The Somme Stations by Andrew Martin

It is the autumn of 1914 and Detective Sergeant Jim Stringer is nervous, to say the least, about fighting in the war, but when a notice appears at York Station calling for men to enlist in the newly formed North Eastern Railway Battalion, he feels he must do his duty. He'll be spending a few months training in Hull with an odd assortment of 'railway pals', there'll be a few incidents highlighting the growing animosity between certain characters, and the friendliness between others.    
    But the reader's curiosity is truly piqued by the opening pages, told in letters from Jim's wife to a friend, that while he is recovering from a serious leg wound, Jim is to be charged with murder. The story switches back to fill in the gaps, beginning with the strange cast of characters Jim enlists with. These include the two young lads - surely they lied about their ages - Alfred Tinsley, a railway nut who doesn't get on with young William Harvey, who is mad about the army and eager to teach the Kraut a lesson or two. Oamer is the philosophical and popular NCO with a secretive private life and cheery Cockney, Bernie Dawson can't drink bitter without losing his temper. The Butler brothers include oily Oliver who is wary of Jim for reasons of his own, and the twins, beefy Roy and Andy who seem mentally deficient but are dab hands with a shovel and laying of track.
    When one of the pals is murdered shortly before they are sent to France, Jim's policeman instincts kick in, but the death is written off as either accident or suicide and the men ship off. They will soon be helping set up the railway system at the Somme that will keep the artillery well supplied with shells at the front. But the military police have not let the pals off the hook for the Hull murder and this makes things a bit jittery for them, to say nothing of the horrendous reality that is the war in France.
    Told through the eyes of a character we've come to know so well, The Somme Stations is a unique war story describing a little known corner of the battlefield, the role of the railways. Jim's war experiences are as evocative as any I've come across, and though in some ways it's a grim read, it is laced with his usual Yorkshire humour, a bit darker this time around. This is partly due to the array of interesting characters on offer as well as the ridiculous aspects of war that resemble a world gone mad. There is also quite a lot of alcohol consumed and contemplations of the qualities of your humble Woodbine as opposed to 'Viginian Select' cigarettes. Stringer's Chief puts in a surprise appearance and a copy of The Count of Monte Cristo has a significant role to play.
    Martin has had a few literary award nominations for his Jim Stringer series, but this one won the CWA Ellis Peters Historical Award. I am hard-pressed to choose any as better than the others, I love them all, but The Somme Stations is certainly one of the more entertaining war stories I've read.

 

The Baghdad Railway Club by Andrew Martin

In this instalment of Andrew Martin's Jim Stringer mystery series, our dogged railway detective finds himself sent to Baghdad to investigate a potential case of treason. It is 1917 and Jim has barely recovered from an injury in the Somme when a chance meeting at a railway club in London plus a word from his Chief in York have him working on a covert mission.
    Not terribly good in hot weather, Jim is flung into a scorching Mesopotamia, where the Allies have chased out the Turks. The local population is unsure whether the British are any better and insurrection simmers in the background.
    It is easy to forget that there was more to World War One than the Western Front and of course Gallipoli. But the fall of the Ottoman Empire is not to be sniffed at. Jim's meant to reconnoitre with a Captain Boyd outside the tea shop at the railway station but discovers the poor chap's corpse instead. Jim slips away, anxious not to be in the frame for his murder and is soon on the hunt for suspects.
     The one with the most likely motive is Lt. Col Shepherd, the officer who has taken Jim on to help run the railways - a debonair, old-school-tie sort with a tendency to be a risk taker in battle. Shepherd was the officer mentioned by Boyd to the War Office as a possible traitor, for apparently accepting a bribe from the surrendering Turks. There's also Boyd's nervous batman to consider who is acting somewhat secretively. Other characters add colour - movie maker, Wallace King, who turns up at the most inconvenient of times with his film camera and the breathtakingly lovely archaeologist, Harriet Bailey, who is an expert on the Arab peoples.
    Jim begins to feel nervous when Shepherd and his side-kick Captain Stevens are eager to take him on a steam train outing up to Samarrah, Jim driving and Stevens as fire-man. Normally this would be a joy, but the intense heat and also the knowledge that Jim's cover is blown give Jim a sense of impending doom.
    The tension ramps up a notch or two with more deaths, and there's Martin's usual blunt North of England humour which describes the characters so well. The tedium of talks given at the railway club meetings, the love-lorn folly generated by the presence of a pretty woman, the reluctant help given by Jim's Arab servant, the ridiculous code devised by Jim's secret service boss that is really no help to Jim at all - all give the reader plenty of chuckles. Meanwhile the plot is driven towards a stand-off during another railway outing, while a surprise twist courtesy of Jim's wife Lydia rounds the book off nicely.
    The Baghdad Railway Club delivers more of what fans of the Jim Stringer series have come to expect - who new that steam railway systems could be such fun? There are only two I have yet to read, but perhaps Martin will get the railway bug again and deliver a few more.

