The Necropolis Railway by Andrew Martin is first book in a series starring railway man Jim Stringer. It is billed on its cover as "an ingenious and atmospheric thriller" (Daily Express, London) and "a masterful novel about a mad, clanking fog-bound world (Simon Winchester, author of The Professo...
"Jim Stringer ... Railway Detective"Coming as I do, from what used to be one of the oldest and largest railway communities, Swindon, this book was of great interest to me, when I saw it for sale in a local charity shop. That was long before I knew that the author himself came from a family of rai...
Blackpool Highflyer is the second book in the Jim Stringer Railway Mystery series set in Victorian England, summer of 1905. Jim is now a fireman on the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway, 'Lanky' for short among railway employees. He and his wife Lydia, his former landlord in London, now own their ...
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I was thinking about how, coming out of the woods, we’d struck two of the coppers in the search party. I’d asked them whether they’d come upon any scent of ‘their quarry’, and one of the two had said, ‘The quarry? That’s over yonder, en’t it?’ which had made me think John Lambert might yet escape...
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After all, he had accomplished his mission. He wrote, ‘I knew that if anyone would succeed, Mackrell would, and my relief at his presence there that night cannot be adequately expressed.’ Who was this man who had inspired such hope? You might say that, as a grown man, Gyle...
Before 1890 – before, that is, the opening of the first deep-level Tube – the District had reached what remain its westerly termini at Richmond, Wimbledon and Ealing Broadway. A couple of years later the Metropolitan had reached its own most northerly point, Verney Junction, which was as bucolic ...
It had been the right thing to say. Then – since I’d caught a bit of a chill – I pressed my right nostril and blew snot from my left down onto the footplate, at which his grin faded. ‘I’ve just swept that,’ he said. ‘It’s a bloody footplate,’ I said, ‘it’s not carpeted.’ The light was fading over...
It was getting on for nine. The heat had hardly abated; the only difference was that the light had turned dark green again. Jarvis and Ahmad between them had prepared my evening meal: some species of spiced meat (Ahmad’s contribution), with fried potato (Jarvis’s doing). Jarvis had not eaten hims...
