Bodies in the Bookshop crime fiction store opens in Cambridge
Cambridgeshire is a notorious murder hotspot with determined detectives around every corner, if the huge number of crime novels set here are to be believed.
From the sleuthing vicar of Grantchester in the Sidney Chambers novels by James Runcie, to Alison Bruce’s DC Gary Goodhew of Parkside police station in central Cambridge and even medieval teacher Matthew Bartholomew investigating murky goings-on at the university in Susanna Gregory’s series, there isn’t an innocent spot in the city.
There’s something about Cambridge that inspires a fictional detective to set about solving a mystery and from this week these stories will all be available under one roof alongside rare and secondhand crime novels in a specialist new store called Bodies in the Bookshop.
The shop is the brainchild of Richard Reynolds, who worked at Heffers for more than 40 years and ran its crime fiction department. He has joined forces with his friend Jon Gifford, an independent publisher of all sorts but especially Oreon Golden Age detective fiction, which has reissued many old and almost forgotten detective novels.
The shop started out as an idea for a stall on Cambridge market, but when Richard found at last count that he had more than 2,000 secondhand crime novels tucked away in his spare room, the pair started to think a little bigger.
Richard says: ”I specialised in crime fiction at Heffers from the late 80s and I retired in September 2022 but I had long wanted to open a crime fiction bookshop. Over the years my wife had pointed out various places in Cambridge that would be suitable but the timing was never right. But when I retired I had just collaborated with Jon Gifford at the Oleander Press on reissuing 25 Golden Age detective stories - the Golden Age is sort of between the two World Wars - and we started talking about doing something else together.
“We just happened to be walking down Botolph Lane one day, John and I, and we saw that the Jet Photographic had disappeared from there, probably during Covid, and they’d moved premises. So I contacted them, and they said that they weren’t going to move back. And the best people to contact about the shop were Pembroke College. I found out the premises was available, and we decided to go ahead.”
Although the pair had been discussing the possibility of setting up a stall on Cambridge market, Richard says: “I didn’t fancy the early starts or the weather.”
As an avid collector of crime novels from every age and author, Richard also saw the shop as an opportunity to make some space at home.
”It’s an expensive way of reducing one’s own crime fiction stock from the house!” he chuckles.
The shop is on Botolph’s Lane, just a few doors along from a house said to be the former home of Cambridge’s hangman. It will stock new crime fiction and books about Cambridge downstairs and have a large second hand book section upstairs. The shop will stock out-of-print editions, especially older crime novels and a selection of fiction and non-fiction about Cambridge and East Anglia.
Some of the books reissued by Oreon press are set in Cambridge.
“There’s quite a few by Glenn Daniel called the Cambridge Murders,” says Richard.
“He was the university vice chancellor and professor of archaeology in the 1960s. He used to go into Heffers frequently. And the book had been published by Penguin in 1940s under a pseudonym, and then we got permission to reissue (through Oreon) after his wife’s death. I think it must be on its third publisher by now, but that’s a really popular book, set in (the fictional) Fisher College, which is sandwiched between John’s and Trinity in that tiny gap.”
As a devoted collector, Richard already had enough books in storage to stock the secondhand section of the new shop.
He says: ”We started to log the books for the market stall or a website, and I already had 1,200 books in storage for this endeavour, and then a couple of thousand in the spare room of secondhand books. The rest have been ordered and are going on the shelves.
Someone said to me the other day ‘You’ve retired from being retired’. But actually I just miss connecting with people and finding out what they’re reading. It’s not just about selling books to people. It’s really about learning from each other and sharing a love for detective fiction and other books. I do miss that. I loved talking to people at Heffers and I still go back almost every week just to talk to former colleagues and see people and buy things. I hear questions being asked, and I have to really stop myself jumping in to answer.
“I hope the bookshop will give people that sense of community and love for wanting to find out what people have read and what they’d like to read and be really able to hone in on matching books to their wants. Or maybe I could challenge them with something completely out of their comfort zone. And if we don’t have something in stock, we could have a search service for secondhand books.
