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When we parted company with those venerable members of the Peculiar Crimes Unit (PCU), Arthur Bryant and John May, it appeared that a short-sighted and conventional administration and their own reckless disregard for the niceties of modern police practice had finally ended their long career. The PCU has been disbanded and the team turned loose to fare as best it can. For Arthur Bryant in particular this involuntary retirement threatens to become a death sentence, as he has lost much of his will to get out of bed in the morning, let alone to live. But happily, London is still there and still has its ways of confounding both order and bureaucracy. The King's Cross area, long neglected, is undergoing a transformation as a result of the rail link to St Pancras and the forthcoming London Olympics. Anything that might interfere with the massive redevelopment scheme is of national interest. So when headless bodies begin to turn up behind King's Cross station and a figure, dressed as a stag and bearing a set of antlers made of kitchen knives looms threateningly on the edge of the waste ground, the Home Office reluctantly calls upon the PCU. It's to be kept on a very short leash, denied access to the data bases and technical support of modern policing, and required to come through with a solution within the week. But it is back. And just in time for Bryant, who's been fading fast. Faithful readers of the series (and I am one) will remember that we learned in FULL DARK HOUSE, where he first appeared, that he was born in 1918 and was working at the Unit during the Blitz. That was where he met May, then three years his junior, though he seems much younger now. Fowler has wisely obscured this biography as the series progresses. But ninety years old or not, Bryant is venerable and has the sort of memory that not only retains the relatively recent but that spans the centuries. Arthur's age and his extraordinary knowledge of London's past make him acutely sensitive to what has gone before. It's a dangerous sensitivity, as May points out: "All the things that have happened here in times gone by remain burned into his vision like afterimages. It's Arthur's weakness. And, of course, his greatest strength." London too has that same sort of memory. Its ancient holy spots, its wells and mounds, are all still there, if disregarded, and can on occasion remind those operating the diggers and those ordering them about that they are forgotten, perhaps, but not gone. Fowler treads this ground very cannily. Any description of this book or of the series runs the risk of making it all sound impossibly twee. Horned Gods, sacred wells, Merlin's Cave, oh my! But it is nothing like that really. It's about as twee as Schrödinger's cat. Any story that includes a villain straight out of the pages of Patricia Highsmith is not likely to seem especially quaint just to begin with, and the investigation into the murders proceeds in a perfectly reasonable way. The series originally was supposed to end with THE VICTORIA VANISHES. At the time, though I was happy to go on reading about Bryant & May as long as Fowler cared to write about them, I did wonder if it might not be wiser to let the series end on that almost perfect note. I was quite wrong. The Peculiar Crimes Unit may have been turfed out of their old home, but they still have their feet firmly planted in London - both its tawdry contemporary everyday sites and those that are numinous.
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, December 2009
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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