Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie series has a large number of fans. Additionally Cleverly has published a collection, The New Cambridge Mysteries (2015), of mystery stories set in and around Cambridge including Inspector Redfyre and a future-set tale involving the feisty Detective Constable Stella Kenton seeking a killer in a disturbing, dystopian view of Cambridge (and policing) in the year 2022. The second Redfyre novel, Invitation to Die (2019) takes places a year later in 1924 with multiple murders at a college. Originally from the city’s educated elite, Redfyre is no stranger to the local godfathers running its esteemed colleges and universities. Great War veteran Redfyre is a godsend to the Cambridge CID, a city that needs a really good detective as the fusty old town encounters the Jazz Age. The series started with Fall of Angels (2018) set in 1923. The entire series, running through to the final book, Cambridge Black (2017) stays firmly in Cambridge.īarbara Cleverly is a writer who lives in Cambridgeshire and is known for her Detective Inspector John Redfyre novels. The series-now up to seven books-starts with Cambridge Blue (2009) and Goodhew investigating a series of murders involving an eccentric Cambridge family. now the crime.Īlison Bruce started out writing true crime books before launching a crime fiction series featuring Detective Constable (DC) Gary Goodhew, the youngest detective in the city’s CID based at Cambridge’s Parkside Station. it’s a famous university town and lots of important people studied there) granted city status.

Cambridge doesn’t have one (though there is one that dates back to 1083 at nearby Ely) so had to lobby hard and was eventually, for “exceptional” reasons” (i.e.

Traditionally in England a town had to have a cathedral to deserve city status. Both are now cities, though Oxford was declared a city in 1542 and Cambridge only in 1951. Cambridge life is almost exclusively centred around the university and associated spin-off economy-biotech, genetic research, locally dubbed “Silicon Fen”. By contrast Cambridge is relatively small (only about 200,000 people including the student population in term time), about 50 miles north of London in Eastern England’s Fenland. As well as the university there is a large manufacturing base in the city-cars particularly-and it is integrated into the wider English Midlands economy. Perhaps one day we can merge the two as a giant Oxbridge Crime and the City? Though both are universally known as ancient and venerable university towns, the two are very different. So, protocol declares that we should have a column on its great rival university city, Cambridge. Some time back, we published a Crime and the City on Oxford.

Jackson brodie books