“I also want to have authors come in. Writing is such a solitary profession that writers do like the chance to get out. We’ve suggested to one or two people that they might like to come in and have a stack of their books with them, but they’re not allowed to talk about their own book. They have to talk about other detective fiction and quite a few authors have said, ‘Oh yes, I really would love to do that.’ Often they have worked in bookshops and really miss that sense of meeting up with people, that connection.
“Authors used to come and see me in my old job and would say, ‘Aren’t’ you meant to be working on something?’ And they would reply ‘Yes, but I need some displacement activity to get my mind working’. I think that’s why so many work in cafes and the University Library.”
The shop is set to have a large section of Golden Age era books - which includes famous names like Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham, Josephine Tey and Dorothy L Sayers, as well as some very little known writers whom the Oleander Press has recently republished.
Richard’s expertise on rare and long forgotten crime novels is sought out by publishers and he is keen to share his knowledge with the avid readers of Cambridge.
He says: “I want the shop to be more of a community than just a shop. I run a crime fiction reading group together with Pippa McAllister, who’s been a great friend for the last 25 years. First it was at Heffers, and then we carried on with it. So we have been meeting for 22 years now, and quite a few people who come along for that each month. And we have crime writers in the reading group (including Mandy Morton and Nicola Upson) - lots of people we know, and I’ve got links wider than that, because I chair a national competition for crime fiction: the Gold Dagger Award with the Crime Writers’ Association. I’ve loved reading crime fiction since I was a child, so it seemed a natural progression.”
The shop’s name also comes from his time at Heffers.
“Bodies in the Bookshop was an annual event that I ran every summer for 22 years. We started off the first year with five authors coming along in 1990 and in 2012 we had 65 authors on one night, all coming to sign books and joining in with a party. Plenty of customers came and people got their books signed. It was just a party, really. But that was hugely supported by the Crime Writers’ Association and by many crime writers.”
Now he hopes to put on similar events at the new bookshop. He would also love to write a crime novel himself.
”I’ve got ideas. My wife has got ideas. But it’s finding the time,” he says.
Richard’s favourite Golden Age crime books
A crime writer’s motif for perfect murder is stymied after his intended victim is eliminated by a third party! For poet and amateur detective Nigel Strangeways, untangling truth from fiction is far from simple in The Beast Must Die by Nicholas Blake.
Deadly deeds surface in the competitive world of rowing after a fellow is bumped off during the preparation for the main race on the River Thames in The Boat Race Murder by R E Swartwout, a locked-room mystery first published in 1933.
Angela Pewsey had sung her last song. A prying snoop, who’d gathered something on everybody in the village of Inching Round, unexpectedly meets her maker mid-note, in The Voice of the Corpse by Max Murray.
In Measure for Murder, the second book by Clifford Witting to be reissued, after Catt Out of the Bag, Mrs Mudge, cleaner at the Little Theatre in Lulverton, receives an unpleasant surprise upon discovering a corpse in the box office, stabbed in the back with a dagger, a prop from the society’s latest play, Measure for Measure.
Detective deans, vicars and curates are more than capable of quoting chapter and verse when it comes to solving puzzles, and none more so than in The Hymn Tune Mystery by George A Birmingham. The marvellous Irish Precentor, the Reverend John Dennis, joins forces with Inspector Smallways, to unmask a murderer, after the often inebriated Carminster cathedral organist is, this time round, found quite dead in his organ loft, his skull cracked open.
There’s murder most irreverent at the Bishop’s palace one Christmas in Arrest the Bishop by Winifred Peck, with the death of the Reverend Ulder. Could it have been the bishop himself who’d delivered the fatal dose, or perhaps the less than model butler?
Everyone, apart from the parlour-maid, has an alibi after a man is found murdered in his locked study. Everything is relevant for Hercule Poirot’s ‘little grey cells’ as he misses nothing in one of my all-time favourite reads, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie. Just marvel at one of her most ingenious mysteries!
