Blood on the
Tracks
Edited and Introduced
by Martin Edwards
Poisoned Pen Press
Copyright
Introduction copyright © 2018 Martin Edwards
Published by Poisoned Pen Press in association with the British Library
First Edition 2018
First US Trade Paperback Edition
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2018930056
ISBN: 9781464209697 Trade Paperback
9781464209703 Ebook
‘The Eighth Lamp’ reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown Group Ltd, London, on behalf of the Estate of William Edward Vickers.
‘The Unsolved Puzzle of the Man with No Face’ from Lord Peter Views the Body, published by Hodder & Stoughton and reproduced by permission of David Higham Associates on behalf of Dorothy L. Sayers.
‘The Level Crossing’ reproduced by permission of The Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of Freeman Wills Crofts.
‘The Adventure of the First-Class Carriage’ reproduced by permission of United Agents LLP on behalf of Lady Magdalen Howard.
‘Murder on the 7.16’ reproduced with permission of Peters Fraser & Dunlop Ltd on behalf of Michael Innes Literary Management Ltd.
‘The Coulman Handicap’ reproduced with permission of Curtis Brown Group Ltd, London on behalf of The Beneficiaries of the Literary Estate of Michael Gilbert. Copyright © Michael Gilbert, 1958.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
The historical characters and events portrayed in this book are inventions of the author or used fictitiously.
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Contents
Blood on the Tracks
Copyright
Contents
Introduction
The Man with the Watches
Arthur Conan Doyle
The Mystery of Felwyn Tunnel
L. T. Meade and Robert Eustace
How He Cut His Stick
Matthias McDonnell Bodkin
The Mysterious Death on the Underground Railway
Baroness Orczy
The Affair of the Corridor Express
Victor L. Whitechurch
The Case of Oscar Brodski
R. Austin Freeman
The Eighth Lamp
Roy Vickers
The Knight’s Cross Signal Problem
Ernest Bramah
The Unsolved Puzzle of the Man with No Face
Dorothy L. Sayers
The Railway Carriage
F. Tennyson Jesse
Mystery of the Slip-Coach
Sapper
The Level Crossing
Freeman Wills Crofts
The Adventure of the First-Class Carriage
Ronald Knox
Murder on the 7.16
Michael Innes
The Coulman Handicap
Michael Gilbert
More from this Author
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Introduction
Blood on the Tracks celebrates the classic railway mystery. Trains and rail travel have long provided evocative settings for tales of murder and mayhem, and succeeding generations of crime writers have made ingenious use of them.
The range of railway mystery stories is astonishingly diverse: from classic whodunits such as Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express to those best-selling novels of psychological suspense, published more than sixty years apart, Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train and Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train. And we can add to the eclectic mix a host of other titles, including Graham Greene’s Stamboul Train, and John Godey’s The Taking of Pelham One Two Three. All those books were adapted for film, while other memorable mystery movies set on trains include Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes (based on Ethel Lina White’s The Wheel Spins), Night Train to Munich (a film indebted to The Wheel Spins but enjoyable in its own right) and Transsiberian, a lively thriller released in 2008 and starring Woody Harrelson, Emily Mortimer, and Ben Kingsley.
A pleasing illustration of the unexpected links between trains and detective stories is supplied by ‘Coronation Scot’, composed by Vivian Ellis and named after the express train which ran on the L.M.S. Railway in the 1930s. The music became a popular, and somehow perfectly appropriate, theme tune for the long-running and incident-packed adventures broadcast in the BBC radio series Paul Temple.
What is it about train travel that makes it such a suitable background for a mystery? Part of the answer surely lies in the enclosed nature of life on board a train—the restrictions of space make for a wonderfully atmospheric environment in which tensions can rise rapidly between a small ‘closed circle’ of murder suspects or characters engaged (as in the enjoyable old film Sleeping Car to Trieste) in a deadly game of cat and mouse. Similarly, a train journey may provide a mobile equivalent of the ‘locked room’ scenario beloved of crime writers and readers alike, as several clever stories in this anthology demonstrate.
The immense potential of the train-based mystery was quickly recognised by nineteenth century writers. The most notable examples were Charles Dickens, one or two echoes of whose splendid tale of the supernatural ‘The Signalman’ can be found in stories in this book, and Arthur Conan Doyle, one of whose most entertaining non-Sherlockian puzzles features here. But there were several others, including L.T. Meade and Robert Eustace, one of whose ‘impossible crime’ stories featuring the ‘ghost exposer’ John Bell is included here.
John Oxenham’s ‘A Mystery of the Underground’, originally serialised in Jerome K. Jerome’s magazine To-Day in 1897, was a story about a serial killer on the Tube which is said to have caused such consternation amongst the travelling public that it led to a reduction in passenger numbers until the hysteria subsided. Modern readers can find it in the British Library anthology Capital Crimes. Underground railways are even more claustrophobic than their overground counterparts, and they have supplied backgrounds to stories as different in mood as Mavis Doriel Hay’s Murder Underground, Cornell Woolrich’s ‘The Phantom of the Subway’, and Michael Gilbert’s ‘A Case for Gourmets’.
