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Mystery
Trains: Crime Writers and the
Railway
by Ian Bell
When I
was a young kid growing up in Scotland, all those
years ago, I was thought eccentric—even a bit
wayward—in some of my ideas. Most of the time I
was a regular guy, more or less indistinguishable
from my peers, but there was one area where I
always seemed to be a bit out of step with
everyone else. From time to time, kindly adults
would ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up,
and I would try to offer an honest reply.
Footballer, I would say. Arizona gunpoke. Viking
warrior. Trapeze artist. Proprietor of a flea
circus.
As you
can see, I was a pretty flexible child, eager to
keep my future career options pretty wide open.
And even though it didn’t work out as I planned—or
not yet anyway—like all kids I secretly sought
approval from grown-ups. So I was always saddened
by the puzzlement on the faces of my questioners
as they listened to my schemes, and I knew every
time that I had somehow said the wrong
thing.
I know
better now, of course. I may not have realised it,
but I had said the wrong thing. The correct answer
a boy was expected to give to that question at
that time was "train driver."
It might
well seem strange to most of you today, but way
back then, in the early 1950s, the railways still
seemed to carry with them striking connotations of
power and mystery and adventure. By no means did
everyone have access to a private motorcar and
regular air travel was still pretty rare, at least
in my circle. So the steam trains (like the ocean
liners) represented a masculine world of dynamism
and mobility, far removed from the mundane daily
grind. They offered a compelling vision of
harnessed energy and the chance of serendipitous
encounters. As portrayed in films like Shanghai
Express, The Lady Vanishes and The
39 Steps, locomotives were urgent creatures of
the night, racing along full of fire and smoke and
noise.
In many
ways, trains were magical devices. They emphasised
speed and eliminated distance. They brought people
together, but they also pulled them apart. And
even before people read Patricia Highsmith, rail
journeys could always contain an element of the
unknown, an unexpected encounter with adventure.
But paradoxically, amid all their opulence and
exoticism the railways were also regulated by
timetables and reliably predictable in their
movements, thereby bringing together contending
images of extravagance and control.
Of course
we must remember that we are dealing here not with
reality, but with representation. Despite the
poetic and evocative depictions of opulence and
travelling in style, most train journeys even then
were in fact just long, expensive, and not very
comfortable. (And this remains true in the U.K.
today, alas.) So where did all those more
glamorous images of rail travel, so firmly
embedded in the common imagination, originate
from? Why, from the cinema and the popular
press—including crime fiction, Watson. Where else
are such powerful fantasies established and
disseminated?
As with
so much else, the train begins to make its biggest
impact in the work of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. In
his hands, the railway soon became a powerful
image of a more mobile society than that of the
recent past. Here is an early example of the
romance of the train, from the master
himself—first published in this very
magazine—where the closed railway compartment
embodies a kind of peripatetic cosiness, as though
it was 221B Baker Street on wheels. In "The
Boscombe Valley Mystery," Sherlock Holmes and the
ever-loyal Dr. John Watson are summoned by
telegram to quit London temporarily for the rural
west country of Herefordshire to investigate a
puzzling case. "Leave Paddington by the 11.15,"
they are baldly told. Collecting a few appropriate
belongings, they head for the station that very
morning: "Sherlock Holmes was pacing up and down,
his tall, gaunt figure made even gaunter and
taller by his long gray travelling-cloak and close
fitting cloth cap." A daunting sight for fellow
passengers!
On
boarding the train, the investigators quickly
establish a congenial, slightly raffish male
environment: "We had the carriage to ourselves
save for an immense litter of papers which Holmes
had brought with him. Among these he rummaged and
read, with intervals of note-taking and of
meditation, until we were past Reading. Then he
suddenly rolled them all into a gigantic ball and
tossed them up onto the rack."
The
journey proceeds peacefully. As Watson
familiarises himself with the press reports of the
case, Holmes scrutinises his "pocket Petrarch"
with complete concentration. Time passes, and the
miles slip by unobtrusively. Lunch is taken at
Swindon, and the train arrives at its destination
on time in the late afternoon. In a way that might
surprise contemporary rail passengers, everything
is exactly at it should be and the trip is
accomplished without delay or incident.
In this
version, the railway is one of the friendly new
technologies, one of the demonstrable benefits of
the then-recent advances in Victorian science and
engineering that Doyle was eager to celebrate. In
the story as told by Watson, the train is a purely
functional device, neither creating nor solving
the mystery, and contributing little to its
unravelling. In terms of literary theory, the
railway is a feature of the discourse, not of the
story, its description being inessential to the
central plot, no more (and no less) than an
incidental felicity. The railway’s principal roles
involve getting our heroes from A to B
safely—allowing them time to read, talk, and eat
in comfort as they go. In short, it is a
conveyance without inconvenience.
