Author Jim Kelly’s wartime saga continues with ‘The Cambridge Siren’
The Cambridge Siren, the fourth novel in Ely-based author Jim Kelly’s Cambridge series – a book which has been described as “superbly twisty” by Booklist – is out now.
Set in the city during the Second World War (autumn 1941, to be precise), Cambridge back then was obviously very different – and certainly doesn’t fit the cliché.
No students for a start, and it was all very sombre, dark, and crowded – no change there! The city is full of evacuees, soldiers, and civil servants who have moved out of London.
“Cambridge is incredibly popular for crime at the moment,” notes Jim, a former journalist whose first book, The Water Clock (2002), was shortlisted for the John Creasey Award, citing Professor T, Ludwig, and Prime Target as examples.
“And the publishers were always saying, ‘Why don’t you write something in Cambridge?’ And the problem is it’s becoming a cliché of itself – and it’s incredibly difficult to write about it in a really fresh way.
“So eventually I thought, ‘Well I’ll give in and will write about Cambridge, but not now – we’ll write about it in the Second World War and try and look at it differently’.
“It’s great, I really enjoy it, because it’s quite a tawdry period, if you know what I mean. Everything’s a bit tatty, which I really like!
“And there’s no tourists but there are obviously loads of soldiers and evacuees… This book is set in the autumn of ’41, so we’re not that far away from Pearl Harbour.
“So the next one, the Americans will be here, and of course that transformed Cambridge, probably more than most other towns in the country.
“It was a sort of Mecca for airmen, and I think it really changed Cambridge, actually, in the long-term, those years, because things like music…
“Cambridge was great in the 50s and the 60s and it makes you wonder whether that’s a legacy of the Americans.
“But this book is set in the bit of the war, I guess, where people start calling it ‘the duration’ because nobody really knows when it’s going to end.
“And I always thought that would be really good; I like that idea of people being kind of trapped in a way of life and you think it’s going to go on forever.
“There wasn’t an end in sight and so it just becomes normality and people just have to get on.”
Described as a “thrilling wartime mystery”, the book’s main protagonist is Detective Inspector Eden Brooke, a veteran of the First World War.
As the people of Cambridge are awakened by the air raid sirens, driving them from their beds to one of the city’s crowded bomb shelters, a body of a young man is found in a shadowy corner.
Everything points to suicide, but DI Brooke has his doubts, given the fact that the unidentified man has a tropical suntan and the detective’s office telephone number scrawled on the back of his hand.
Did the victim know his life was in danger?
Adding to the intrigue, a local factory making submarine periscopes discovers it has a saboteur on the workforce, and two more men are found dead in the city’s shelters.
The trail leads Brooke to the university and a laboratory which hides a brutal secret…
“The main plot is really about people who fail their army medicals,” explains Jim, whose father was a Scotland Yard detective.
“So the book is dedicated to all those men and women who failed their army forces medical, but went on to serve their country.”
He adds: “Air raids play a part in the plot, and the siren was on top of the Guildhall, so it’s a kind of motif all the way through.
“Siren’s a great word because it conjures up those Greek sirens, as well as the sirens of the war, and I thought it knitted it all together.”
Jim’s previous books set in wartime Cambridge are The Great Darkness (2018), The Mathematical Bridge (2019), and The Night Raids (2020). For more information, visit jgkelly.co.uk.
