Can crime novels teach you anything about a location? Fans of the late Phil Rickman would argue that they knew the Hereford/Wales borderlands through his Merrily Watkins novels. Readers of Jim Kelly’s Phillip Dryden books might , as a consequence, claim a nodding acquaintance with the Fens. London? Perhaps too vast and unknowable despite the best efforts of Mark Billingham and Tony Parsons. Leeds? I knew it through countless visits to an undergraduate son, but always found the place rather intimidating. Chris Nickson lives there, and has used it as the background for three series of novels. In those featuring Simon Westow we are in Georgian times. The baton is then handed on to Tom Harper, who bestrides the city like a colossus from Victoria’s reign to the period after The Great War.

Now we are in WW2, with a redoubtable young woman, Cathy Marsden, who has been seconded from the local police force to the Special Investigation Branch, an embryonic group whose work sits in the gap between regular policing and military intelligence. We are in the spring of 1944. Cathy is newly engaged to Tom, a mechanic with the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers. He has served in North Africa, where he has managed to keep himself out of the firing line. Now, after a spell of leave, he has been recalled.

There are rumours that the Allies are building up to ‘something big’. At work, Cathy and her colleagues are investigating a fatal car crash in which a local spiv and his girlfriend were killed. More intriguing is the fact that the boot of the car was filled with handguns stolen from American and British barrack armouries.When another small time local crook, Ricky Hopper, ends up being mangled in the metal waterwheel of a local factory, Cathy realises that these are deep waters, as dark and dangerous as the River Aire itself.

Nickson effortlessly captures the privations of ordinary Britains during the war.
“Cathy settled with her fish paste sandwiches wrapped in greaseproof paper and thermos flask of tomato soup. Her mother made the same thing each week. One more routine of war, she’d be happy to leave behind.”

The author makes other very apposite cultural references. Safe in her own bed, in her own home, Cathy reads herself to sleep with Daphne du Maurier’s Hungry Hill, a romantic saga about an Irish family, published just a year earlier.

Vernon Scannell wrote:
“Whenever war is spoken of
I find
The war that was called Great invades the mind:”
That terrible conflict hangs heavy over the Marsden household. Gassed while ‘doing his bit’, Cathy’s father’s lungs were ruined, and every breath is a struggle. There is a terrible irony that just three decades later, the same mortal enemies are intent on ripping out each others’ hearts.The SIB search narrows in focus. They are looking for two men. Dandy Wilson is the new Mr Big in the Leeds underworld of touts and black marketeers, while Corporal Lyle Brevitt is the source of the pilfered American stores. Anxious to find the latter is US military policeman Frank Graves.The SIB receive reliable information about where to find Wilson, but when they raid the property, their quarry is gone. Given the timescale, the inescapable conclusion is that someone is passing on inside information to the fugitive. Does the leak come from the regular police or – unthinkably – from someone in SIB?

Eventually, both Wilson and Brevitt are tracked down and the traitor within is unmasked. What Nickson – like all good novelists – does well is to make us care deeply about the central characters. Here, we leave Leeds on the eve of ‘D’ Day, and we can only hope that Cathy’s Tom survives what is to come, and returns to claim his bride. The Faces of The Dead was published by Severn House on 7th April.