England's Finest

Book 0: Peculiar Crimes Unit

by Christopher Fowler

Genres: Mystery; Traditional Mysteries; Suspense

Synopsis

The Peculiar Crimes Unit has solved many extraordinary cases over the years, but some were hushed up and hidden away. Until now.

Arthur Bryant remembers these lost cases as if they were yesterday. Here, then, is the truth about the Covent Garden opera diva and the seventh reindeer, the body that falls from the Tate Gallery, the ordinary London street corner where strange accidents keep occurring, the consul’s son discovered buried in the unit’s basement, the corpse pulled from a swamp of Chinese dinners, a Hallowe’en crime in the Post Office Tower, and the impossible death that’s the fault of a forgotten London legend.

Expect misunderstood clues, lost evidence, arguments about Dickens, churches, pubs and disorderly conduct from the investigative officers they laughingly call‘England’s Finest’!

Release date: April 7, 2020

Publisher: Bantam

Print pages: 285

Sample

A Brief History of the Peculiar Crimes Unit

Britain has a long history of ‘backroom boffins,’ men and women who came up with original ideas out of necessity. Napoleon’s nation of shopkeepers became a nation of entrepreneurs partly because there was no funding to be found, and because the twentieth-century wars demanded ingenuity. 

Founded by Winston Churchill in 1939, the PCU was one of a number of new divisions designed to combat less tangible threats to the British way of life in wartime. In this hour of desperation, when most able-bodied men had been taken into the armed forces, seven experimental agencies were proposed by the government. 

The first was the Central Therapy Unit, set up to help the bereaved and the newly homeless cope with the psychological stresses of bombardment. The unit closed after just eleven months because bombed-out residents continued turning to their neighbours for support rather than visiting qualified government specialists. 

A propaganda unit called the Central Information Service (later to become the COI) was set up to provide positive, uplifting news items to national newspapers in order to combat hearsay and harmful disinformation spread about British overseas forces, and to fill the void left by the blanket news blackouts. It was based in Hercules Road, SE1, and was finally closed in 2011 due to government budget cuts. 

A third unit based at the War Office employed a number of writers and artists, including novelists Ian Fleming and Dennis Wheatley, to project the possible outcome of a prolonged war with Germany, and to develop stratagems for deceiving the enemy. The most famous wartime deception created by this unit was Operation Mincemeat, in which the corpse of a dead Welsh tramp was disguised as a drowned Royal Marine officer, planted with false plans, and left for the Germans to find. 

A subsidiary unit used members of the Royal Academy to develop new camouflage techniques for the British Navy after Churchill realized that the horizontal stripes painted on to warships made them more visible, not less. RA artists explained that the eye plays tricks, and that jagged verticals would be better for disguising fleets. 

The most successful of the seven experimental units launched by Churchill in wartime was the cypher-breaking division based at Bletchley, where Alan Turing and his team cracked the Enigma Code, and in doing so laid the foundations for modern computer technology.

The Peculiar Crimes Unit is the only division that still survives. Its revised initiative was aimed at easing the burden on London’s overstretched Metropolitan Police Force. All of the units trained people of exceptional talent, employing most of them directly from school, some as young as fourteen. The PCU was created to tackle high-profile cases which had the capacity to compound social problems in urban areas, primarily in London. The affix ‘peculiar’ was originally meant in the sense of ‘particular.’ The government’s plan was that the new unit should handle those investigations deemed uniquely sensitive and a high risk to public morale. To head this division, several young and inexperienced students were recruited from across the capital.

The crimes that fell within the Unit’s remit were often of a politically sensitive nature, or were ones that could potentially cause social panics and public malaise. Its staff members were outsiders, radicals, academics and free-thinkers answerable only to the War Office, and later the Home Office. They had no social skills and no resources, but were free to solve problems in any manner that would work, no matter how unorthodox.

Which was how my father blew up our kitchen table.

He and his pals had developed an explosive paint that became unstable after it dried, and someone at the Unit had painted all the letters of the headline on his Evening News, so that when he threw it on to the table it exploded.