All the
same, the journey on the train is described as a
kind of adventure—as a departure from the normal
course of events, requiring elaborate preparation
and special clothing. By merely going to
Paddington Station, Holmes and Watson are made to
appear daring and intrepid—taking a comfortable
jaunt into the relatively unknown. Like the copy
of Bradshaw’s European railway timetable to be
found on Holmes’ mantelpiece, the 11.15 from
Paddington reassures us that the world is regular
and predictable, without letting us forget that it
is also exotic and strange.
But the
railway does not always show such a friendly and
helpful face to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and his
famous characters. In a later story, "The
Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans," a more
sinister and threatening version is offered.
Instead of being associated with the successful
transportation of the detectives, the trains here
are the source of the mystery itself. And the
railway in question this time is not the sunny and
comfortable West Country line, but the much more
sinister and unsettling underground system of the
inner-city, a recent and as yet imperfectly
understood innovation.
"The next
thing that was heard of him was when his dead body
was discovered by a plate-layer named Mason, just
outside Aldgate Station on the Underground system
in London." The dead man here, identified as
Arthur Cadogan West, is found next to the line. He
is discovered to be in possession of a number of
missing papers, vital (of course) to the security
of the nation, being some of the secret plans for
the new Bruce-Partington submarine. The body has
no railway ticket anywhere about it, and there are
no signs of a struggle. After lengthy
investigation, Holmes eliminates the impossible,
and is left with the improbable but unquestionable
conviction that West’s dead body had fallen from
the roof of the train, having been put there by a
foreign agent at one of the stages where the
carriages briefly travel overground.
Probably
not one of the best Sherlock Holmes stories. By
the time he published the collection His Last
Bow in 1917, Doyle seems to have lost much of
his earlier commitment and inventiveness. The
"Bruce-Partington" nevertheless introduces a
darker version of mobility surrounding the
railway. The furtive and clandestine nature of the
underground system, with trains emerging
periodically into view amid the fog, offers a
powerful image of the hidden and suppressed
features of urban life which recur frequently
throughout the stories. The city, as is so often
the case, is the meeting point of the strange and
the familiar, the reliable and the
treacherous.
One
further element in this story invites comment.
Unlike most of the stories, in this adventure the
investigation is conducted not by Holmes and
Watson alone, but by a larger group including the
Scotland Yard officer Lestrade and Sherlock’s
smarter brother Mycroft. Mycroft’s work on behalf
of the British government is rather enigmatically
described. However, he is also presented as a
creature of habit in an unexpected image: "Mycroft
has his rails and he runs on them."
In this
one brief image of Mycroft as a kind of automaton
or thinking machine, then, the contending
ambiguities of rail travel in the stories
coalesce. For Doyle, imagining a less complex
Victorian world, the trains are a way of
regularising energy and of making power
predictable. Whether they are a force for good or
evil depends on whether you stress their
predictability or their potential
subversiveness.
And,
sadly, it is that grim word "predictable" which
describes the subsequent use of the railway in
early twentieth century crime writing. There were
many isolated stories featuring trains, but after
Doyle the focal figure has to be the ex-railway
engineer Freeman Wills Crofts, who wrote a long
series of novels featuring Inspector French
between 1920 and 1957. Now be warned. Take my word
for it, Crofts is a very special writer indeed. If
your heart races at the recitation of weights,
measures and dimensions, then Crofts is the man
for you. But if you prefer to seek excitement,
steer well clear. Freeman Wills Crofts is to
boredom what James Ellroy is to sleaze, and his
enduring appeal is confined to those readers who
do not get out of the house very often.
Trains
figure prominently throughout his work, although
in a remarkably unromantic and prosaic way. In all
of his novels, the key plot device is the cracking
of a seemingly unshakeable alibi, invariably
achieved by the close (the very close!) reading of
a railway timetable. Human motivation and
mendacity, it seems, are no match for a
well-constructed timetable. His first novel,
The Cask (1920) has at least the charm of
novelty, but the later books fully justify their
author’s inclusion at the head of what Julian
Symons memorably called the "humdrum" school of
crime writers. Treat him with caution. If you put
one of his books down, it will be very hard to
pick it up again.
Leaving
F.W. Crofts to the insomniac or the otherwise
dysfunctional, we can see that the railway is much
more imaginatively and romantically exploited by
the Queen of Crime, Agatha Christie. Many of her
best known novels involve journeys—by rail or by
boat—or touch on railway-related activities for
atmosphere or plot.
