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day, rather than at night – following a self- created ‘beat’ around writing locations that’s carefully honed to ensure the prolific writer effectively uses the time he has available. “There’s a cafe called Novi, where you can sit right by the window,” he says, “and in summer they open the windows up, so people are walking right past you on the pavement. I’ve never failed to get a decent hour there. Then I’ll go to the University Library where I’ll get another hour – and then I’d go to the Central Library for another hour – and if I’m really pushing it, I’m a member of the Botanic Gardens, so I’ll head to their cafe as well. I’m productive in those places, but they only work if I’ve thought in advance enough about what I’m going to do.” between London Liverpool Street and Ely, returning from his old day job as a journalist with the Financial Times . “I quite like working on trains: you’re surrounded by people but they leave you alone,” he laughs. “My wife (author Midge Gillies) was published before I was, and had an agent – I was messing around trying to write a crime novel: she offered to look at it, and she said there has to be something on every page that makes people want to read. So I thought I’d rewrite it – and each night, on the train, I limited myself to a single page. On the way in I read the newspapers, because I just… needed to. But on the way back, I wrote. It was a way of claiming back time. Psychologically it was very good: even when things went wrong with the train, I just thought ‘it’s all right – I’ve got more time to do this’.” Now a full-time writer, freed from the shackles of the daily schlep to London, when not moving around Cambridge Jim works at home in Ely, adopting the dining room table as his desk. The family dining table also comes in handy when laying out the book for the first time: Jim’s ‘spatial’ mind means he prefers to see a plot physically rather than carrying it around in his brain. “If it’s in your head, you’re never really sure if it works,” he says. “I use report cards, so every chapter is a different card, and then I colour-code for various parts of the plot – for this series, it’s very important whether it’s night or day, so I mark the cards with a black circle if it’s night, and an empty circle if it’s day – and then I can Impressively, Jim wrote his first two books on the commuter train
lay all the cards out on the dining room table and see the whole book.” “There has to be a plan before I start writing, but almost immediately the plan becomes untenable, so I have to have another one,” he says. “I know some writers who say ‘I’ve mapped it all out: all I have to do is write it,’ but the result is often not a very good book – it gets trapped by its plan. Some things work and some things don’t, and you only really find out in the middle – and then you’ve got to make really horrible decisions. Originally there were two big threads to the story, and I threaded them together so they both started almost immediately – and I finished the first draft, seven or eight months in, and I just knew, as soon as I started reading, that it’d be a much better book if one thread started and another came in later.” The resulting woven plots ebb and flow throughout the book much like the river Cam itself, a crucial part of the narrative that almost becomes a background character within the tale, or one of the nighthawks, who Eden visits on his nocturnal wanderings around the city. “Rivers are great,” Jim enthuses. “I did a book group reading: there was a woman at the event who was visiting Cambridge, and had just read the book, who said that I was clearly completely obsessed with rivers – and I thought ‘oh – you’re right’.
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And [the detective’s] name is Brooke, which I hadn’t really thought of… it was one of those moments where somebody reveals much more about what you’re doing than you know. One of the brave things about writing fiction is that you don’t know what you’re revealing about the way you think: you just do it. And then someone stands up at an event and says: ‘Have you noticed…?’” he chuckles. “Someone pointed out that my books are always about a body that’s been hidden in the past, or lost, and that comes to light – which is a broad description of what a murder mystery is – but it’s interesting... I always do my psychoanalysis backwards, once the book’s finished, which I think is the best way.” The Mathematical Bridge is a hugely enjoyable book that will be extra- warmly received by readers familiar with Cambridge – and thanks to Jim’s abundant output, once you’ve finished this novel, there’s another in the series to dive straight into, and a whole host of other titles to paddle your way through in the future. Not to be missed: a perfectly gripping summer read. l
“The river Cam becomes a character within the tale”
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