‘The American Suspect’ by Jim Kelly

Published by Allison and Busby,
19 March 2026.
ISBN 978-0-7490-3264-7 (HB)

The American Suspect is the fifth novel in this author’s Nighthawk series. It is set in and around Cambridge during 1942. American GIs are stationed in the area building airfields from which to launch bombing raids on Nazi Germany. A buried body, identified only by his dog tag, is found in an unmarked and curious spot as a runway is being extended at one of these airfields. Detective Inspector Eden Brooke is called from Cambridge to investigate. No recent burial, it transpires that it took place during the Great War (Brooke is a veteran of that conflict and has disturbing flashbacks to his participation). It appears that this is a case of murder, although there are complications. Albert Ball-Proctor was a pilot who went missing in action, presumed dead, in 1918. How, then, did his body end up in an unmarked grave on an airfield? 

We are soon introduced to a number of other important characters. Amongst them are Molly Curtin, a young and attractive member of the WAAF, and her bedridden mother Ede. Major Gerry Brogan is a detective in the US military police. Two further murders are committed, and Eden becomes convinced that the three deaths are linked. A black US serviceman is arrested and charged with murder. Brooke has reasons for doubting his guilt and has to work quickly as capital punishment is, of course, on the statute book.                                        

There are a number of other strands to the novel. Cats, particularly black ones, are regularly being abducted in Cambridge for their fur. Expensive wine is going missing from college cellars, and cigars are also targeted. All plot lines are drawn together as the novel reaches its conclusion. 

The novel is marked by a series of contrasts which are central to the story. There is, for example, tension between the local police and the US officials. Although Brooke gets on well in the main with Brogan, on one occasion he finds it necessary to deliver a lecture: ‘The law, Major – that is, the United States of America (Visiting Forces) Act – stipulates, as I’m sure you know, that US servicemen operate under US law in the United Kingdom, supervised by the US military police. It does not say that any UK citizen falls under your authority.’ There is also tension between the coloured (a term used in the novel) and white US soldiers; the two groups are usually kept apart by being given different evenings off. In the same lecture, Brooke says ‘Most people find coloured troops friendly and good-mannered, less boastful perhaps than their counterparts in white units. We don’t like ‘swank’, Major. The coloured troops don’t act like they own the place. That can’t always be said of their white counterparts, can it?’ Molly Curtin’s relationship with a coloured US soldier is complicated by these racial stresses. 

Kelly writes with an assured grasp of the period. The background of wartime eastern England is a constant, whether it be the deprivations of some or the machinations of others. The fears of families with sons on active service, including Brooke’s, are ever-present. This is an intelligent and, despite some of its subject matter, a civilized novel whose plot retains the reader’s interest. I thoroughly enjoyed it and recommend it enthusiastically.

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Reviewer David Whittle

Jim Kelly was born in 1957 and is the son of a Scotland Yard detective. He went to university in Sheffield, later training as a journalist and worked on the Bedfordshire Times, Yorkshire Evening Press and the Financial Times. His first book, The Water Clock, was shortlisted for the John Creasey Award and he has since won a CWA Dagger in the Library and the New Angle Prize for Literature. He lives in Ely, Cambridgeshire. 

www.jim-kelly.co.uk

David Whittle is firstly a musician (he is an organist and was Director of Music at Leicester Grammar School for over 30 years) but has always enjoyed crime fiction. This led him to write a biography of the composer Bruce Montgomery who is better known to lovers of crime fiction as Edmund Crispin, about whom he gives talks now and then.