Having taken a wrong turn that lasted two episodes, book 6 of Andrew Martin’s Jim Stringer series has arrived and I’m happy to say Last Train To Scarborough places my favourite Edwardian steam detective right back on track.

If Death on a Branch Line and Murder at Deviation Junction strayed too far into John Buchan territory, Martin is once more doing what he does best, that is evoking a specific time and a specific place, not as a museum of the past, but as a living, breathing depiction of an aggressively modern world driven by social change and technology.

Martin writes beautifully and this is a very fine book indeed. The story is a good tale well told, but it is the scale of the setting that really sets Martin apart. Last Train To Scarborough is small, but it is precisely  this concentration on the details of a life, that makes for a richer and  more resonant experience.

It is the glorious Summer of 1914. The impending apocalypse of The Great War is on nobody’s mind very much at all. We can see it as the calm before the mother of all storms but for Jim and his wife Lydia, life is still all about getting around and getting on. So much so, Jim has become grumpy. Grumpy at the prospect of leaving the railway police to take up articles as a solicitor. Grumpy at his boss, The Chief’s, reaction to his impending entry into this unmanly, white-collar world. Grumpy at his wife for being the object of the affections of a member of the local gentry.  And grumpy because there’s  the murder of a railwayman in a Scarborough guest house for him to solve that is liable to spoil his weekend.

Whatever else occupies Stringer, the railway itself  is never very far away. It is the defining technology of the age, a smoke-breathing, clanking symbol of power and movement and change that couldn’t be further removed from our own rose-tinted version of an Edwardian Arcadia. And Jim is in love with every inch of it.  Andrew Martin’s achievement is to bring the muscular, glamour of this Age of Steam vividly to life and Last Train To Scarborough is a worthy addition to this memorable series. Recommended.

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