One night, Arthur Bryant witnesses a drunken lady coming out of a pub. The next morning, she is found dead at the exact spot where their paths crossed. Even more disturbingly, the pub has vanished and the street has changed. Bryant is convinced that he saw them as they looked over a century before - is elderly detective losing his mind? Then it becomes clear that a number of women have met their ends in London pubs and the likeliest suspect seems to be a mental patient. But knowing who the...

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 C...

Two small children - playing a game called 'Witch-Hunter' - place a curse on a young woman eating lunch in a church courtyard. An hour later the woman is found dead. Then a society photographer is stabbed to death in a nearby park and suddenly a link emerges between the two cases. As the members of the Peculiar Crimes Unit investigate, they realise that the case might not just end in disaster - it might also get everyone killed.

One Sunday morning, the outspoken Speaker of the House of Commons steps out of his front door only to be crushed under a mountain of citrus fruit. Bizarre accident or something more sinister? The government needs to know because here's a man whose knowledge of parliament’s biggest secret could put the future of the government at stake.It should be the perfect case for Bryant & May and the Peculiar Crimes Unit, but unfortunately one detective is in hospital, the other is missing and...

The very first issue of the - still current - magazine, The Autocar was on 2 November 1895. It gave three pages of coverage to The Horseless Carriage Exhibition organised by Sir David Salomons, the Mayor of Tunbridge Wells. Driving a horseless carriage on the highway was still illegal without a man walking in front, so even the assembling of a tangible proportion of the cars existing in the south east of England must have been very difficult. In the event four of the six exhibits listed ap...

The year is 1969 and ten guests are about to enjoy a weekend at Tavistock Hall. The guests also include detectives Arthur Bryant and John May – undercover, in disguise and tasked with protecting Monty Hatton-Jones, a whistle-blower turning Queen’s evidence in a massive bribery trial. The house’s owner – a penniless, dope-smoking aristocrat – is intent on selling the estate to a secretive millionaire but the weekend has only just started when the millionaire goes missing and murder is on th...

Two teenagers who see a dead man rising from his grave. And if that's not alarming enough, one of them is killed in a hit and run accident. Soon it seems death is all around and Bryant and May must confront a group of latter-day bodysnatchers. More graves are desecrated, further deaths occur, and when Bryant is blindfolded and taken to a secret society, he realises that this case is more complex than even he had imagined.

The members of London's Peculiar Crimes Unit are on the case again when a dog walker is found dead. The method of the death is odd… the killer had no way in - or out - and the dog is nowhere to be seen. But the ‘hows’ and ‘whys’ of the murder are not the only mysteries, and it seems very likely that the killer is preparing to strike again.

An artist is found dead in a gallery with locked doors and windows. A television presenter is struck by lightning while indoors. Two seemingly impossible crimes that only Arthur Bryant and John May of the Met's Peculiar Crimes Unit might be able to solve. But Bryant has lost his nerve and May is fighting to keep the unit from closure. Worse still, an unsolved mystery from the past has returned to haunt them...

91 year-old Alice Hoffman died alone in her top floor flat. Social services say she slipped through the cracks in a failing system. But detectives Arthur Bryant & John May of the Peculiar Crimes Unit have their suspicions. Mrs Hoffman was not as innocent as she appeared. A former government security expert, she had once worked for their own unit, but there's no-one left who can remember her. And when they uncover a link between her and a diplomat desperate to leave the country it begins to...

The death of a child and what seems to be a murderous puppet make a perfect case for Bryant and May and the Peculiar Crimes Unit. As John May and his team interrogate the suspects, Arthur Bryant heads into the secret world of illusions and stagecraft. As a second impossible death occurs, the detectives uncover forgotten museums and London eccentrics. The stage is set for a race against time with a surprising twist…

As the nation's oldest serving detectives, we know more about London than almost anyone. After all, we've been walking its streets and impulsively arresting its citizens for decades. Who better to take you through its less savoury side?We'll be chatting about odd buildings, odder characters, lost venues, forgotten disasters, confusing routes, dubious gossip, illicit pleasures and hidden pubs. We'll be making all sorts of odd connections and showing you why it's almost impossible to ...