This is the fourth in Jim Kelly’s excellent series set in Cambridge during WW2, featuring senior police detective Eden Brooke. If you click the images below, you will be able to read my reviews of the previous three novels in the sequence.

Brooke served in The Great War, but had the misfortune to fall prisoner to the Turks. The Ottomans, rather like their Japanese brethren twenty years later, were brutal – not to say sadistic – captors, and Brooke’s eyes were permanently damaged. He and his wife Claire are certainly ‘a family at war’, however. Their daughter Joy’s husband is a submariner, while son Luke is away training in Scotland for some ‘hush hush’ activity.

Brooke has plenty on his hands. A dead man is discovered in a city air raid shelter. Cause of death? Wrists neatly slit. Too neatly, according the medical officer; suicides rarely if ever manage to slit the second wrist properly after self-inflicting the first wound. And why does the unidentified man have Brooke’s telephone number inked on his hand? Hundreds of miles away, on board his submarine, Lieutenant Ben Ridding has to examine a faulty periscope, which recently caused two torpedoes to miss their target by a considerable margin. He finds that one of the lenses has been purposely set askew. It was manufactured at the Vulcan works in Cambridge. A coded message to the Admiralty is passed on to Brooke, who begins an investigation.

Kelly has a magnificent eye (and ear) for period detail. Here, Brooke takes a witness to the morgue to investigate a corpse.

“Brooke led Mrs. Brodie to the table: twenty strides, the metal Blakey’s* on his shoes striking the quarry tiles. It was a ceremony with all the subtle horror and indecent haste of an execution.”

*Blakey’s were little metal plates nailed onto the leather soles and  of shoes to preserve them

Another two dead men are discovered, each in the vicinity of a shelter. The dead men found in the shelters have two things in common. Each has minor disability, thus eliminating them from service in the forces, and each had stayed at The Laurels, a rather strange guest house outside the city. Despite posting a police ‘spy’ inside the Vulcan works, the latest batch of periscopes reaches its destination in Barrow-in-Furness. From a shipment of twelve, two have been sabotaged.

Jim Kelly’s other two crime fiction series – The Philip Dryden Ely novels and the Peter Shaw books, set a little to the north in Kings Lynn, are dominated by the pull of the the landscape. Eden Brooke’s world is more intimate, centred on the college gateways and narrow city byways of Cambridge, but he is ever aware that just beyond the city lights (now dimmed by wartime regulations) is the primeval vastness of The Fens, now largely drained, but still desolate and sparsely populated.

“The Fens, as Brooke had been taught by his father in a lecture illustrated by a map which still hung in his old bedroom at Newnham Croft, lay in three levels: North, Middle and South. The north stretched to Lincoln across the silty fields south-west of the Wash.”

Despite the apparent failure to  solve the mystery of the periscopes, Brooke turns his attention to The Mystery of The Laurels. If that sounds like a story from a Sherlock Homes collection, it is appropriate because, using an attention to detail worthy of the great man, Brooke discovers a complex and lucrative conspiracy whereby wealthy young men can pay to avoid being called up into the armed forces. In WW1, it took Britain over two years to resort to conscription, but it was re-introduced  in 1939, almost immediately after war was declared. In solving the murders, however, Brooke has inadvertently trodden on some very important toes. Involved, although rather at a tangent to the call-up conspiracy, is a notable British scientist connected to a major defence project. As in aside, it is worth noting that while Hitler was obsessed with what have been called ‘wonder weapons’ (at the expense of solid and reliable military kit) Churchill was fascinated by rather weird developments. One such features in this novel. If you Google Project Habbakuk you will discover more.

Once again using a potent blend of observation and intuition, Brooke solves the periscope problem, and the book ends with a joyful family reunion, but one tinged with uncertainty. Brooke is an endearing character, a deeply thoughtful and ascetic man in some ways, but with unlimited courage and a steely sense of duty. The Cambridge Siren is published by Allison & Busby, and available now.