The Necropolis Railway by Andrew Martin is a truly original piece of historical crime fiction. The current crop of historical detective fiction tends to the cosy and sentimental; that is not a criticism as such, as the best of these like the Dandy Gilver series combine this with sharp plotting and a witty narrative, but Jim Stringer Steam Detective, as seen here, is really quite something else. The plot is not particularly remarkable but the handling of it is certainly out of the ordinary.
From the start the voice is original: a very young man, keen on railways and determined for success, leaves London to make his way on the London railway. He is quite flawed as a person and as a detective. He is not at all suited to big city life, the exigencies of being an adult on his own resources, or the fact-finding required in his detecting. He is not always a pleasant narrator, but he is endlessly interesting.
The main premise of the book is such a winner that I am astounded that it hasn't been done before. There really was a Necropolis Railway which ran from its own station just outside London's Waterloo station on the London and South Western Railway to the massive Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey, from 1854 until 1941. Brookwood Cemetery was meant to deal with the after effects of a fast rising population: the fast rising numbers of deceased persons requiring a place of rest. At the time a railway was fast and a convenient way of transferring coffins and mourners out of London both to and through the cemetery. So for atmosphere the premise cannot be beaten: we have smokey Edwardian London, bustling, gas lit and enigmatic, we have locomotives and sheds full of steam and grime and plenty of places to hide, we have special trains full of coffins and not many living people, we have the cemetery itself, and we have a naive young man straight from the altogether fresher Yorkshire coast.
Our detective and guide, Jim Stringer, narrates throughout. He is no fool but he is not altogether up to speed either. When he arrives to work on the railway he realises that his predecessor has disappeared. What next? We get the facts in the end by luck as much as by deduction, but Jim does have redeeming features: he is a brave man, he is dogged, and unlike those he chases he has a strong sense of justice. As the book goes on he learns and grows, moving away from the gauche boyish enthusiasm for engine driving, an enthusiasm driven by books and magazines, to realising that both real life and engine driving are not as simple as they seem.
Why did I not take the chance to flee? I did not want to go back to portering, but there again I could see the moving shadow coming for me, and present in my mind always was the cemetery, with the railway on hand to take me there on a one way ride. It was better to be a porter imprisoned in a too tight, over-decorated waistcoast than to take that trip before my time. But I now somehow knew that all these horrors had always been waiting for me, because becoming an engine man was no mere matter of book learning. Engine men, I could not deny, looked different from me, and they looked different because they had been through just such a thing as this. This was the life of London and the life of men, where threats and fears came, and they had to be stood down.
Like any good historical novel the time and place are almost another character. From the dingy digs with the grumpy landlady to the bullying men in the loco sheds, place and time are crisply evoked. It is a dark world, and one certainly full of grit, but this is not a gritty novel in the sense of being hard, or pseudo-realistic as works billed as "gritty" often are. Instead this is a lightly played and thoroughly unpredictable piece, as evil and corruption flit through the shadows and the smoke.
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