Fri 13 Feb 2015
CRIME FICTION AND THE MYSTIQUE OF TRAINS, by David Vineyard.
Posted by Steve under General[12] Comments
by David Vineyard
A train is the ideal environment for a mystery or thriller. There is a closed society that is relatively isolated for long periods (certainly in earlier times) and short of leaping to their possible death there is no where for the suspects to go between stations.
There are a variety of venues from private and semi-private compartments, sleeping cars, baggage cars, dining area, public cars and lounges to stage action in, and enough places to hide to make it both a challenge to find someone and difficult not to be seen. There are borders to be crossed, exotic cities to reach, dangerous and elegant trestles to cross …
Then there is the romance of the machine. No other mode of transportation ever caught the publics imagination quite like a train. Add to that the original great train robbery by Charles Peace, Jesse and Frank James, the Orient Express, the Trans Siberian, the famous hijacked Confederate train in the Civil War, and other famous trains and it was a natural.
Doyle used them frequently, Canon Whitechurch did a whole series with Thorpe Hazel, and so on. Half of Frank Packard’s output seemed to be set on or about trains. Graham Greene used them for The Orient Express, Ministry of Fear and Travels with My Aunt, and one figures in Ambler’s Background to Danger. Agatha Christie and Ian Fleming both used them more than once. There was the Rome, Paris-Lyon, Shanghai, Irish, and other Express trains and bestsellers like Dekobra’s The Madonna of the Sleeping Cars.
I’m not sure there was ever another form of transportation as well suited to suspense, drama, melodrama, romance, mystery and adventure.
Ships are too big, planes too small, the train though is the ideal size with limitless possibilities for mischief. Some like the Orient Express even lived up to the hype. It still had that exotic feel when I rode what was left of it in the seventies — it has been restored and runs its classic route since — but the cigar smoking gilded cherubs were still on the ceiling of the dining car.
Then too, trains were an adventure you could actually experience. Few people could afford a passenger liner, few needed to fly, but anyone might make a journey on a train. We forget just how common train travel was, easily up into my early twenties even in this country.
Few things are familiar and exotic, common and romantic, or mythic and down to earth, but trains are. If nothing else how many little boys, and some little girls, dreamed of adventure on those Lionel trains of our childhood?
February 13th, 2015 at 11:21 pm
Excellent, David. My sentiments exactly for many years, and the impetus for an anthology of crime stories set on trains, MIDNIGHT SPECIALS, I edited back in 1978. My first solo anthology and still my favorite of all those I compiled or had a hand in compiling.
February 13th, 2015 at 11:38 pm
I recall MIDNIGHT SPECIALS fondly and should have mentioned it, but if I started listing them I’d have to go back to Philipotts MY ADVENTURE ON THE FLYING SCOTSMAN. Thanks for the nice words. If I recall Steve is in agreement on this as well.
I think my favorite mystery short on one is Palmer and Rice’s “Once Upon a Train” the first Hildy Withers and John J. Malone teaming, but there are so many good ones, Randall Garrett even did one with Lord Darcy, that choosing would be really difficult. It’s just as well I’ll never edit and anthology. It would probably top out at at 2,000 pages, for the first volume…
February 13th, 2015 at 11:42 pm
David, There really is something special about mysteries taking place on trains, and you mentioned one of my own personal favorites, Eric Ambler’s BACKGROUND TO DANGER. It’s been a while since I read it, but I think it encapsulates everything you say about what makes traveling on a train so special.