Needless to say, my long-suffering mother found our family life rather stressful.

The PCU remained in operation throughout the war and has continued in one form or another ever since that time. In the past two decades, reorganization of the national policing network has aimed at reducing the influence of individual units, and creating standardized practices operating from guidelines laid down for a national crime database, subject to performance league tables. Bryant and May made it known that they were not fans of this target-related system.

The PCU unofficially aided a number of high-ranking politicians in the past, and as a consequence has remained exempt from these measures. However, a series of high-profile embarrassments placed the Unit on a blacklist of Organizations of Potential Detriment, which means that the Unit is under surveillance by the Home Office and will be closed down if it fails to perform.

Private & Confidential Memo From: Raymond Land, Peculiar Crimes Unit To: All Readers

Hullo there. As the chief of a London police unit that’s so often in the press these days (usually for the worst possible reasons), I’ve been asked by Arthur Bryant if I would pen a foreword for this, his second volume of missing cases. They were missing because he left the files on the floor where the two Daves had decided to stand their mini cement mixer, and it was only my quick thinking that saved the day, but Mr Bryant won’t tell you that because I never get credit for anything around here unless it goes wrong. 

I consider myself a reasonable man. I always give my foreign coins to the homeless. I’ll put a lost glove on the railings. I pick up litter. I listen carefully to my bosses before ignoring them. When my wife, Leanne, asked for a divorce I gave up with good grace, although I did pop something through her flamenco instructor’s letter box. I agreed to her terms. I even threw in the Bang & Olufsen (it didn’t work but she could have got it fixed). But when Mr Bryant informed me that he was having another set of our investigations transcribed for the amusement of people who read popular fiction I took umbrage. We are a serious police unit, not a branch of WH Smith. People come to us for help, not a copy of Barely Legal and a Galaxy. 

It wouldn’t be so bad if Mr Bryant just stuck to the facts, but he always embellishes. What starts out as a straightforward smash and grab usually ends up as some kind of baroque fairy tale. I suppose there’s not much mileage in simply describing a spotty nonce in Tommy Hilfiger setting fire to an ATM, but that’s real life for you: It’s boring. Furthermore, Mr Bryant casts himself in a good light and makes me look more stupid than I am. I only wish I had his partner’s patience. John May just sits there and smiles indulgently. I must find out what medication he’s on. 

These days most of our work is sitting behind desks studying statistics. I prefer to deal with facts and figures. There’s nothing to break the monotony except Dan launching into one of his periodic rants about broadband speed, Janice coming round with chocolate digestives and one of the Daves going through a mains cable. Jack Ryan wouldn’t last five minutes. 

That’s not the way old Bryant tells it, though. According to him it’s all last-minute escapes and surprise culprits. He describes his job the way he thinks it should be, or perhaps the way it is in his mind. He’s been ill lately and it’s not always possible to tell if he’s in King’s Cross or Narnia. His thought processes are peculiar. I once got up the nerve to ask him how old he was, and he said, ‘I’m all the ages I’ve ever been, so you could say I’m twenty, just several times over.’ 

He has a very flexible attitude towards time. He remembers things as if they were yesterday. Unfortunately, he doesn’t remember yesterday. Don’t get me wrong, he knows a hawk from a handshake when he wants to, but there’s a whole team helping him, it’s not a one-man show. I tell him there’s no ‘i’ in ‘Unit’; we all deserve a fair share of the blame. 

Bryant wouldn’t be told, though, and hired some mad academic to write up twelve more cases that must have occurred in an alternative space/time continuum for all I recognize them. Of course, I know what’s happened. The success of the first collection has turned his head. He thought it would only sell about six copies but by my reckoning he shifted at least ten. I said to him: ‘There’s no need to embellish, just put them down as they actually happened so people can see how pointless our lives are.’ 

Anyway, here’s the result. Being an officer of the law answerable only to Her Majesty’s Government I could never advocate breaking the law, but I wouldn’t pay full price for this volume if you know what I mean.