First a thank you to edrie (i hope she's handling her crises as best she can and knows i am with her in spirit). secondly to MichiganChet who will help me with the posting here. i write a regular GUS diary but i want this one to be done to this groups specs and properly. thank you both, you're very nice people. i've found most true book lovers are.
From Amazon.Com and supplied by Mr. Fowler himself:
Christopher Fowler was born in Greenwich, London. He is the multi award-winning author of thirty novels and ten short story collections, and the author of the Bryant & May mystery novels. His first bestseller was 'Roofworld'. Subsequent novels include 'Spanky', 'Disturbia', 'Psychoville' and 'Calabash'. His books have been optioned by Guillermo Del Toro ('Spanky') and Jude Law ('Psychoville'). He co-founded Creative Partnership, a company that changed the face of film marketing, and spent many years working in film. His memoir of growing up without books, entitled 'Paperboy', was highly acclaimed. Fowler's website contains no biographical information.
He has written comedy and drama for BBC radio, including Radio One's first broadcast drama in 2005. He writes for the FT and the Independent on Sunday, Black Static magazine and many others. His graphic novel for DC Comics was the critically acclaimed 'Menz Insana'. His short story 'The Master Builder' became a feature film entitled 'Through The Eyes Of A Killer', starring Tippi Hedren and Marg Helgenberger. In the past year he has been nominated for 8 national book awards. He is the winner of the Edge Hill prize 2008 for 'Old Devil Moon', and the Last Laugh prize 2009 for 'The Victoria Vanishes'.
Christopher has achieved several pathetic schoolboy fantasies, releasing a terrible Christmas pop single, becoming a male model, writing a stage show, posing as the villain in a Batman graphic novel, running a night club, appearing in the Pan Books of Horror, and standing in for James Bond.
His short stories have appeared in Best British Mysteries, The Time Out Book Of London Short Stories, Dark Terrors, London Noir, Inferno, Neon Lit, Cinema Macabre, the Mammoth Book of Horror and many others. After living in the USA and France he is now married and lives in King's Cross, London.
The author also runs a nifty
blogsite called, imaginatively enough, 'Christopher Fowler's Blog' I really urge everyone to check it out, even though a very entertaining link to the Peculiar Crimes Unit had to be shut down because of incessant spamming, from Russian miscreants and a shoestore in Texas. You have to be careful with them. But the site provides another look into the authors satiric taste and free rein imagination and he does it quite well.
In fact, here is a quote: An Open Letter to the Publisher: [NB: this is Mr Fowler's view of the Meredith Kercher murder, not mine]
Dear Harper Collins,
I see that you are to pay Amanda Knox £4 million for her memoirs. Apparently she hired a top lawyer used by Barack Obama and George W. Bush to negotiate a book deal about being jailed in Italy for her part in the murder of Meredith Kercher, a British student.
I see that she will reveal ‘never before told details surrounding her case, and describe how she used her inner strength and strong family ties to cope with the most challenging time of her young life.’
I am a jobbing writer who gets paid an often staggeringly low sum for each of my books. If I am found innocent of murdering someone, will you give me a book deal?
Okay, so the prosecution says Miss Kercher was killed in a brutal sex game which went wrong, and Italy’s highest court is appealing over the acquittal. Luckily, Ms Knox won’t be extradited back to Italy from the US so it’s a win-win for you. And as Ms Knox has professed a desire to become a writer, perhaps you can nurture her career with future horrific scandals.
I can offer you other incentives to hire me. For a start, I’m an actual writer so the book won’t need to be dictated and rewritten. Also, I will make sure the details are really gruesome and involve far weirder sex-and-drugs stuff than Amanda’s tale. And I’ll commit the murder in a place where the police are famously corrupt, like Los Angeles.
Furthermore I can cry on cue, thank Jesus and find strength in my family at a moment’s notice. I know there are downsides. I can’t guarantee anyone will call me ‘Foxy’, and I realise that the OJ Simpson book ‘If I Did It’ published by Gibson Square, wasn’t very well received by grumps who felt it was in some way ‘immoral’ to make money from an acquitted but still suspect murderer.
I hope Ms Knox’s book will cover the delightful moment when she did a cartwheel in the police station just after the murder, and the bit where she was caught on television kissing her fellow suspect passionately. I hear he’s also preparing to sell a book about the crime in Italy. Perhaps you could sell them both as a BOGOF.
Anyway, hats off to you for working with Ms Knox’s powerful representatives to create such a unique sales product. I’m looking forward to a book that tells a gripping partial story from a murder case’s key suspect. After all, it’s not as if 21 year-old Meredith Kercher can write one back, is it, having been stabbed so many times and had her throat slit?
Your domestic sales should be good, as I hear Ms Knox is viewed in her own country an innocent victim of a messy Italian judicial system. Unfortunately, over here it is generally assumed that she got away with murder, so you may have to do radio spots as well as posters.
Meanwhile my offer still stands. If we agree the details up-front I can start making immediate arrangements to be involved in a tragic but oddly gripping crime. I’ll visit Ann Summers and B&Q for everything I’ll need today if you like.