As for MIDNIGHT SPECIALS, this is one of my favorite mystery anthologies, with the word “mystery” incorporating a lot of territory. Here’s a list of the contents, thanks to ISFDb:
 Midnight Specials: An Anthology for Train Buffs and Suspense Aficionados • interior artwork by uncredited
3 • The Signalman • (1866) • shortstory by Charles Dickens
18 • The Shooting of Curly Dan • (1973) • shortstory by John Lutz
26 • The Invalid’s Story • (1882) • shortstory by Mark Twain
35 • A Journey • (1899) • shortstory by Edith Wharton
48 • The Problem of the Locked Caboose • (1976) • novelette by Edward D. Hoch
70 • Midnight Express • (1935) • shortstory by Alfred Noyes
81 • Faith, Hope and Charity • (1930) • shortstory by Irvin S. Cobb
103 • Dead Man • (1936) • shortstory by James M. Cain
118 • The Phantom of the Subway • novelette by Cornell Woolrich (variant of You Pays Your Nickel 1936)
139 • The Man on B-17 • (1950) • shortstory by August Derleth [as by Stephen Grendon ]
147 • The Three Good Witnesses • (1945) • shortstory by Harold Lamb
165 • Snowball in July • (1952) • shortstory by Frederic Dannay and Manfred Bennington Lee [as by Ellery Queen ]
175 • All of God’s Children Got Shoes • (1953) • shortstory by Howard Schoenfeld
189 • The Sound of Murder • (1963) • shortstory by William P. McGivern
202 • The Train • (1957) • shortstory by Charles Beaumont
213 • That Hell-Bound Train • (1958) • shortstory by Robert Bloch
231 • Inspector Maigret Deduces • (1966) • shortstory by Georges Simenon (trans. of Jeumont, 51 minutes d’arrêt 1938)
243 • Sweet Fever • (1976) • shortstory by Bill Pronzini
252 • The Man Who Loved the Midnight Lady • (1977) • shortstory by Barry N. Malzberg
261 • Bibliography (Midnight Specials) • (1977) • essay by uncredited
Not a bad bunch of stories.
February 14th, 2015 at 2:45 am
During the Victorian era trains were symbolic of progress. A railway carriage was a magic room where you could go in one door, sit in relative comfort for a few hours, an then go back through the same door and out into somewhere new. In the Holmes stories they are never really used as a setting, but then they were part of everyday life–a convenience that got you to wherever the story was taking place. It was only gradually that the idea of using the train as a setting in itself began to appear. Now that railway travel is no longer the mass transport method, it has become somewhat nostalgic. The railway carriages that appear in period crime dramas and thrillers probably look a lot cleaner and lavish than the real ones did.
February 14th, 2015 at 8:53 am
The Bibliography at the end of Midnight Specials is especially informative. It is full of little known items.
February 14th, 2015 at 12:51 pm
David, Steve, Mike–
Thanks for all the nice words on MIDNIGHT SPECIALS. I should probably mention that not all the selections are set _on_ trains; a few, such as “Sweet Fever,” are stories in which trains figure prominently in the plot. Nor are all detective or even crime stories per se; the Derleth, for one, is a supernatural tale.
As for the bibliography at the end, I compiled it from books in my library and otherwise known to me at the time. In the years since I’ve come across many more that qualify for inclusion. The list, if I were putting it together now, would be a third or more as long.
Steve: BACKGROUND TO DANGER is one of my favorite train mysteries as well. A much more obscure one I’d recommend is Tech Davis’s FULL FARE FOR A CORPSE, a Golden Age detective novel set on a transcontinental train snowbound in the Wyoming wilderness. Well worth tracking down if a copy can be found for a reasonable price. (The only one listed online at present is listed at a whopping $250.)
February 14th, 2015 at 1:06 pm
I’m currently reading and enjoying Edward Marston’s series about the Railway Detective, Robert Colbeck, who is an Inspector in Victorian England’s London Metropolitan Police. All of Colbeck’s cases are connected in some way with the railways.
I have and have read MIDNIGHT SPECIALS as well, and enjoy any mystery with a train or trains as an important element. Good post.
February 14th, 2015 at 1:26 pm
David:
Neglected to add that “Once Upon a Train” is a favorite of mine, too. I wanted to include it in MIDNIGHT SPECIALS but its length mitigated against it. (Permission difficulties as well.) As it was I had to lobby to keep from dropping a story or two and/or the bibliography because the total wordage exceeded Bobbs Merrill’s limit.
February 14th, 2015 at 7:28 pm
Bradstreet,
Conan Doyle’s short “The Lost Special” is often considered as a Holmes story because the epistle explaining what happened sounds very much like Holmes. I doubt Doyle intended that, but many Holmesians like to pretend it is a ‘lost’ Holmes story.