Night Train to Jamalpur by Andrew Martin

Andrew Martin might well have called this novel 'Snakes on a Train'. His railway detective, Jim Stringer, has been sent to Calcutta  to investigate corruption and security arrangements on the East Indian Railway. It is 1923 and with Lydia and their sixteen year old daughter Bernadette in tow, his secondment was supposed to be a kind of working holiday.
    But someone has been secreting venomous snakes in first class carriages and the body count begins to climb. Jim feels that this should be something he could look into, and of course he does, hampered as he is by fellow investigator, the cigar smoking and monstrously rude, Major Fisher. The two are on the night train of the title, when a murder takes place - Jim rudely awakened by sounds outside his compartment and then gunshot.
    The Anglo Indian, John Young, with whom Stringer had been chatting and sharing an evening drink just hours before, is found dead while horsemen ride off into the night. It is difficult to suggest a motive for the killing unless Jim himself is the target, a means of stalling any investigations into railway corruption.
    And Jim can only wonder who has stolen the folder of potentially damning information that had arrived on his desk the day before. If only he'd had the chance to read it first. Jim is inclined to suspect Fisher, who is uncooperative and who he believes is carrying a gun, which for some reason fails to appear when their carriage is searched by police.
    If that isn't enough to be going on with, Jim begins to worry that his daughter Bernadette is about to be swept off her feet by the son of a Maharajah, known to the family as the RK. On top of this Bernadette is out almost every night dancing with her posher pals and spending small fortunes on hats. Meanwhile Jim's wife, Lydia, is eager to spread the word about the women's movement in India at a time when revolution is in the air. But Jim worries that there is something else niggling her.
    Jim's investigations take him from balls held by Anglo high society and golfing with the RK to clandestine meetings with snake charmers. There is a host of potential suspects, most of them peculiar in some way - the strangely faceless William Asquith in charge of the traffic department who spends more than he could possible earn,  his subordinate Dougie Poole, who has a brilliant mind hidden by his tendency to be off his face most of the time, as well as Professor Hedley Fleming who knows an inordinate amount about snakes, to name but three.
    While this novel isn't as pacy as some Jim Stringer novels, there is a lot going on and enough action to keep the reader well amused. And laced through everything is Jim's knack for wry observations and local colour. The India situation in itself is interesting, with whisperings about that upstart, Gandhi while Lydia has plenty to say about British colonial domination.
    Night Train to Jamalpur is the last in the Jim Stringer series to date, its author seemingly beavering away on other projects. We've seen Jim delve into all manner of cases in a range of interesting settings. Will there be more in the series? I certainly hope so as this is probably my favourite current mystery series - where it doesn't really matter 'whodunit', as the story is all in the telling. Which is just as it should be.

The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins

I don't often read this kind of thriller - there is so much tension that you know you're not in for a relaxing sort of reading experience. On top of that, The Girl on the Train has all these characters who aren't very likeable.
    First off there's Rachel, our main narrator. After a failed marriage she's in a bad way having lost her job because she's an alcoholic and she doesn't have the wherewithal to do anything to fix her life. She keeps up a charade to her flatmate Cathy of a normal working woman taking the train to work each day, but the reader knows this would be impossible on the amount of wine and ready-mixed gin and tonics she consumes.
    To make matters worse she can't seem to let go of her husband and continues to phone and leave him messages, even hanging around outside her old house. Naturally this upsets his second wife, Anna, who wants to be left alone with her husband and baby.
    Then there's the fantasy world Rachel dreams up about the couple she calls Jess and Jason, who she can see from her commuter train when it stops at a signal. Jess and Jason epitomise the kind of loving relationship she would like to reinvent with her ex-hubby, Tom, made more real to Rachel by their proximity just along the road from her old house, the house Tom now shares with Anna.
    But one day Rachel sees something from her train that shocks her and soon after, Jess, whose real name is Megan, disappears. Rachel becomes a bit like an amateur sleuth - she has time on her hands after all - and contacts Megan's husband, not Jason but Scott, and does even more cringe-worthy hanging around and snooping, fuelled by all the alcohol she gets through.
    Further down the list of unlikeable characters we come to Megan, who narrates part of the story in the months before her disappearance, and we learn that Megan is at least as flaky as Rachel. Other chapters are narrated by Anna, who can be smug and unsympathetic.
    However what makes these women unreliable also makes the plot hum along. With Rachel there are her blanks in memory, the humiliation of people's disgust over events she cannot recall. As she puts the story together of Megan's disappearance, she begins to wonder if she had a hand in it herself. And why does she experience so much lurking fear?
    The police of course are no help at all. They want Rachel to keep her nose out of things, but they don't seem to be getting anywhere and don't believe anything she tells them. She's a pathetic fantasist and a drunk, so you can't blame them.
    I can see the appeal of a book like The Girl on the Train as it reels you in from the opening chapters and is superbly engrossing. It gives you a grim view of marriage, of the kind of stifling suburban misery that goes on in behind closed doors and the cruelty that lurks in what seem to be the happiest of relationships. But there's too much happening for the reader to dwell much on any of that and you just have to get to the end to see what happens.
 

