In a brief biographical sketch, the crime writer Christopher Fowler, who has died aged 69, claimed he had achieved several of his “pathetic schoolboy fantasies”: releasing an “appalling” Christmas pop single; working as a male model; posing as the villain in a Batman graphic novel; running a Soho night club; appearing in The Pan Book of Horror series; and standing in for James Bond. Rather than examples of Fowler’s wicked sense of humour, all these claims were true. Time Out, meanwhile, called him “an award-winning novelist who would make a good serial killer”.
He was best known for his Bryant & May thrillers, featuring the elderly, venerable detectives Arthur Bryant and John May, who head up the Peculiar Crimes Unit, a department of the London police set up during the second world war to investigate cases that might cause a national scandal or public unrest. The pair had made appearances in some of Fowler’s early novels – Rune (1990), Darkest Day (1993) and Soho Black (1998) – before breaking out into their own long-running series, starting with Full Dark House in 2003.
