White Corridor. [Paperback]

As a fan of Christopher Fowler's Peculiar Crime Unit as well as a fan of locked room mysteries, I viewed the arrival of this book with trepidation, because there are so few good new locked room murder mysteries. The last good new one I read was Barbara Amato's "Hard Tack" back in 1991. Even when I was two-thirds through Fowler's new book, "White Corridor", the dread of an inadequate solution remained. Fowler's style is very different from that in traditional locked room mysteries such as those by John Dickson Carr, but his style is also part of his charm. Fowler doesn't have much interest in a complex technical anlaysis of the murder scene. There simply wasn't any good discussion of whether door locks, window latches and other devices could or might have been manipulated to create the illusion of a locked room.

But the ending was worth the wait. The hallmark of a new locked room murder mystery is a novel solution to the locked room problem, and Fowler succeeds on all counts here.

Christopher Fowler's droll and original "White Corridor" brings back the London-based Peculiar Crimes Unit, "a highly unorthodox specialist police division" founded by the now elderly senior detectives Arthur Bryant and John May. Bryant, in particular, has attracted a great deal of attention (mostly negative) because of his reliance on psychics, necromancers, cryptozoologists, and alternative therapists to help him solve "impossible" crimes. The PCU tackles sensitive cases using out-of-the-box thinking; they work outside of the many constraints that shackle the regular members of the Metropolitan Police Force. Unfortunately, Bryant and May have made some powerful enemies, including Oskar Kasavian, the vindictive supervisor in charge of Internal Security. Kasavian is plotting to get rid of the PCU once and for all.

Acting Unit Chief Raymond Land decides to declare a compulsory one week furlough for the PCU, ostensibly to upgrade the unit's computer system and to better organize its operations. In addition, the PCU's irascible pathologist, Oswald Finch, is about to retire; the thought of no longer hanging around his beloved mortuary throws Finch into a panic. He enjoys working with corpses; he has even begun to resemble them. Finch's probable successor, the Eton-educated Giles Kershaw, is looking forward to stepping into his mentor's shoes, but it turns out that Kershaw's appointment may not be a sure thing.

During this time of transition, Bryant drags May off to a convention of psychics, leaving the unit under the leadership of the conscientious Detective Sergeant Janice Longbright. When Bryant and May get caught in a blizzard, they are stranded somewhere in the Dartmoor countryside. They are freezing and anxious, since the rescue services will not be able to reach them until the weather clears. Meanwhile, DS Longbright and her colleagues are called upon not only to solve a sensitive murder case, but also to man the barricades when a royal visitor is invited to Mornington Crescent. Nor do Bryant and May get a well-deserved break from crime-solving. Even during a violent snowstorm, they end up trailing a mysterious killer with shadowy motives.

"White Corridor" is a sharply written, literate, and lively mystery. Fowler is a magnificent descriptive writer and his dialogue is brisk and dryly humorous. The story lines are complex and challenging enough to provide perfect fodder for the PCU. All of the characters are beautifully depicted: Bryant is one of the most amusing and unusual protagonists in contemporary British mysteries. He dresses in ridiculously out-of-date clothes, is on a first-name basis with a white witch, cultivates a sickly marijuana plant, plays sadistic practical jokes on his peers, disdains modern technology, and bickers endlessly with his frustrated but devoted housekeeper, Alma Sorrowbridge. However, he is also a brilliant detective, and in some ways, his mind works every bit as effectively as the most high-tech computer. May complements Bryant perfectly; although John is the more practical and more technologically proficient of the two, he has great respect for Arthur's intelligence and experience. Working together, the two men accomplish much more than they could separately.

The book succeeds for another reason. Instead of focusing exclusively on Bryant and May, the more junior members of the PCU finally take center stage. It is entertaining to observe them putting together clues on their own and proudly showing that they have profited from the careful training that they received at the feet of the masters. "White Corridor" ends on a bizarre note, but if the crimes featured in Fowler's books weren't outlandish, there would be no need for these highly imaginative and creative detectives.

If Ken Bruen's east London crime novels featuring the brutal and boorish Inspector Brant are literature as rugby, then Christopher Fowler's mysteries of the aging Brant and May detective duo are symphonies. Both entertaining, but Bruen is jarring and violent where Fowler is refined, cultured, and subtle. Fowler writes the classic British mystery: dryly humorous, understated, unadorned, and intelligent. In this outing, inspectors Arthur Brant and John May, the irascible and unorthodox heads of London's Peculiar Crimes Division, find themselves stranded in a freak blizzard on the moors of southern England, leaving Sergeant Janice Longbright in charge to solve the ultimate "murder in the inside-locked room" mystery of the team's chief forensic scientist. Meanwhile, a serial killer is on the loose in the snowdrifts, keeping our discerning duo occupied between cell phone-assist calls to Longbright and her short-handed crew. But despite facing simultaneous murder investigations and answering some nagging questions about the apparent drug overdose death of a young woman whose body occupies the morgue, the real terror facing the PCU team is the looming stationhouse tour of an insufferable princess and PCU nemesis Oskar Kasavian, the London PD bureaucrat bent on shutting the renegade crime-solving unit down.

Rich in allegory and clever forensics, contemporary crime fiction's most eccentric inspectors plough through deliciously convoluted threads of seemingly unrelated mysteries, taking a few keenly twisted turns before arriving at a clever and, at least for me, a totally unexpected climax. Brilliant character development and sharp, witty, dialogue add up for one of the year's most engaging and enjoyable crime novels. If you haven't met Brant and May yet, this is as good a place as any to start - and chances are you'll not remain a stranger.