The Last Train to Scarborough by Andrew Martin

At the start of this novel, railway detective Jim Stringer wakes up in the dark to find himself lying on a pile of coal, unable to remember how he got there. He soon finds out he's on board a ship, the kind of jobbing steamship that runs from the north of England to the south. On top of that he's not too well, suffering terrible nausea, and the captain of the ship and his foreign sounding first mate seem set to kill him.
    Change of chapter and suddenly the reader is with Jim and his family - 'the Missus' and his children, Harry and Sylvia (named after Sylvia Pankhurst, of course), at their new house on the edge of Thorpe on Ouse. It's a bigger house but the rent is reasonable, perhaps because the landlord has taken a bit of shine to Lydia, Jim's wife.
   Lydia wants the family to get on in the world, and with that in mind, Jim is about to ditch railway policing for clerking in a law office, with the view to one day becoming a solicitor. He'll be James Stringer from now on, thank you.
    But the Chief has one more case lined up for him, and this concerns the disappearance of a railway fireman (they're the ones that shovel in the coal to keep the engine running), who was spending a night at the Paradise Hotel in Scarborough. The case is months old, and the local police have been all over the guesthouse numerous times, but no one can account for the whereabouts of Raymond Blackburn, a strong, handsome, silent type with a fiancee waiting for him.
    The Chief sends Jim off undercover as a fireman to the Chief's rifle-club pal, Tommy Nugent, a chatty, nervous driver with guns in his luggage, just in case. The Paradise advertises itself as economical accommodation for railwaymen, and Jim finds himself in Blackburn's old room at the top of the stairs.
    The off-season hotel offers a bunch of suspects: a beautiful but flirtatious landlady and her 'slow' but powerfully built brother who has a fascination for newspaper articles about railway accidents. The other two guests are equally peculiar: Howard Fielding, a finely dressed older gent with a taste for fine wine and cigars who is oddly enough in the railway postcard business with fellow guest, Theo Vaughan. Theo is nowhere as flash and is hoping to branch out into a more racy and potentially more lucrative line of postcards as he soon reveals to Jim in an amusing scene at a local pub.
    As usual there is a load of scope for humorous banter among the inmates with their oddly contrasting characteristics and Jim's need for information. These scenes are interwoven with ones on board the coal steamer that has become Jim's prison. Here there is no comfort and Jim's health more and more precarious. The reader can only wonder how he is going to get himself out of this one.
    The Last Train to Scarborough is another terrific story in the Jim Stringer series. There's still plenty of railway detail to keep the train buffs amused, but if you don't know a thing about it all, the story still rattles along with loads of pace and that wonderful north of England style. With this instalment we are in March of 1914, and only too aware that Jim will be a long way from home in the next book in the series, The Somme Stations. It's bound to be a corker!

