The Necropolis Railway

This is a joint review of the initial books in two mystery series set on English railways during Queen Victoria's reign, Andrew Martin's The Necropolis Railway, and Edward Marston's The Railway Detective . Martin begins at that bottom with young Jim Stringer, whose dream is to live on the footplate, driving a great iron locomotive in the Gilded Age. Now he is just an engine cleaner, trying to make the leap to fireman. He is subject to severe hazing by his colleagues in the locomotive shed in London, absent any training programme. As gradually emerges, in tandem with his growing skills, this country-boy was hired under suspicious circumstances by a director of a special funereal railway. The mystery is what nefarious things are going on behind the scenes. The excitement is in the arduous training and enlightenment of Jim. The suspense is whether the observant young man will survive the attention of his malignant supervisors and prove worthy. Marston jumps into the early days of the railways. Robert Colbeck, a dapper detective--nattily-dressed and proud of it--is from the new Metropolitan Police of Scotland Yard. He takes on the mystery of who had robbed and crashed a mail train full of gold and sensitive mail. Was it done for money or out of hatred of the new-fangled railways? Dastardly deeds continue to affect the railway and its locomotives, and endanger Colbeck's budding infatuation with a poor but beautiful girl, the tearful daughter of an assaulted train driver. Martin immerses you in the smoke, sweat, and argot of the 1903 era of mechanical monsters; Marston's could be set almost anywhere in the generic Victorian era. Martin imbues his story with Jim's sense of awe before the steam power and mechanical clackery of the time. With Martin at your side you feel Stringer's enthusiasm and are immersed in his confusing and steep learning curve, including the jargon; Marston is the omniscient author, meant to awe, featuring an arrogantly correct detective who is always prescient, out-sherlocking Sherlock. Marston merely uses the railway as a setting, while Martin is engaged in reconstructing the whole experience for us, creating an historical novel in the best sense. While Martin's characters are young, they are complex and mature; Marston's heroes are older men with simple sentiments and antagonisms. Martin's unassuming Jim struggles to survive and inadvertently develops a talent for observation and detection; Marston's Det. Colbeck emerges full-blown and already famous, always with the critical data in hand. Martin slowly constructs the unsuspected crime, which becomes part of the solution to many inexplicable activities and hostilities experienced by Jim along the twisting way; Marston starts his story with a train crash and his plot moves inexorably towards a solution, flagrantly linear, lacking misdirection, and undercutting the possibility for suspense. It is just too pat. His man Colbeck is obstructed only by a recalcitrant superv

I am neither an avid railway buff, nor a frequent mystery reader, but I thought the Necropolis Railway was terrific bit of historical fiction. I picked this up because my four year old has somehow become a train buff, and I thought I might learn a bit more about the "steamies" beyond what the Rev. Awdry had to offer. I wasn't disappointed. In a word, the novel is atmospheric; you get a real sense of the sooty blackness of the age of steam among these hulking engines. I also enjoyed the breathless enthusiasm that the protagonist has for the railways. It hadn't occurred to me that railway engineers were at one point the jet pilots of their day, but of course they must have been. The mystery plot itself was a little flat: plenty of red herrings, but the villain wasn't particularly well developed, and his motivations seemed rather obscure. But like, say, Motherless Brooklyn (one of my favorites) the mystery itself is really just a frame; the interesting parts are the characters and the settings. And, of course, the trains. I will be reading the sequel; I am sure that when Martin focuses on a more popular subject he will write a best seller.