This book is perfect on so many levels, Christopher Fowler is a genius. This works as a detective story, an homage to forgotten London, a history book and an exquisitely written novel. Despite the 'whodunnit' element, this book shines as an ode to the friendship that forms between eccentric and and misfit characters. The characters are like old friends to me now and the newest recruit to the PCU is a welcome young addition. If you have never encountered the world of Bryant and May, I encourage you to do so. Start at the beginning and work through the series, I almost envy you the treats you have in store. This would be a ten star read for me; fabulous.

Welcome back to my blog, everyone. I'm sorry for not reviewing anything in the last 17 months or so, but I have had several major changes in my life and, unfortunately, I couldn't find the time or opportunity really to get back to it...until now! I hope that I will be able to be a lot more regular with my reviews these days, especially while the world is still in lockdown.

So, to restart my blog, we have a return of some very old friends...

Bryant & May - Oranges and Lemons

One Sunday morning, the outspoken Speaker of the House of Commons steps out of his front door only to be crushed under a mountain of citrus fruit. Bizarre accident or something more sinister? The government needs to know because here's a man whose knowledge of parliament’s biggest secret could put the future of the government at stake?

It should be the perfect case for Bryant & May and the Peculiar Crimes Unit, but unfortunately one detective is in hospital, the other is missing and the staff have all been dismissed. It seems the PCU is no more. But events escalate: a series of brutal crimes seemingly linked to an old English folk-song threatens the very foundation of London society and suddenly the PCU is offered a reprieve and are back in (temporary) business!

And if the two elderly detectives, ‘old men in a woke world’, do manage to set aside their differences and discover why some of London’s most influential figures are under life-threatening attack, they might not just save the unit but also prevent the entire city from descending into chaos . . .(blurb from the book!)

This was a typical Bryant & May book. Firstly, they are recovering from the events in the previous book in the series, when May had been shot and Bryant seemed to lose trust in him. However, events brought back the whole PCU which had been closed down by the Home Office. The plot was quite easy to follow, as with all of this series, but it was clear to me that the main suspect probably wasn't the killer from the very beginning. Fowler lead me on a merry chase across London to it's churches featured in the Oranges and Lemons nursery rhyme and they atmosphere of each area was distinctly different, yet still true to real life.

The two new characters introduced were mysterious and clearly both had something to surprise. Both of their surprises were unexpected, however, and that made for an extra puzzle throughout the book.

Over all, this book is excellent. I would have liked more suspects to be involved, but that didn't distract me from an enjoyable read.

Star rating: 4.5/5

This is the first book in The Bryant and May Series I have read. It is brilliant in every way with likable and believable characters who share witty and humorous dialogue; an interesting, refreshing and articulate writing style; well plotted and intelligent story line and an erudite author who makes the unbelievable, believable (who ever heard of a Peculiar Crimes Unit of the police force?). After reading only 1% I was so completely hooked into the story and characters, I couldn't put the book down, I cannot remember if that has ever happened to me before. There were many moments when I laughed out loud and I have not done that for a very long time whilst reading a book.

This story is number 19 of the series and the biggest question I have is how come I have only just stumbled across them?. Whilst I was a little dubious that I would struggle to figure out where I would land in the series by plunging into the 19th book first and was concerned that I would need some background to the story and the character relationships. I needn't have worried at all about that. To prepare, though, I downloaded book one and began reading that at the same time as reading book 19. I quickly learned that Oranges and Lemons was perfectly capable of standing alone and it was not in any way necessary to read the titles sequentially. I later went on to learn that it was the intention of the author for each of these stories to stand on their own feet.

As well as the mystery, crime and detection elements and the wonderfully drawn characters in this book, London plays a huge role in the story. Having now also read a couple of the earlier books too, it appears that London is a character throughout the series and this makes the books all the more enjoyable for me as the rich and varied history of the city and its people adds so much texture to the stories.

And so I'm hooked! Not only have I become a fan of The Bryant and May series but I am also now a great fan of Christopher Fowler. His website is an amazing resource of fabulous information with his blog offering up daily posts which provide a mixture of insights and topics to discuss, all written in the authors wonderful writing style. As a lifetime reader, it is a real treat to find a new (to me) author whose voice becomes instantly recognisable as soon as you read their written words. So, now I have another 18 stories in this series to look forward to and all the other intriguing works of Christopher Fowler to prowl through! This is reader heaven!

Thank you so much for the opportunity to review this book, as the series is my absolute favourite of all! I approach every new one with some trepidation, in case the well of inspiration has run dry, but it never has and each one is as fresh and funny as the ones before, without compromising on what the passage of time is doing to the main characters.
Spot-on contemporary commentary as always, this time concentrating on past misdemeanours and holding public figures to account. Misdirection is the key word here and although I thought I spotted the perpetrator about halfway through I was wrong.
I always keep a notebook nearby for the historical asides, fascinating sideroads abound to wander down, a bit like being inside Arthur’s mind. Blown up, hollowed out, boarded over, you ask yourself just how long the PCU can keep going, even with the attention of Daves 1&2. What this book in particular proves is that it’s more than just a building, in the same way as London is more than just a city. Layers and layers of history to be uncovered, frequent surprises.
Snappy, hilarious dialogue abounds and recurring supporting characters you’ve missed as much as the main ones.
A thorough delight to read.

