Stories of a City: Why it’s a crime not to visit Bodies in the Bookshop

In her monthly column for Velvet, Cambridge novelist Susan Grossey takes us to a different city site each month - and tells us their stories, past, present and personal. This month, we’re off to Bodies in the Bookshop

In these days of chain stores, repeat restaurants and corporate takeovers, the arrival of any independent venture in our city is a cause for celebration. Even our historic streets can start to resemble, at shop-front level at least, those of any other mid-sized UK town, and we need to guard against this by supporting anyone brave enough to launch solo into the unforgiving world of retail.

And much as I love our independent vintage boutiques, hat shops, chocolatiers and gin distilleries, I reserve my greatest retail love for independent bookshops. (Most people see the book token as an unimaginative gift, whereas for me it is the best possible one to receive: it’s money that can only be spent on books, and requires me to go into a bookshop to do it – utter bliss.) Imagine my joy, then, at the opening last summer of Bodies in the Bookshop – an independent crime bookshop on Botolph Lane.

Full disclosure: this opening did not take me by surprise, as I already knew the two men behind the project and had begged them to go ahead. Richard Reynolds was the crime fiction buyer at Heffers for over four decades and championed my own novels when they first came out, while Jon Gifford is the local publisher behind such legendary books as The Night Climbers of Cambridge and Zuleika in Cambridge. But their dedication and expertise only increased the sense of anticipation, for what is more joyful than a shop run and staffed by people who know and love their stock and want to share their enthusiasm with others?

If you’re not sure quite where Bodies is, let me help you. Stand facing the original Fitzbillies, with the Pitt Building at your back. Now look to the left, and there is a little, winding, cobbled passage heading away from you. This is Botolph Lane, and stepping into it is going back three or four centuries. Two shops up, next to the marvellous Espresso Lane, is our bookshop. Formerly a house and then a pub, a shoe repair business and a photographic studio, it is apparently haunted by someone who walks up the stairs and disappears. It has a large picture window with a tempting display that changes weekly; as I write, they are featuring spy novels, with the motto “VGN BZM ROX NM SGD ROHDR?”* hanging above them. Two smaller windows feature local titles, or books for children, or puzzles – it’s certainly not just traditional crime.

Watch your step as you go into the shop – and indeed everywhere inside, as it’s an old building with uneven floors, low ceilings and unexpected corners. There’s a little room to your left, with Cambridge-y stock, and the main sales floor ahead of you (with the “Agatha nook” at the back, for fans of Golden Age crime – that’s stories featuring plenty of clever plots, clergymen and afternoon tea and minimal sex and gore). Upstairs it gets really higgledy-piggledy, with historical crime and second-hand books in all crime categories (mostly collected over fifty years by Richard) displayed in a rabbit-warren of five little rooms. There is also a locked cupboard where apparently they store chairs for events but I’m not going in there to check – see earlier comment about the resident ghost.

The sense of travelling back in time is reinforced when you look out of the upstairs window into the graveyard of St Botolph’s church – what more fitting neighbour for Bodies in the Bookshop than a large collection of, well, bodies?

* It’s a simple cipher; substitute each letter for the one after it in the alphabet, and you arrive at a quotation from David Cornwell (aka John Le Carré): Who can spy on the spies?

Susan Grossey is the author of many historical crime novels, including the Hardiman books, set in Cambridge in the 1820s. The second in this series – Sizar – was published in December 2024. See susangrossey.com

For more about Lucy and her work, follow @lucyjonespoppetpics on Instagram.