Bryant and May, light

In my "Prostho plus" post, a couple of days ago, I focused on humour – not difficult, in what was, in one of its many dimensions, an openly comic novel.

I wouldn't describe the Bryant and May novels of Christopher Fowler (which I discovered, as with so much else, through JSB) as comic, but they certainly contain immensely comic lines and passages. Here are two of my own favourite examples...

From Seventy senen clocks:

“The coven has a resident numerologist called Nigel. He's very good at Chaos Theory, which is just as well because his maths is terrible...”

and from The water room:

“The last time Bryant had accessed police files via the Internet, he had somehow hacked into the Moscow State Weather Bureau and put it on red alert for an incoming high-pressure weather system. The Politburo had been mobilized and seven flights re-routed before the error was spotted and rectified.”

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• Christopher Fowler, Seventy-seven clocks. 2005, London: Doubleday. 0385608853 (hbk).
• Christopher Fowler, The water room. 2004, London: Doubleday. 0385605544 (hbk).