In the spirit of full disclosure here: you should note that I am a train buff. Admittedly, I do a fair amount of flying each year, but when I have a choice, I generally prefer train travel. In my opinion, it's generally more soothing and much more pleasant than the rush and crowding encountered in the course of today's air travel (travail?). If there is a downside for those of us who are traditional mystery fans, I must admit that fictional train travel -especially when encountered in Golden Age stories - can be extremely hazardous to the health of the fictional characters encountered on, in, near, or under those trains. Now, mystery author, historian and critic Martin Edwards has edited a new anthology of such stories, called Blood on the Tracks: Railway Mysteries as part of the British Library Crime Classics series. It will be published in the U.S. next week by Poisoned Pen Press, which provided me with an advance copy for this review. It's the subject of this week's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to the entire review by clicking here.
Let's get to the heart of the matter: if you like trains, and like mysteries involving trains and train travel, you'll find a great deal to enjoy about Blood on the Tracks. Edwards has collected fifteen train stories, arranged in roughly chronological order of the dates when the stories first appeared, ranging from Arthur Conan Doyle's fine(and non-Sherlockian) story from 1908, "The Man with the Watches" to a story called "The Coulman Handicap," written in the 1950s by Michael Gilbert.
So what kind of stories will you find? Detective stories, impossible crimes, locked rooms (all right, locked train carriages), stories by famous authors and more obscure ones, too, arranged sort of roughly by chronology, from early to late. (For a complete list of the stories, including short non-spoiler reviews of each, please listen to this week's Classic Mysteries podcast.) You'll find stories by such distinguished and popular authors as R. Austin Freeman, Michael Innes, Freeman Wills Crofts, and Dorothy L. Sayers, along with perhaps less-well-known writers, such as Matthias McDonnell Bodkin, F. Tennyson Jesse, and Victor L. Whitechurch. In addition to selecting the stories, Martin Edwards has provided introductions to the book and to the individual authors and stories as well, as is often the case with these anthologies from the British Library. It's a fine and thoroughly enjoyable collection, and I recommend it heartily.
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