Her first
attempt—typically—features travel as an
opportunity for upper class luxury. In The
Mystery of the Blue Train (1928), Hercule
Poirot is on hand to investigate a case involving
missing rubies, heiresses, and the complicated
lives of the rich and famous—all travelling on the
famous London to Nice "Blue Train."
The
author later rather harshly described this novel,
written at a very difficult time in her life, as
"easily the worst book I ever wrote," and it is
certainly wooden enough in its characterisation
and exposition. But in its railway setting it
hints at possibilities which Christie was to
exploit much more creatively and imaginatively in
her later work. In what must be her most famous
and successful novel, Murder on the Orient
Express (1934), she explores the most
fashionable and elegant of all contemporary rail
journeys, setting a compelling mystery on the
train later made even more famous by Graham
Greene, Eric Ambler, and Ian Fleming. In
Christie’s account, the Orient Express carries
Hercule Poirot from Stamboul to London, via Paris,
offering a range of venues which hint at mystery
and romance.
Drawing
on her own experience of an earlier journey on the
actual Orient Express undertaken in 1928, the
author describes its languid comforts with some
relish. Elaborate meals are served up in style.
Exquisite food and drink is on offer. Rich and
glamorous passengers recline gracefully, spending
and consuming conspicuously. The central plot
twist is brought in when the train is suddenly
snowbound in northern Yugoslavia—a device perhaps
implausible to some, but with the full
corroboration of actual incidents. While stuck in
the drifts, the carriage figures as an isolated
"closed setting," enabling Poirot to investigate
the sudden violent death of a disagreeable
American passenger—Samuel Edward Ratchett—who has
suffered multiple stab wounds. The wounds are of
different degrees of severity. The other
passengers seem above suspicion. There are no
signs of motive or cause. Poirot is baffled. And
you probably know the rest . . .
Murder on
the Orient Express is certainly one of Christie’s most
ingenious and entertaining mysteries, and the
special atmosphere of the train is a highly
significant feature of the text. In another
Hercule Poirot novel, The ABC Murders
(1936), she uses the predictability of the
railway in a striking and witty way. Trains
themselves do not appear, but timetables are
central. The plot concerns a series of murders,
committed in alphabetical order, with each body
being found next to a copy of the railway
timetable (the "ABC" of the title) open at the
appropriate letter of the alphabet. Without giving
too much away, it is safe to indicate that the
apparent connection is misleading, and that all
but one of the murders is a diversion.
Although
the story is full of incidental delights—Poirot
has started to dye his graying hair and his vanity
is a recurring motif providing consistent
amusement—the railway timetable remains central to
the deception. It imposes a spurious order on
events, and is still perhaps the best of all of
Christie’s "red herrings."
Both of
these Poirot books were generously received on
their original publication, were successfully
adapted for the screen, and remain popular,
bearing reading even now. But my personal
favourite of Christie’s railway adventures is a
later Miss Marple, 4.50 from Paddington
(1957), also known in the U.S. as What Mrs.
McGillicuddy Saw. In this amusing and slightly
self-parodic work, the serendipity of the journey
is emphasised. For the eponymous Mrs. McG, a day’s
shopping in London has been satisfactorily
concluded, and she has boarded a train home. As
her train pulls out, another pauses alongside and
they are still for a moment. Mrs. McG looks out of
the window, and is appalled to see, in the
adjacent carriage, a woman being strangled. One
glance is all she gets as the trains then pull
away from each other, but it is enough.
So the
mystery begins, and we see the full dialogue
between order and disorder articulated through
timetables and passion. The predictability of
trains is cleverly contrasted with the volatility
of the human personality. The mystery itself is
expertly handled by Christie, and the plot is
skilfully detected and uncovered by Miss Marple
and her younger assistant Lucy
Eylesbarrow.
There are
many reasons for liking this book, including its
delightful representation of genteel rail travel,
but to explain my own particular fondness we have
to go back to an earlier stage of my life again.
How well I remember coming across this startling
piece of detection, announced by the local
policeman on finding the body: "The woman wasn’t a
local, sir," he said. "There’s some reason to
believe—from her underclothing—that she might have
been a foreigner."
These are
startling words for an inexperienced reader to
come across. Foreigners are exotic in all sorts of
ways. And if I am honest I might have to say that
thinking about those words, and speculating on
their implications, might have given me the first
inklings that there could be more to my life than
even being a train driver.
Never
forget: reading crime fiction can change your
life.
All
aboard!
THE
END
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