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. Praise for Bryant & May: Peculiar London “This is a fun last look at beloved characters for their devotees.” —Publishers Weekly Praise for Christopher Fowler’s ingenious novels featuring the Peculiar Crimes Unit “[Christopher Fowler’s] ardent American following deserves to get much larger.” —Janet Maslin, The New York Times “Unbeatable fun . . . [Fowler] takes delight in stuffing his books with esoteric facts.” — The Guardian “Fowler, like his crime solvers, is deadpan, sly, and always unexpectedly inventive.” — Entertainment Weekly “Dazzling.” — The Denver Post “Thrilling.” — Chicago Tribune “Captivating.” — The Seattle Times Christopher Fowler was the acclaimed author of the award-winning Peculiar Crimes Unit mysteries: Full Dark House, The Water Room, Seventy-Seven Clocks, Ten Second Staircase, White Corridor, The Victoria Vanishes, Bryant & May on the Loose, Bryant & May off the Rails, The Memory of Blood, The Invisible Code, Bryant & May and the Bleeding Heart, Bryant & May and the Burning Man, Bryant & May: Strange Tide, Bryant & May: Wild Chamber, Bryant & May: Hall of Mirrors, Bryant & May: The Lonely Hour, Bryant & May: Oranges & Lemons, Bryant & May: London Bridge Is Falling Down, and Bryant & May: Peculiar London. In 2015 Fowler won the coveted Crime Writers’ Association Dagger in the Library Award in recognition for his body of work. Christopher Fowler died in 2023. 1 A Big Lump of Rock & Other Stories Arthur Bryant: If history consists of what you can remember, I’m buggered. I had my glasses in my hand a minute ago and now they’ve gone. And I’ve put a bag of chips down somewhere. I’m up in the PCU’s evidence room, where we keep the impounded booze and my notes on London. I say notes. Not everything is legible. We have mice. For years my walking tours around the capital were simply an evening job attended by retired archivists, socially awkward loners and the kind of people who shout about Jesus in public. They required me to argue with strangers, something I previously had little interest in doing if it didn’t involve arresting them. Rather than let this lot go to waste I decided to share it with you on a sort of virtual tour. I don’t actually know what a ‘virtual’ tour is. John May tried explaining it but my attention drifted when he said ‘online.’ By the time he got to the metaverse I was sound asleep. He set me up on a Zoom call with Scotland Yard last week but I somehow ended up on a Welsh radio programme about knitting. I can’t compete with the kind of passionate historians who know how many double-­decker buses you can fit into the Albert Hall, but I’ll be making some connections that may take you by surprise. They certainly took me by surprise, not always in a good way. Let’s see if I can get this thing working. I found a cassette recorder up here that used to belong to one of the Kray twins. I erased the old tapes; you don’t want to listen to some bloke screaming for two hours. London was established by the Romans as a trading centre and that’s what it still is. Almost everything else is based around ceremony and entertainment. You won’t find anything here about the Little Venice Dragon Boat Pageant, the Bethnal Green Morris Dancers, the Bastille Day Waiters’ Race or the Dagenham Girl Pipers, who for some unearthly reason became the punchline to many London jokes. A lot of the ceremonial events that take place in London occur in various forms around the globe, so they’re not covered. The only fun thing about Trooping the Colour is waiting for guards to pass out on hot days, and you can read about Westminster Abbey anywhere (although I bet not everyone knows it’s a ‘Royal Peculiar,’ meaning it belongs to the reigning monarch and not the Church). I’m more interested in exploring the obscure and unique. And I’m not sticking in loads of ad