The eccentric views of London in Christopher Fowler's playful Peculiar Crimes Unit novels will gladden the heart of anyone who appreciates an offbeat mystery.
The Burning Man by Christopher Fowler (Doubleday, £16.99) is the 12th novel to feature the fabulously unorthodox detectives Arthur Bryant and John May and their colleagues at London's Peculiar Crimes Unit.
So far, octogenarians Arthur Bryant and John May of London's Peculiar Crimes Unit have appeared in 11 of Christopher Fowler's novels, but London's Glory (Doubleday, £16.99) is the first collection of short stories featuring the unorthodox duo.
"The Peculiar Crimes Unit is not like other... divisions" of London's Metropolitan Police Force, Christopher Fowler warns us in THE MEMORY OF BLOOD (Bantam, $25), the latest in a delightfully anarchic series of novels featuring an eccentric pair of elderly sleuths who may very well be crackers.
For Bloom, things had gone wrong in the '60s, when universities took on "the imperative to promote equality, stamp out racism, sexism and elitism (the peculiar crimes of our democratic society), as well as war," he wrote, because they thought such attempts at social change "possessed a moral truth superior to any the university could provide".
As senior investigators in the Peculiar Crimes Unit, the partners are expected to attend to criminal matters that fall outside the norm, but Bryant's insistence that he saw a murder victim near a pub that doesn't exist (it was demolished in 1925) has the entire unit baffled.
Because there does not appear to be anything peculiar about crime's concentration, it is likely that processes that give rise to concentration in physics, geology, biology, economics, medicine, computer sciences, and other disciplines have analogs in the study of crime.
In financial history, Ponzi schemes — the fraudulent enterprise of paying off old investors with money collected from new ones — are the most peculiar of crimes.
