Bryant & May: Peculiar London
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Descripció de l’editorial
Thinking of a jaunt to England? Let Arthur Bryant and John May, London’s oldest police detectives, show you the oddities behind the city’s façades in this tongue-in-cheek travel guide.
“The best fun is running all over the city with these amiable partners.”—The New York Times Book Review, on Bryant & May: The Lonely Hour
It’s getting late. I want to share my knowledge of London with you, if I can remember any of it.
So says Arthur Bryant. He and John May are the nation’s oldest serving detectives. Who better to reveal its secrets? Why does this rainy, cold, gray city capture so many imaginations? Could its very unreliability hold the key to its longevity?
The detectives are joined by their boss, Raymond Land, and some of their most disreputable friends, each an argumentative and unreliable expert in their own dodgy field.
Each character gives us a short tour of odd buildings, odder characters, lost venues, forgotten disasters, confusing routes, dubious gossip, illicit pleasures, and hidden pubs. They make all sorts of connections—and show us why it’s almost impossible to separate fact from fiction in London.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
British author Fowler's valedictory 19th book featuring eccentric sleuths Arthur Bryant and John May (after 2021's London Bridge Is Falling Down) offers no mysteries for the Peculiar Crimes Unit to solve, just anecdotes and history about London, which May himself qualifies as being both "personal" and "unreliable." That places the onus on readers to try to guess what's real and what's not, which may frustrate some. The stories told by Bryant and May as well as members of the series' supporting cast are replete with humorous trivia. For example, PCU stalwart Janice Longbright, whose mother was one of the unit's original members, shares that flowers or mushrooms shouldn't be picked from a certain cemetery "because the arsenic from so many embalmed Victorian corpses has poisoned the soil." Bryant, in discussing the maritime history of the Deptford area, where the king's naval yard was once located, explains that the Jolly Roger didn't always identify pirates and was based on a Spanish symbol "signifying the victory of transcendence over mortal bones." This is a fun last look at beloved characters for their devotees.