The first specialist railway detective was Victor L. Whitechurch’s Godfrey Page, a train enthusiast and amateur sleuth who appeared in a story published by Pearson’s Weekly in 1903. Whitechurch, steeped in railway lore, and a regular contributor of articles to The Railway Magazine, subsequently created a rather more memorable railway detective in the vegetarian Thorpe Hazell, one of whose cases is included in this book.
As the years went by, writers of detective fiction increasingly set their mysteries on trains. An entertaining example is Death in the Tunnel, an ingenious novel by Miles Burton, which features his regular sleuth, Desmond Merrion. Burton is better known as John Rhode, whose vast output of novels include Tragedy on the Line, Dead on the Track, and Death on the Boat Train.
Like Murder Underground, Death in the Tunnel has been reprinted by the British Library, and so has J. Jefferson Farjeon’s Mystery in White, a Christmas crime story which begins with a train journey coming to an abrupt
end in a snowdrift. The most famous crime novel in which a train gets stuck in the snow remains Murder on the Orient Express; Agatha Christie wrote two other novels in which trains play such an important part as to earn a mention in the title, The Mystery of the Blue Train and 4.50 from Paddington. In a characteristically innovative touch, Christie has a plume of smoke from a passing train provide a significant clue to the solution of the puzzle in Taken at the Flood.
Freeman Wills Crofts, a railwayman who became a best-selling crime writer, regularly featured trains in his novels and short stories; one example, ‘The Level Crossing’, is included here. A strange coincidence arose in 1930, when Dorothy L. Sayers was working on a Lord Peter Wimsey novel, The Five Red Herrings. She wrote to her publisher, Victor Gollancz, that: ‘The book, in which all the places are real and which turns on actual distances and real railway time-tables, is laid in exactly the same part of the country as Freeman Wills Crofts’ new book, which also turns on real distances and time-tables.’ The Crofts book to which she referred was Sir John Magill’s Last Journey, and the pair discovered the similarities between their works-in-progress while corresponding with each other about something else. As Sayers said, ‘The two plots are, of course, entirely different, and it doesn’t really matter a pin.’ She was right about that, but the incident is a reminder of the way in which, quite innocently, writers often chance upon similar concepts at much the same time.
In The Five Red Herrings, Sayers elaborated (with due acknowledgment) upon a plot device originated by J.J. Connington, who—like Sayers and Crofts—became a founder member of the Detection Club. In The Two Tickets Puzzle, Connington’s Superintendent Ross investigates the murder of Oswald K. Preston, shot dead on the 10.35 from Horston. Connington was an exponent of the ‘fair play’ mystery that gave the reader every opportunity to compete with the fictional sleuth, and his US publishers emphasised that the book featured ‘clever reasoning from the clues but no superhuman brain stuff’. Another Detection Club member, Milward Kennedy, found himself unable to resist poking gentle fun at his colleagues in Death to the Rescue, in which he refers to their ‘tricky way with train tickets’.
Following the Second World War, railway mysteries in the traditional vein continued to appear; a notable example is Edmund Crispin’s ‘Beware of the Trains’, included in the British Library anthology Miraculous Mysteries. This story, like ‘The Problem of the Locked Caboose’ by the prolific American Edward D. Hoch, illustrates how a railway setting can provide a superb background for an ‘impossible crime’ story. As late as 1967, Leo Bruce, a novelist more commonly associated with crime writing in the Golden Age tradition, published Death of a Commuter, a case investigated by his amateur sleuth Carolus Deene.
In an era of train cancellations, delays, and industrial action by drivers and guards, there is little scope for murder mysteries in which the culprits construct ingenious alibis reliant upon trains running to time. Unexpectedly, however, the railway detective has enjoyed a resurgence of popularity in the twenty-first century, thanks to two series with well-researched historical settings. Edward Marston’s books set in the mid-nineteenth century and featuring Inspector Colbeck and Sergeant Leeming have won a devoted following, and the same is true of Andrew Martin’s books about Jim Stringer. One feels sure that Victor L. Whitechurch would approve.
Recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in rail heritage in Britain, and preserved railways up and down the country enjoy a special place in the affections of the travelling public. The revival of interest in the Golden Age of Steam, like the renewed enthusiasm from long-forgotten books published during the Golden Age of Murder, owes something to nostalgia, and the parallels are emphasised by the reading public’s enthusiasm for the cover artwork of the Crime Classics books, derived from vintage railway posters. But in each case, there is more to the renaissance than mere sentiment. A trip on, say the Severn Valley or Tal-y-Llyn Railways offers a highly enjoyable experience in its own right, and so do stories written by such fine authors as Anthony Berkeley, Christopher St John Sprigg, Anthony Rolls, and company.
