still there and the streets themselves remain. It remains the only book that concentrates solely on theatre related sites.