Christopher Fowler’s lovely old pair of detectives Bryant and May are back in a well-received hardcover, TEN SECOND STAIRCASE. While you wait for that one, why not catch up on their three previous adventures in paperback? Here’s what I said about Seventy-Seven Clocks:
Those two highly unusual London coppers Arthur Bryant and John May who make up the aptly named Peculiar Crimes Unit (a TV series title if I’ve ever heard one) of Scotland Yard, star in a story which starts with a violent death in the lobby of the legendary Savoy Hotel and quickly expands to include art vandalism, Gilbert and Sullivan and a host of other peculiarities. As Bryant explains the unit’s history to a biographer, “Before we knew it, we were dealing with goat-bothering bishops and transvestite Conservatives -- not that the latter constitutes much of a peculiarity these days.”