Normally when I read a Bryant & May book, so wedded to the ins and outs of London, I'll find myself criss-crossing their paths sooner or later. But for this one I was in Norwood the whole time, and while it's not like we don't get the odd detective story out here what with Conan Doyle having been a resident, it's a little far out for shambolic Arthur Bryant and dapper John May to come. Not that this is the only disconnect this time out; the latest in the series opens with May seriously injured, Bryant missing, and the Peculiar Crimes Unit, after false alarms in more previous books than not, finally closed down. Inevitably, if a little implausibly, they're soon back together and the Unit reopened, at least on an ad hoc and even more under-resourced basis than usual, being set up to fail once more. I do wish the series could get past that tic, as also the bit where nobody trusts Bryant's eccentric tangents to solve the case, despite his track record across the previous books – though here there is at least a variation on that, with a killer seemingly aware of and gaming the PCU's system, using a byway of London history (you can guess which from the title) to distract from their real plan. There are also the occasional bum notes: yes, the beginning reminds us that these are Bryant's own accounts of the case, with neither him nor his ghostwriter entirely to be trusted, but while that excuses a degree of invention and in-character mistakes (Bryant's belated and faltering attempt to catch up with txtspk is particularly entertaining, FFS), elsewhere it just feels like glitches. So one ominous presence, a tycoon unsubtly named Peter English, is a bit Philip Green, a bit Murdoch, a bit Arron Banks, a bit Farage – all squeezed into an old-style, pre-Big Bang London business bigwig, which feels a little lacking in focus, a little trying to do too many things at once. And then there's the statement from a civil servant that the Government chooses the Speaker, rather than Parliament, which is the sort of elision you might have got away with in 2017, not mere months (even if it does feel more like lifetimes) after the election of a new one. Still, that one in particular I would hope might be corrected between this Netgalley ARC and publication.

Not that this Speaker is the colourless new sap, mind. His indomitability in defence of the House is more reminiscent of the much-missed Bercow, even if his dandyish tendencies are a long way from Bercow's fabulously frightful sweaters. The case begins as he's nearly killed by crates of citrus fruit, a stone's throw from St Clement's, in possibly the series' most Midsomer (near-)death yet. The powers that be initially think it's a bizarre accident, but of course Bryant knows better, and then there's another accident outside St Martin's... and we're off, into another chain of, as it says on the tin, peculiar crimes. It takes Bryant & May a little while to get back into the groove, but for all the lingering frailties of the recuperating May in particular, soon it feels like the pair of them have never been away. Even better, the supporting cast of the Unit, which has generally played second fiddle to the two leads, finally has someone to match them in the shape of Gen Z intern Sidney Hargreaves, who can best be summarised with the admittedly horrific phrase 'sexy Bryant'. I particularly enjoyed, and know people who should steal, her response to the question "Are you on the spectrum?" – "I prefer to think of it as somewhere over the rainbow."

The other big change, of course, is the poignant distance between the book's spring 2020, and the one in which I read it. Right at the start, when the Unit still seems to be doomed, its boss/whipping boy Raymond Land ends his final memo "Good luck in the future, what's left of it", and it's never long between similar punches to the gut. "The city contnued its diurnal ebb and flow without noticing that its most venerable specialist crime unit had ceased to exist" – how could Fowler have known, how could any of us, that this is exactly what the city wouldn't do this time around? Hell, the short chapters from the perpetrator's perspective are even prone to baleful references to 'the Event', just like everyone who's ever seen Mitchell & Webb is nowadays. "It was as if the city, birthed in ancient paganism, periodically demanded sacrifices of its people." Empty streets, everyone home looking at screens and ordering pizza. The worry that the citizenry might end up afraid of public transport, public spaces. Ditzy white witch Maggie Armitage's prediction that "human entropy has entered its terminal phase". The police looking as outsiders on "Ordinary life, something that seemed almost alien to her now." Most of all, "amazing nurses working in a system that had stopped functioning efficiently years ago".

So yes, it's fascinating as a distorted mirror of our own dark year, one where London's skies are chucking down on a handful of intriguing deaths instead of shining bright and blue over hundreds of miserable, unnecessary ones. Hell, there's even the immortal line "Yeah, I could smash a pint in the face...And I already chose the boozer for us. A little hipster hangout, top of the topknots, Banterbury Cathedral" – reading which was I think the first time in all of this that, just for a second, I didn't miss pubs. But that's not all it is. There are pieces of writing here whose power has nothing to do with counterpointing twists of fate, like the perfect description of an overheard nursery school as "the sounds of a hundred starlings being torn apart by cats". There are the weird little fragments of London trivia, always as delightful to me as to poor, misunderstood old Arthur Bryant. And most of all there's him, and John May, still taking their own strange route through the city as it once was and hopefully will be again.