The Streets of ... Peterborough with Tony Forder's DI Bliss

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POSH JIMMY BLISS

The wood in which human bones are unearthed by a bunch of kids, introducing readers to DI Jimmy Bliss for the first time in Bad to the Bone, is neither dense nor particularly eerie, but it is ancient with narrow pathways spider-webbing its outer edges. This case also saw the first appearance of the Bone Woman, who at the time was working at one of Peterborough’s most visited attractions, the Flag Fen Bronze-Age site.

When Bliss was first transferred from the Met to Peterborough, he was less than impressed with the city. A significant number of housing and business estates are the kind of bland and featureless late 70s design that leaves no lasting impression on the casual visitor, and seemed to offer few endearing features for the city’s inhabitants. The Thorpe Wood police station where Bliss works is a prime example of this architectural malaise, and the poor bloke has to see it every day.

Over time, however, Bliss has come to realise that there is more to Peterborough than meets the eye. The Ferry Meadows parkland is situated just a few minutes away from Bliss’s home, and when readers first encounter him it’s the place where he walks his two dogs, Bonnie and Clyde, every single day. With lakes, a sailing area, cafes, children’s’ play areas, nature trails and interesting tree carvings, Jimmy came to love the place. Within the boundaries of the wider parkland close to the mere on the river Nene, Jimmy even decided to moor his small boat, The Mourinho, which he bought on a whim shortly after moving to the city.

Of course, when you live and work in the same area, there is an inevitable crossover. When

Jimmy returned to the city following a twelve year absence, he was summoned to the scene of a grisly murder at Ferry Meadows, in the car park close to the boating lake. This was Bliss’s introduction to The Scent of Guilt case.

So even if the park lost some of its lustre in his eyes due to that particular murder scene, Bliss came to see virtue in other parts of the city, in and around the old brick pits, the cathedral, and the smaller villages lurking in many sections of Peterborough which retain their essential natural order. Indeed, his favourite pub is in one of those older parts of the city around which newer housing estates have been developed.

For many years, a regular sound heard by city residents was the heavy drone of aircraft flying out of and returning to nearby RAF Wittering, once the main home of the Harrier but most often utilised as part of the supply chain during various wars. Bliss became familiar with the base during the If Fear Wins case, in which he investigated the brutal slaying of an RAF logistics airman.

The main bridge traversing the Nene is an ancient route across the river, once commonly used by those travelling from London into Lincolnshire, and it is here that we find a block of apartments, one of which is home to Penny Chandler. It was as Jimmy sat in her kitchen looking down at the river that he found inspiration for solving a major puzzle in The Reach of Shadows.

Now that Bliss has made the city his home – though in truth London will always be his real home – he has taken more of an interest in its long history. From a Roman way station known as Durobrivae, to being named Medeshamstede, before becoming St Peters Burgh or Burgh St Peter when the settlement was first walled, to Peterborough as it is now. It’s a diverse city, which became home not only to many Italians after the war and a significant Muslim population in the early 70s, but also a huge influx of Londoners in the latter part of that same decade, and in more recent times to eastern Europeans.

Jimmy’s work for the Major Crimes team at Peterborough has taken him to York, Essex, London, and even across the pond to California. In the forthcoming The Death of Justice, Bliss and the team spend more time out of the city than in it, working as part of a task force in the Lincolnshire Fenlands as a cold case erupts into a spate of unimaginable violence. He may always consider himself a Londoner at heart, but Peterborough is now the place Bliss will find difficult to leave.