Blood on the Tracks will, I hope, appeal both to train buffs and crime fans. Railway mysteries written over a span of more than half a century are presented in roughly chronological order, and the contributors include some of the most popular authors of their day, as well as less familiar names. I would like to express my thanks to Rob, Maria, and Abbie at the British Library for their support and hard work in bringing this book into being, and I hope that its contents will beguile even the most wearisome commute or long distance train journey.
Martin Edwards
www.martinedwardsbooks.com
The Man with the Watches
Arthur Conan Doyle
Arthur Conan Doyle was a seasoned traveller, and his love of train journeys is evident in several of his stories, including an excellent Sherlock Holmes tale, ‘The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans’, and a non-series story, ‘The Lost Special’; the latter is included in the British Library anthology Miraculous Mysteries.
This story was included in Doyle’s collection Round the Fire (1908), but was first published in The Strand Magazine ten years earlier, at a time when Holmes had, as far as Doyle was concerned, been killed in a fatal encounter with Professor Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls. Like ‘The Lost Special’, this is an example of the ‘impossible crime’ mystery, and it presents a puzzle that would tax Holmes himself. Doyle enjoys himself with a joke by presenting a solution to the riddle conceived by ‘a well-known criminal investigator’—but is the un-named sleuth correct?
There are many who will still bear in mind the singular circumstances which, under the heading of the Rugby Mystery, filled many columns of the daily Press in the spring of the year 1892. Coming as it did at a period of exceptional dullness, it attracted perhaps rather more attention than it deserved, but it offered to the public that mixture of the whimsical and the tragic which is most stimulating to the popular imagination. Interest drooped, however, when, after weeks of fruitless investigation, it was found that no final explanation of the facts was forthcoming, and the tragedy seemed from that time to the present to have finally taken its place in the dark catalogue of inexplicable and unexpiated crimes. A recent communication (the authenticity of which appears to be above question) has, however, thrown some new and clear light upon the matter. Before laying it before the public it would be as well, perhaps, that I should refresh their memories as to the singular facts upon which this commentary is founded. These facts were briefly as follows:
At five o’clock on the evening of the 18th of March in the year already mentioned, a train left Euston Station for Manchester. It was a rainy, squally day, which grew wilder as it progressed, so it was by no means the weather in which anyone would travel who was not driven to do so by necessity. The train, however, is a favourite one among Manchester business men who are returning from town, for it does the journey in four hours and twenty minutes, with only three stoppages upon the way. In spite of the inclement evening it was, therefore, fairly well filled upon the occasion of which I speak. The guard of the train was a tried servant of the company—a man who had worked for twenty-two years without blemish or complaint. His name was John Palmer.
The station clock was upon the stroke of five, and the guard was about to give the customary signal to the engine-driver when he observed two belated passengers hurrying down the platform. The one was an exceptionally tall man, dressed in a long, black overcoat with astrakhan collar and cuffs. I have already said that the evening was an inclement one, and the tall traveller had the high, warm collar turned up to protect his throat against the bitter March wind. He appeared, as far as the guard could judge by so hurried an inspection, to be a man between fifty and sixty years of age, who had retained a good deal of the vigour and activity of his youth. In one hand he carried a brown leather Gladstone bag. His companion was a lady, tall and erect, walking with a vigorous step wh
ich outpaced the gentleman beside her. She wore a long, fawn-coloured dust-cloak, a black, close-fitting toque, and a dark veil which concealed the greater part of her face. The two might very well have passed as father and daughter. They walked swiftly down the line of carriages, glancing in at the windows, until the guard, John Palmer, overtook them.
‘Now, then, sir, look sharp, the train is going,’ said he.
‘First-class,’ the man answered.
The guard turned the handle of the nearest door. In the carriage which he had opened, there sat a small man with a cigar in his mouth. His appearance seems to have impressed itself upon the guard’s memory, for he was prepared, afterwards, to describe or to identify him. He was a man of thirty-four or thirty-five years of age, dressed in some grey material, sharp-nosed, alert, with a ruddy, weather-beaten face, and a small, closely cropped, black beard. He glanced up as the door was opened. The tall man paused with his foot upon the step.
‘This is a smoking compartment. The lady dislikes smoke,’ said he, looking round at the guard.
‘All right! Here you are, sir!’ said John Palmer. He slammed the door of the smoking carriage, opened that of the next one, which was empty, and thrust the two travellers in. At the same moment he sounded his whistle and the wheels of the train began to move. The man with the cigar was at the window of his carriage, and said something to the guard as he rolled past him, but the words were lost in the bustle of the departure. Palmer stepped into the guard’s van, as it came up to him, and thought no more of the incident.
Twelve minutes after its departure the train reached Willesden Junction, where it stopped for a very short interval. An examination of the tickets has made it certain that no one either joined or left it at this time, and no passenger was seen to alight upon the platform. At 5.14 the journey to Manchester was resumed, and Rugby was reached at 6.50, the express being five minutes late.
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