Ely is a small town, deep in the Cambridgeshire Fens. It's situated near low lying marshes and the canals that formed the trading routes of old. Current day Ely is slow and quiet. It's also deeply shrouded in heavy smog – part mist / part smoke from the local dump. The dump is a huge pile that's been building up for decades, and it's burning, deep in its centre, pumping pollution out to mingle with the mist.Philip Dryden is a reporter with the local small newspaper. Philip was a bigger fish in a bigger newspaper / reporting pond until a car accident that nearly killed his wife Laura and changed both their lives forever. Laura was trapped in the car that Dryden was driving as it went into one of the canals. Comatose she has lain in a hospital bed for many years since then. A victim of “locked-in” syndrome, she has recently been able to communicate sporadically with the outside world via a computer driven by mouth suction. Since the accident Philip has refused to return to driving, and he is now ferried around by Humph, owner driver of a beaten up Capri taxi and devotee of language lesson tapes. Humph is happy to drive Philip and then sit and wait, in fact there is very little of Humph's life that's conducted outside of the Capri.In THE MOON TUNNEL Philip is pursuing a number of stories. Firstly the future of the town dump is causing ructions, and as the smog lingers, the local council and the dump owners escalate the arguments. Not too far away, an archaeological dig is working on a series of Anglo-Saxon burial tombs. The tombs are situated below a WWII prisoner of war camp which held Italian, then German, servicemen up until the end of the war. Many of the Italian prisoners worked on farms in the area and a lot of them stayed in England after the war. They, and their families, are a prominent group in Ely still. When a skeleton is found in a wood lined tunnel, it makes sense that this is an escape tunnel from the POW camp, and the body must be that of an Italian serviceman. Only there doesn't seem to have ever been an escape from the camp. Combine that mystery with the theft of an extremely valuable painting from one of the local “Country Houses” in the dying days of the war, and Dryden thinks the body in the tunnel is not really who they re-buried him as.THE MOON TUNNEL is one of those engaging, stately character driven English mysteries. Stately isn't meant to imply a slowness of plot that's annoying, rather that the story progresses elegantly and smoothly. Philip is a perfectly feasible amateur sleuth as he digs away at stories that interest him, perhaps that could be saleable to bigger papers than just his local rag. His ongoing devotion to his wife is touching, but not cloying or overplayed. The nightly visits to Laura, particularly now that she can communicate, albeit stiltedly, convey an intellectual as well as loving connection between them. His ongoing reliance on her ability to perform some research tasks for him is natural as is his acceptance that she may forget. Philip's ongoing friendship with Humph is also beautifully drawn out. Humph's a character and really Philip is equally as eccentric and these two men have created a friendship out of mutual reliance which is comforting and charming. Many of the cast of supporting characters also fall into that eccentric category. Ma, the dump owner, is a women to remember, as is Vee, the elderly sole remaining member of one of the great families of the great Country Houses.Despite the amount of back story between Philip, Laura and Humph, THE MOON TUNNEL still stands up well on it's own. There is just enough information about their past to make the reader catch on to what is happening, without rewriting earlier books. The mystery of the body in the tunnel interweaves the archaeological team, local Druids and protesters, the ex-pat Italian community and Dryden's own family. There are components of this story that come from the Second World War, there are aspects that are very much current day. THE MOON TUNNEL is a very entertaining book, the mystery is interesting, the pace of the overall book is really good and Dryden and Humph are a great combination.
I always enjoy this author, who writes mysteries rather than thrillers. Set in the Fen country, the novel features a detective (Philip Dryden) whose wife is in a partial coma and a sidekick (Humphrey) who lives in his old Chevy Capri, which he uses to chauffeur Philip.The atmosphere is like peasoup fog because a long-burning fire at the local dump is polluting the area with a thick smog of sulfur fumes. Meanwhile, a team of archeologists unearth the body of a man in a tunnel under the old camp used to house Italian and then German POWs toward the end of WWII. The man in the tunnel appeared to be going into rather than out of the camp, and hereby hangs the tale.You could read this as a study of how many Italian POWs ended up settling in England while retaining their culture. A second subplot revolves around a reprisal incident in occupied Greece toward the end of the war.It's a complex tale, not one to speed through, but I enjoyed every minute of it.Here's a sample of how Kelly describes a drive through a small town that used to be a railroad junction:"Humph, ignoring the dismal visibility, took the first two crossings at the Capri's top speed of 53 mph, achieving a satisfying degree of lift-off and percussion on re-entry. This was one of the joys of his life and he was deeply satisfied to hear the exhaust hit the ground on the second attempt--a hollow clang like a Chinese dinner gong--followed by the faint but exotic scrape of the rear bumper touching the tarmac. But the third barrier was flashing red before he got within distance so he was forced to pull up in the mist and wait. A train clattered past devoid of passengers, rocking the cab slightly as it rolled over uneven sleepers. " 'That was very childish,' said Dryden, looking pointedly out of the side window at the tethered goat, its eyes a pool of satanic yellow and black. 'Well done.' "
What do You think about The Moon Tunnel (2005)?
Another good book in the Philip Dryden series. Once again Philip puts together the pieces of a puzzle that starts in the past only to unravel in the present. When a body is uncovered in a tunnel underneath an old POW camp in the fens, Philip has a good story on his hands. What he doesn’t foresee is that this body is the start of a much larger mystery. Add a second body to the story and things are no longer as simple as they seem. As I’ve said in my previous Philip Dryden reviews, I like reading a mystery from the point of view of a reporter rather than always from a police angle. It makes for a nice change as Philip approaches the solving of the mystery in an entirely different way. Add some returning characters, such as Humph, and this was a novel that kept the pages turning very quickly.
—Monica
