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BRYANT & MAY AND THE BLEEDING HEART
by Christopher Fowler
Bantam, December 2014
400 pages
$26.00
ISBN: 0345547659


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

This is the eleventh outing for Arthur Bryant and James May, perhaps the oldest detectives ever to serve in the Metropolitan Police.

The regular yearly appearance of a new Peculiar Crimes mystery hides its somewhat precarious history as a series. Several times in the past Bryant & May have appeared to be tottering toward the end of their career, only to be pulled back from the brink in the end to appear, somewhat dishevelled but still on the job, in their next installment. And I, for one, am very glad of their periodic salvation.

As Fowler points out, to keep a long-standing detective series alive, it is necessary to refresh and surprise. The first consideration seems to have prompted the removal of the Peculiar Crimes Unit to a new jurisdiction, the City of London. If this sounds unduly constrictive, the reader is assured that their remit extends well beyond the borders of the City. Still, they will have some explaining to do to win over their new supervisor, Orion Banks, Public Liaison Officer and mistress of bafflegab and the art of euphemism.

The first case that presents itself is right up Arthur Bryant's alley - two teenagers, taking advantage of the seclusion of St George's Gardens, a public square cum minor cemetery on the edge of Bloomsbury, to smoke a bit of weed and enjoy a little cuddle, are terrified when one of the graves apparently opens and its inhabitant rises to his feet, says something, and falls back into his coffin. Bryant is swiftly off on a chase which inevitably involves resurrectionists, both old and new, and the sinister Mr Merry, a lecturer at the Museum of London, a necromancer and a very dangerous man, or so it appears. Bryant is quite frightened of falling under his spell, but then Bryant is not himself through much of this book.

A secondary plot involves one of the hoariest of London legends, the ravens at the Tower of London, on whose welfare, it is said, the continued existence of England itself depends. They're gone, it seems, and if the news gets out, then at the very least, tourist traffic at the Tower will plummet.

It is not yet clear if the jurisdictional move will pay off in a rejuvenation of our improbably ancient detectives. (As I recall, they met during the Blitz, when May was nineteen and Bryant three years older. You do the math.) They are still elderly, but considerably younger now, it appears. They gain a new antagonist in Orion Banks, who speaks in an impenetrable jargon. She remarks that the duo have "exceeded their optimal efficiency timelines," and represent "more of a senior sensibility" than she is used to. But the staple conflict of recent police procedurals between new female broom and old male cop is beginning to wear a bit thin, even if Fowler is immensely inventive in the language he develops to describe it.

While there is still a sufficient helping of that singular mixture of the occult, the history of London in its many layers, and hard-headed reason that marks the entire series, the plot lines in this one are less bafflingly ingenious than Fowler usually manages to produce. The menace in the person of Mr Merry is deflated rather more easily than we have come to expect, and most worryingly, Bryant and May seem to have very little to do with one another - they are less a partnership than distant acquaintances.

Perhaps the move has unsettled the pair and the next time around, they will have settled in. Arthur Bryant will have got over his funk and James May will be given more to do than he is this time.. I certainly hope so, as this is one series I look forward to each year. I would hate to think that it has finally run its course.

§ Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal.

Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, January 2015

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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