Dead in a Drawer
Something Old: The Spherical Ghoul, by Fredric Brown
Something New: White Corridor, by Christopher Fowler
“The Spherical Ghoul,” by Fredric Brown, centers on the unusual events that befall a mortician inside a locked morgue. A ventilation shaft plays a key but unpredictable role in this locked room mystery.
Brown was a professional writer, which means he wrote a lot, and he wrote across genres, writing just about anything he could for money. He never hit the big time. Some of what he turned out was workmanlike, and some of it was just below masterpiece level.
In his best mystery novels, including The Screaming Mimi and Night of the Jabberwock, Brown excelled at introducing an ordinary character with a simple desire, and slowly immersing him in a plot of ruthless complexity. In The Screaming Mimi, our hero sees a beautiful woman, and knows she’s out of his league, but he wishes that he could spend just one night with her. In Night of the Jabberwock, the protagonist is a small-time newspaper editor, good at his job and happy with the role he plays in town, but he wishes he could break just one real news story in his life. Both of them are in for the night of their lives.
“The Spherical Ghoul” is a short story without the scope of his full-length work, but it has a nice mundane-turned-macabre touch that will give you an idea what he can do. It’s in the collection Homicide Sanitarium, and in Bill Pronzini’s anthology Tales of the Dead. If you want to try one of his books, I suggest Night of the Jabberwock for you Golden Age/puzzle types, The Fabulous Clipjoint for those looking for a more straightforward crime novel, and The Screaming Mimi for you noir types. Brown had something for everybody.
Christopher Fowler does not have something for everybody, but he does have a lot. He also writes across genres, but is now focusing on mystery. His series, about London’s Peculiar Crimes Unit (PCU), is a heady mix of the puzzle and the procedural, the old and the new, the natural and the supernatural. It features the aging, eccentric, and occasionally brilliant Arthur Bryant and the slightly-younger-but-still-aging John May, who together founded the PCU to focus on unusual crimes that might not get the focused attention needed to solve them. As a unit not in the mainstream of the department, the PCU is continuously fighting for its budget and survival, and Bryant in particular knows that he’s unlikely to work at anything useful again if the PCU is shut down.
The latest, White Corridor, centers on the unusual events that befall a coroner inside a locked mortuary. A ventilation shaft plays a key but unpredictable role in this locked room mystery.
Most of his earlier Bryant and May books have been billed as locked room mysteries, but none of them was. I’m delighted to say that this is not only a locked room mystery, it’s a locked room mystery with an extremely clever new solution.
The locked room isn’t the only thing going on here. There are three plot strands: Byant and May are trapped on the road in a snowstorm, a killer is stalking two people across the English countryside, and the PCU is faced with an impending royal visit.
I found the pace at the beginning a bit frustrating—as often happens with multiple viewpoint books there isn’t the same amount of incident in the different strands so some are more interesting than others–and was particulary impatient with the killer’s back story, but after the first few chapters everything starts to tick along quite nicely, and the plots all mesh beautifully at the end. The real charm of the series is the long (60 years!) and loyal relationship of Bryant and May. His previous books are worth reading too. Start with the first in the series: Full Dark House.
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Bonus Bookfling: Just because it’s the first in the series doesn’t mean Full Dark House was the first book about Bryant and May. They also feature in a horror novel, Rune, that was published in the early 90’s.