The first mystery/adventure story on a train is usually conceded to Eden Phillipotts advertising chapbook, MY ADVENTURE ON THE FLYING SCOTSMAN. After that came Griffith’s ROME EXPRESS, Wood’s PASSENGER FROM SCOTLAND YARD, and so on. Croft made a specialty of them and their timetables and even Sayers used one well in FIVE RED HERRINGS. For a while the timetables appeared more often than the trains themselves.
The western Gregory Quist series is about a railroad detective, as is Spearman’s WHISPERING SMITH. My great grandfather, an ex Texas Ranger, was hit on the head and thrown from a moving train while working a case for the Santa Fe railroad as a Pinkerton. Unfortunately for the felon who did it he recovered.
Trains also figure in Ambler’s COFFIN FOR DIMITRIOS and appear in others including A KIND OF ANGER if memory serves. Dorothy Hughes DREADFUL JOURNEY is another great one that is an early example of racial relations in the genre. I love Blochman’s BOMBAY EXPRESS just for the scene with Inspector Prike encountering a ten foot cobra in a small passenger compartment.
I traveled on trains regularly until I was eight, and when I was in Europe I utilized them when I could. When I moved from London to Paris I even took the famous Boat Train. I recall how shabby American passenger trains got though.
There is also a simply awful mystery novel set on a train called MURDER IN TEXAS as I recall by Henry Holt I think.
Trains feature prominently in John Buchan’s first three Richard Hannay adventures, no few other series utilize the setting. White’s THE WHEEL SPINS is a good example of the form.
Prior to WWII a British diplomat and agent claimed to have killed a Gestapo agent on the Orient Express and disposed of the body through the window, a neat trick since they only open 18 inches. One does not care to dwell on how he got the body through that space.
Bill,
I understand how limiting an anthology lineup can be. I’d probably try to fit whole novels in one.
Richard,
I’ve read and plan to eventually review Marston’s books, but you are welcome to beat me to the punch. I enjoyed them a great deal.
February 15th, 2015 at 5:41 am
I’m not sure that Croft has ever been adapted for the screen, but it if he did it would probably sound like the Monty Python sketch that you can see on Youtube entitled ‘Agatha Christie sketch (Railway Timetables)’
Trains do turn up a lot in GA fiction, but they often seem to be just part of the background. In the 70s film version of MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS the train is almost fetishised. Beatifully lit and filmed, with the music swelling as it begins to move for the first time. Compare it with the train in Hitchcock’s THE LADY VANISHES, which is just a train.
February 15th, 2015 at 6:58 pm
Actually the Christie was accurate about what the OE was like then. The wagons-lit was fetishized. If anything her passengers were a bit tame for the real thing, no spies, diplomats, exiled royalty, criminal masterminds, assassins …
That’s what it was like in that period. Even when I rode it much of the glamor was maintained. In the 80’s they refitted it as the original and opened the route back up from Paris to Istanbul. If you have only experienced American or British trains you have never seen anything like it.
The private compartment my wife and I shared was lavish and champagne and caviar were elegantly served (the train had a ‘wine cellar’). It’s one of the few things in my life that exceeded expectations.
August 23rd, 2021 at 1:00 am
Trains are indeed, powerful and mysterious.
It’s almost impossible to cite every instance where they feature in a detective story or thriller movie. In my favorite medium (radio) there’s innumerable train narratives.
Something which hasn’t been mentioned here: an important innovation was the addition of dining cars to trains at all.
Not even ‘fancy’ dining cars, but merely the ability to eat any meal on a long train journey –this made a big difference in people’s lives.
As well as the addition of restaurants to the train terminals themselves.
All this meant that you needn’t bring food with you on a journey. Bolstered later by the invention of sleeper cars.
The era of the fabulous ‘transatlantic clipper’ seaplanes –BOAC, Pan Am and the like –is the only comparable mystique in transportation.
But with trains (in a novel, movie, etc) you also get the wonderful infrastructure of the yards, the works, the roundhouses, the stokers and other working men. Backbone of a nation.
And of course, ‘The Signal-Man’ by Charles Dickens.
Trains are awesome.