The Lost Luggage Porter by Andrew Martin

I don't often pick up mystery novels involving organised crime or gangs of thieves, but I felt happy to make an exception with the third Jim Stringer railway detective novel by Andrew Martin. I knew I wouldn't be disappointed and I was right.
    Martin throws Jim in at the deep end when he turns up for his first day as a detective, having lost his one chance at his dream job as an engine driver because of a terrible blunder that wasn't his fault.   Lydia, 'the wife', is pleased about this as she is smart and she knows Jim has a good brain and thinks he should use it. She is ambitious and modern, a working woman in her own right and pregnant with their first child.
    But back to Jim's first day. Instead of getting to know the rest of the team of York railway police, Chief Inspector Weatherill, a large, messy looking cigar smoker, sends Jim off to buy a scruffy suit so he can go undercover. His brief is to ferret out criminals involved in a spate of burglaries at the station.
    Jim buys a tired old suit from a second hand dealer, as well as a pair of spectacles, and promptly pushes out the lenses. He plonks the glasses on and his disguise is complete. Which is just as well, because an incident the previous day, has shown Jim just where he can begin. This involved the lost luggage porter of the title, a pale, sickly creature named Lund. It was Lund who not only produced Jim's missing railway magazines, but alerted Jim to a pickpocketing duo he referred to as the Brains and the Blocker.
    Perhaps it should have been Lund who joined the detective ranks, as Lund also tells Jim the pub, the euphemistically named Garden Gate, where he would find them. Jim declares his eagerness to join the gang, and after proving himself as a willing if not skilful pickpocket is soon taken on.
    But Jim hasn't bargained on the ruthless nature of the gang's leader, one Valentine Sampson, who has boasted of killing two policemen. When the gang pulls off a heist at York station after dark, a piece of action that involves some shooting and two potential casualties, Jim is hauled off to Paris with the Brains and Sampson. It seems likely that one of the gang has betrayed them, and Jim is put on watch.
    How Jim attempts to make his escape and return home makes for some entertaining reading, and the story rollicks along nicely. But what makes this book work so well is the way Martin builds up his characters, Jim's perky narration, the smart dialogue laced with humour and the period detail which makes you really feel you are in a railway station in the north of England, circa 1905. It is all of this that makes the series such an absorbing read and utterly original.

Death on a Branch Line by Andrew Martin

Death on a Branch Line is the fifth in Martin's Jim Stringer, railway detective series, plunging the reader into York railway station in the midst of the heatwave of 1911.  Stringer is under pressure to find a hotel for the weekend - he's promised the wife a sojourn in Scarborough - but they're all booked out. Then several incidents occur that interrupt his efforts, including the arrival of a police guard which is taking a convicted murderer to the prison where he is to be hanged the following Monday.
    The condemned man, who is said to have murdered his father, makes a plea to Stringer: to visit his family home and prevent another death - his brother's. So instead of Scarborough, Jim takes Mrs Stringer to the tiny village of Adenwold, where half the population is on an outing to the seaside, and there's the feel of a deserted Western town awaiting a showdown.
    In a race against time, Jim tries to find out if there are any other motives for the murder of local landowner, Sir George Lambert, a vigorous hunter and shooter, who didn't get on with either of his two sons. Was Sir George's relationship with the condemned man's governess an important factor? And who are the two men that John Lambert fears so much and what can be the significance of all those railway timetables he's got in his cottage?
    Among the characters that invite the reader's curiosity are the oddball station master who is immersed in a table-top recreation of a Sudanese battle; the cheeky, layabout signalman and the Handley family who run the Angel, the inn where the Stringers spend the weekend.  The landlord is unhappy because he isn't making enough money and he'd rather be a farmer; his wife is upset over the impending execution of Hugh Lambert and their son Mervyn is particularly taciturn for reasons we will only learn about later on.
      Death on a Branch Line doesn't have Stringer charging about the countryside, jumping on and off trains and dodging villains as in previous books I've read in the series. But that doesn't mean it's slow. There is the constant tension of time ticking away until Hugh Lambert's final morning which is oddly contrasted with the heavy midsummer feeling of a town where nothing happens.
    The novel is also leavened with dollops of North of England humour which is largely due to the dry tone of Stringer's narration and his constant little battles to prove his worth to his Chief, a cigar smoking veteran soldier who is oddly spry considering his age and shape. Mrs Stringer gets plenty of opportunity to add her views, particularly to do with women's rights and in the background there is the sense of the approaching war. It's a light, fun read on the one hand, but the book is all the more interesting for the way it conjures up a very believable feel for its time and place.

