Book review: Full Dark House by Christopher Fowler

The thirty-fifth book I read in 2016 was a birthday gift from my friend Leslie, Full Dark House, the first in a series of Peculiar Crimes Unit mysteries by Christopher Fowler.  In the present day, Detectives Bryant and May are octogenarians with a long and successful partnership investigating "peculiar crimes" behind them.  When an explosion rips apart their office, the surviving Detective May must pore through his memories to determine which of their old investigations may have left a loose end which resulted in violent revenge, served decades cold.

I did not particularly like this book.  Too much about it failed to ring true to me, beginning with the very first page, in which the explosion is said to recall the London Blitz.  Really?  Intervening decades of terrorist blasts, first from the Irish Republican Army and then from radical Islamists, and a sixty-year-old war is the first thought of a Londoner when a bomb goes off?  I grant the author that it makes a neat segue to his extended flashback to WWII, but he had me on the defensive from that point on.

The blurbs on the cover refer to the series as "deadpan, sly," "madcap," "completely crazy and great fun," descriptions that led me to expect a series akin to Jasper Fforde or Douglas Adams, but I never got the "comedy" in the mystery; rather, the tone seemed uneven, with the eccentric office politics of the Peculiar Crimes Unit jostling uncomfortably next to gruesome deaths and characters who seem designed to evoke sympathy or pathos.  While most of the victims of the killer in the novel seem portrayed to "deserve it," one man in particular is a mere innocent bystander, and his death is the longest, most-drawn-out, and most bloodily and brutally portrayed in the book.  How the reader is meant to retain any sympathy for the killer's point of view after that episode escapes me.

And now I have to leave some space for spoilers, because I can't fully express my dissatisfaction with the book without discussing the solution to the crime:

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Okay, so Elspeth has sex one time (she is raped) and gets pregnant.  Biologically possible, but very unlikely.  Elspeth goes through nine months of pregnancy, gives birth, and hides a baby/toddler/child/grown man in her workplace for almost twenty years, and no one ever notices.  I call shenanigans.  Can we declare a moratorium on the magical symptomless Hollywood pregnancy for a while, particularly when employed by male writers?  And the Emma Geller-Green syndrome wherein small children only exist when they are plot-relevant but never interfere with their parents going out, traveling, working, or engaging in child-non-centric activities?

That hoary saw in the flashback investigation, combined with the author actually employing amnesia (amnesia!) as a plot device to explain the present-day mystery, really precludes me from having any respect for his work as anything beyond the shallowest melodrama.