Fowler Finally Falls

This unhappy news comes from The Guardian:

Christopher Fowler, author of the Bryant & May series of detective novels, has died at the age of 69, having been diagnosed with cancer three years ago.

Fowler was best known for his Bryant & May thrillers, featuring the veteran detectives solving unusual crimes in London from the second world war to the present day. The series began with Full Dark House in 2003, and 17 more novels followed, most recently London Bridge Is Falling Down, published in 2021. A further book exploring the London of the characters, Bryant & May’s Peculiar London, came out last year.

The prolific, Greenwich, UK-born Fowler saw his first novel, Roofworld, “a fantastical thriller about a secret community living on top of London’s buildings,” published in 1988. He went on to pen short stories and novellas, works of supernatural-flavored fiction, three memoirs (the last of which, Word Monkey, is to be released in August), and of course his succession of darkly comic mysteries featuring unlikely partners Arthur Bryant and John May, members of London’s fictional Peculiar Crimes Unit. The first of those, Full Dark House, ranked among the finalists for the 2004 Barry Award in the Best British Crime Novel category, and won that same year’s August Derleth Award from the British Fantasy Society. He was presented with the British Crime Writers’ Association’s Dagger in the Library award in 2015, recognizing him as an author “who has given the most pleasure to readers.”

In addition, for many years Fowler wrote “Invisible Ink,” a fine, periodic column for Britain’s Independent newspaper that focused on once-prominent writers whose work has been largely forgotten since. “His columns were notable,” he joked in 2016, “for nearly always containing the word ‘peculiar.’”

As Mystery Fanfare observes today, Fowler’s death was hardly unexpected. He’d announced his dire future in an April 2020 post on his blog: “On Christmas Eve I came down with a severe flu-like cold that kept boomeranging back. On March 24th, the day the UK coronavirus lockdown began, I was finally diagnosed with a rare form of cancer. It was spectacularly bad timing. Getting into the system for treatment proved impossible for a month, because our hospitals were daily rethinking their structure. Doctors managed to devise a complicated multiple-therapy system for me and I’ve now started treatment.” Those medications finally proved insufficient.

Remembered by many friends and fans as an “all-around bloody good bloke,” Fowler reportedly died yesterday.

READ MORE: “Christopher Fowler, R.I.P.,” by Martin Edwards (‘Do You Write Under Your Own Name?’); “Christopher Fowler Obituary,” by Steve Holland (The Guardian).