Blood on the Tracks: Railway Mysteries by Martin EdwardsMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Trains and rail travel can provide evocative settings for ingenious crimes and we have such classical novels as Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express or Patricia Highsmith's Strangers on a Train, and not to forget Graham Greene's Stamboul Train (plus great films as Hitchcock's "The Lady Vanishes" or David Lean's "Brief Encounter"). After all, trains are narrow spaces where strange people come in close proximity to one another, and they also provide closed spaces comparable to locked rooms, thus forming mouth-watering locations for mystery writers.
By the way, the country where railway mysteries are most numerous is Japan, starting with Points and Lines by Seicho Matsumoto, and featuring such exclusive railway mystery writers as Kyotaro Nishimura (The Mystery Train Disappears). As in Japan trains run on the second precise (rather than the minute), and the railway schedule is always kept to religiously, it is possible to set up alibi tricks by using the timetable (I mean the real timetable, not a fictional one, so writers of this type of fiction really have to do some timetable study!). It is typical for the much less disciplined way in which trains are run in Europe, that the present volume containing classical train mysteries, doesn't include any tricks with the timetable.
So what role do trains play in these English mysteries?
- A place for murder. There are two such stories, but only Sapper's "Mystery of the Slip-Coach" is a story that could exclusively happen on a train; Emma Orczy's "The Mysterious Death on the Underground Railway" is an excellent tale about a woman found poisoned on a train, but it could just as well have happened in, for example, a restaurant. This is one of Orczy's stories about armchair detective The Old Man in the Corner.
- A mysterious disappearance. "The Affair of the Corridor Express" by Victor L. Whitechurch is an interesting story about a boy who is kidnapped and disappears from a running train. Also in "How He Cut His Stick" by Matthias McDonnell Bodkin we have the riddle of a thief who gets off a train traveling at full speed (the case is solved by "lady detective" Dora Myrl).
- A means to murder. The criminal either puts a dead body on the rails to hide his crime, for example in "The Case of Oscar Brodski" by R. Austin Freeman, one of this writer's stories about Dr Thorndyke, the scientific detective; or he can try to entice his half-drunk victim to a dangerous crossing as in "The Level Crossing" by Freeman Wills Crofts.
- Mass murder by causing a train collision. "The Knight's Cross Signal Problem" by Ernest Bramah, featuring his "blind detective" Max Carrados, is one such story, and a very ingenious one.
- Problems with railway infrastructure, such as the seemingly supernatural happenings in a railway tunnel in "The Mystery of Felwyn Tunnel" by L. T. Meade & Robert Eustace, also an excellent story.
That's about it. Unfortunately, there are some stories in this collection which have no real connection to trains, as "The Unsolved Puzzle of the Man with No Face" by Dorothy L. Sayers, which starts with a discussion about a certain murder on a train, but which is definitely not a "railway mystery."
What I miss are, for example, stations. I am sure there must be detective stories in which stations play a role, but there is none in the present anthology. There is nothing about long train journeys either, or the sort of life-changing encounter in a railway carriage as described by Patricia Highsmith.
So this is a rather uneven collection: a few of the best stories were already known to me, and I found just a handful of interesting new stories; the other eight were just not very interesting or no railway stories.
I love railway mysteries, but this anthology rather makes one yearn for more and better fare.
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