The main thing is not to doubt yourselves. Don’t think for a minute that this will make you appear to the rest of the world as a prime example of the moral disease gripping corporate culture.
I look forward to hearing from you soon.
Yours sincerely,
Christopher Fowler
* * * * *
The books are all written in a "stand alone" format, but for me, some sort of order is helpful. The Full Dark House is, I believe, the first book in the series. (it came out in 2004). There's lots and lots of history of the specialized "Peculiar Crimes Unit" in it. How it began during the blitz and the reason for a specialized police unit to investigate and solve crimes that may be troubling or cause panic in the populace. In the case of the Peculiar Crimes Unit the word Peculiar means "particular". It has come to mean peculiar in later books. The book was followed by The Water Room, Seventy-Seven Clocks, Ten Second Staircase, White Corridor, The Victoria Vanishes, Bryant & May On the Loose and Bryant & May Off the Rails. A ninth novel, titled Bryant & May and the Memory of Blood, was released in hardback on 29th September 2011.
However, after reading that one, you're on your own. Recently, in one book, a question of age was raised. I'm choosing to disregard that and just treat Mr. Bryant and Mr. May as being timeless humans.
Mr. Bryant is an eccentric, he is a cornucopia of london esoterica, which Fowler, laments throughout the books, as the landmarks are disappearing quickly. However, there are still people who keep the arcana alive and Mr. Bryant knows them all.
Mr. May is a dapper older man who joined the unit at the same time Bryant did and was considered the junior partner. He still is in many ways, but he's the only PCU member who can reign Bryant in.
The books are filled with all sorts of arcane london information including how water works underground in the city. Many peripheral characters are typically eccentric with lots of information no regular policing unit would utilize. Mr. Bryant utilizes these forgotten sources to the advantage of the PCU, something regular policing entities disregard.the books are filled with dry british humor which often makes both myself and my husband laugh out loud.
Here is a sample, from "The Memory of Blood", which just came out:
Arthur Bryant stood there pretending not to shiver.
He was tightly wrapped in a 1951 Festival of Britain scarf, with a Bloody Mary in one hand and a ketchup-crusted cocktail sausage in the other. Above his head, a withered yellow corpse hung inside a rusting gibbet iron.
'Well,' he said, 'this is nice, isn't it?'
His partner, John May, was not so consoled. The great chamber was freezing. Rain was pattering into an array of galvanised buckets. The smell of mildewed brickwork assailed his nostrils. A few feet behind him, the Witchfinder General Matthew Hopkins was stabbing a thin- bladed knife into a screaming priest, looking for the marks of the Devil. On the other side of the detectives stood a torture rack and several members of the Spanish Inquisition clad in crimson robes, armed with flaming brands and scourges.
'You could have made an effort and put on a clean jacket, instead of that ratty old overcoat,' said May. 'You look like a character from Toad of Toad Hall.'
'This is Harris Tweed,' said Bryant, fingering a frayed hole in his soup-stained sleeve. 'It was handed down to me by my grandfather.'
'Was that before or after he passed away?'
'Funny you should say that. He died in it. Gave himself a heart attack trying to get the lid off a jar of gherkins. My grandmother thought it was a pity to waste good fabric.'
A distorted tape loop of chanting monks began to play once more from hidden speakers, adding to the chamber's pervasive gloom.
May sighed. 'Of all the things you've put our Unit through over the years, this has to be the strangest. Hosting a cocktail party in a house of horrors in order to catch a murderer. If you ever say a word about it in your memoirs, I'll kill you.'
'I didn't hear any better ideas from you,' Bryant reminded him cheerfully. 'This is absolutely our last chance to break the case. At midnight we'll be forced to unlock the doors and we'll lose everything, unless we can flush him out in the next hour. Keep your eyes peeled for anything unusual.'
May looked around at the kidnapped party guests, most of whom were glumly wedged between rotting corpses. 'Unusual,' he repeated, trying not to lose his temper.
Bryant sucked the celery stick from his Bloody Mary thoughtfully. Somewhere above the stalactite-spiked arches of London Bridge station a train rumbled. The bricks trembled and soot sifted down. The shunting mingled with the thunder outside. Rain was pouring under the front door and pooling around the sodden shoes of the guests, all of whom were underdressed for the occasion. In the silences between rain, thunder and trains, May saw the group's breath condensing and imagined he could hear their teeth chattering. A waitress passed them, bearing a tray of bloody eyeballs on sticks. On closer inspection, these turned out to be dyed pickled onions.
In another book the olympic construction is utilized as a crime area. In another the London underground and water circulation under London are clues to the crimes.
If you love dark humor, strange situations and disappearing london arcana - in short, if you would like an occasional trip to a wicked psychoville - these are the books for you. Mr. Fowler is lamenting the disappearance of the "old london" and in one book stated that clearly, but, in his latest novel, he utilizes more history than landmarks. it works well particularly for us yanks who have little knowledge of the darker side of the city.
Fowler has written many books, as indicated above, but these are my faves. Try them, you'll enjoy!