Book Review: Bryant and May: Wild Chamber

Bryant and May: Wild Chamber: A Peculiar Crimes Unit Mystery
Christopher Fowler 
Mystery


I've never been able to make up my mind about how I feel about this series. Maybe that's because Christopher Fowler doesn't seem to have made up his mind, either.

Wild Chamber is pretty typical, really. There are elements of black comedy in it, but it's not really a comedy. There are elements of satire in it, but it's not really satire. There are chunks of urban grit, but it's not a hardboiled novel. There are realistic parts, written about natural-seeming characters in believable settings, and then there are parts that seem to have wandered over from Douglas Adams and set up shop. It's sort of a whodunit, although the ending is as much "whuh?" as "ah-hah!" (To be fair, I've read much worse.)

Half the time it seems as though Fowler doesn't like most of his characters, which is a downer. And in every book of the series there's a B plot in which Peculiar Crimes Unit is on the verge of being shut down by the Powers That Be, which frankly gets pretty repetitive.

What's good about it, you ask? (You do. Trust me.) Well, I adore the amiably melancholy off-kilter lead character, Arthur Bryant; he's like Lieutenant Columbo as written by P. G. Wodehouse. There are some excellent deductive bits along the way: "I knew how he got into the garden as soon as I found out that Mrs. Soandso kept a budgerigar". There are plot twists. There are suspects who are actually suspicious. It's wildly creative and full of useless facts. I like the setting. Some of the funny bits are, in fact, quite funny. I didn't spot the culprit until near the end, either.

A mixed bag, in other words--a collection disparate parts, not exactly fitting together, yet it all more or less works out. (That describes the Peculiar Crimes Unit itself, incidentally, as well as the books that feature it.) Christopher Fowler's own website describes the lead characters as "Golden Age Detectives in a modern world", which actually puts it rather neatly. If that doesn't sound like the kind of thing you like, it probably isn't. Otherwise . . . well, I'm not going to be buying the books in hardcover, but I'll pick up the next one if it strikes my fancy.