Murder at Deviation Junction by Andrew Martin

Jim Stringer is a railway detective, working out of York Station in 1909. It is just coming up to Christmas and the setting is a striking mix of the dark satanic mills, fire and brimstone connected with the Industrial Age, and snow.
    Jim has been sent to arrest a steel worker for assault at a football game, but somehow ends up discovering a murder instead. The contrast between the steel works and the snow drift that brings his train to a stop at a tiny station couldn't be more obvious. When a derelict shed is searched by the snow clearing gang, a long dead body turns up.
    Railway reporter, Stephen Bowman, who is sharing Jim's carriage looks distinctly uneasy - a young photographer named Peters had disappeared a year before, and it turns out his camera was stolen about the same time. Had Peters uncovered an incriminating secret that led to his death?
    Jim runs the risk of dismissal by pursuing the murder case, but he can't let it go. He has his interview for the position of sergeant coming up, and his young family needs the money a promotion would bring. But Sergeant Shillito has other ideas and would like to take Jim down a peg or too. Then there's Christmas to pay for and Jim's small pocketful of cash is slowly depleted as he hops on and off trains, sends cables and stands witnesses for meals and drinks.
    Jim's under a lot of pressure as his investigations lead him to uncover the story of the Cleveland Travelling Club - a group of five prosperous men who journeyed daily from Whitby to Middlesbrough in their own special carriage. It's not long before he finds that young Peters isn't the only mysterious death, several of the club members have died in odd circumstances as well.
    The case will take Jim as far south as London and into the wintry north of the Scottish Highlands, and all the while the clock is ticking towards Christmas and all the pressure of his interview and family commitments. There's going to be plenty of danger and Jim will have the chance to put his railway knowledge and skills as a fireman to good use.
    You don't have to know a thing about steam trains to enjoy the Jim Stringer series. Andrew Martin recreates the steam age, coloured with the voice of the Yorkshire working classes, making these books delightfully different. There is brilliant characterisation - Jim's fellow detectives add some lively banter as does Lydia, Jim's sparky wife who has feminist ambitions. While there is plenty of action, there is also wit and social awareness, making the books a reasonably intelligent read and as such all the more satisfying.

 

The Necropolis Railway by Andrew Martin

I still find it difficult to believe how much I enjoyed The Necropolis Railway by Andrew Martin, because at the outset there were one or two difficulties that as a reader I had to get my head around. To begin with there was all the steam locomotive jargon, a field of knowledge I know nothing about; then there was the cast of scarily rough and grubby rail workers, and on top of that a swag of early nineteenth century slang. The setting is a wintry Waterloo Station in 1903 - a bleaker spot it is hard to imagine - everything seems drenched in rain and soot, dirt and squalor - what could there possibly be to enjoy?
    For a start there is the wonderful character of Jim Stringer, a nineteen year old eager to make real his dream of one day being an engine driver. He's down from a charming coastal town up north where his father would love him to take on the family butchery business, only Jim is smitten by the railway bug, and manages to get a referral from a visiting railway bigwig, Rowland Smith.
    Jim's to start off as a cleaner (of engines) before eventually progressing to the role of fireman, the step before driving a train. But Jim makes the mistake of mentioning his sponsor, hoping to impress his fellow workers. They treat him like a pariah, and he nearly tosses the job in after a couple of weeks. Even the house he rooms in is a miserable hole, with a leaking roof, truckle bed and no cocoa. If it weren't for the gorgeous, though offhand, landlady he'd certainly be looking for new digs.
    There's a question-mark over the mysterious disappearance of Jim's predecessor, Henry Taylor, which looks more and more suspicious when Jim himself experiences a few close shaves. Then there are the goings on connected with the mysterious graveyard route, its financial woes and Rowland Smith's cost-cutting. Smith sends Jim a peculiar letter asking him for any information on possible misconduct among the rail workers. Andrew Martin layers mystery upon mystery.
    Turn of the century London, the huge station of Waterloo, it's immense sheds full of steam engine paraphernalia; the back stories of rising socialism and the unions, of women beginning to control their own destinies all combine to make an atmospheric setting that draws you in.
    And then there are the terrific minor characters: the mercurial Vincent, who is eager for promotion and his grim, train-driver Uncle Arthur, and Arthur's fellow driver, the frequently drunk Barney Rose. There's Mike, who's face seems to be all teeth and chubby, jovial Mack from the graveyard line who can afford a surprisingly lavish lifestyle.
    These characters and Jim's lovely landlady are given a working-class London vernacular which enlivens the dialogue immensely without recourse to weird spellings. And Jim himself is a vigorous young chap, always beavering away to solve the riddles of the graveyard line. He's a man of action and you can be sure he'll be along for another adventure in the next Andrew Martin book. If it's anything like this one it will be a ripper!