Top positive review
4.0 out of 5 starsChallenging but rewarding
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 3, 2023
Christopher Fowler wrote many Bryant & May mysteries, this is the first one. Or is it? Oddly, it begins by one of the two being blown to bits. An odd way to begin a mystery series about two detectives; killing one off. But who killed the detective and why? The surviving detective, John May, has to delve back into their first case, their first meeting, to try to figure out why his partner, Arthur Bryant, died.
And so begins the back-and-forth, between present-day London and London reeling under the blitz in 1940. Yes, Bryant & May are THAT old.
Fowler was—he died in two months ago, March 2023–a very good writer. Satirical, tongue-in-cheek but with an ability to describe a city at war, civilians at war, in a may that touches the heart much more deeply than the usual “oh the brave Londoners” stories I grew up on after World War 2. War is hell and Fowler paints that hell while still making his main story a kind of “Phantom of the Opera” tale about the real-life Palace Theatre in London, trying to mount an operetta during the Blitz as characters are killed off in rather gruesome, mythological, circumstances. The operetta is Orpheus Descending so there are plenty of mythological references. Oh and did I mention the mystery that starts the whole book, who set off the bomb at the Peculiar Crimes Office that killed Arthur Bryant?
Neither mystery, the Palace Theatre mystery of 1940 or the bomb explosion of 2003, are easy or clear cut. It’s not even an easy read by any means as witnessed that it took me three weeks to read it. First, Fowler moves back and forth between the two eras without any notice that the time has suddenly switched. So, as a reader, I had to figure out when the “time” had changed by his descriptions of characters who were suddenly older, or his descriptions of modern devices such as mobile telephones, computers. Then there’s the mythology element where Bryant goes off on a tangent explaining who the Muses were, what their functions were, how it all might relate to the murders. Sometimes my head felt all muddled and I just had to put the book aside for awhile. And then when I picked it up again, I had to get myself back into it again.
Still, it was worth it. Fowler is, as I said, a very good writer. His descriptions of London and Londoners remind me so forcibly about the city that I love so much. And now that I have finished I am firmly hooked on these two old codgers who see the world in such a quirky way—a world of magic and mystery. Or young detectives? Will Fowler continue his back and forth chronology or will the next book be firmly set in a period. And if so, which one? I am looking forward to finding out.
