Thu 25 Mar 2010
A 1001 MIDNIGHTS review: WARREN ADLER – Trans-Siberian Express.
Posted by Steve under 1001 Midnights , Reviews[14] Comments
by Bill Pronzini:
WARREN ADLER – Trans-Siberian Express. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1977. Paperback reprint: Pocket, 1978. Stonehouse Press, hc, May 2001; trade ppbk, July 2004.
One of crime fiction’s most popular subgenres is the tale of mystery and intrigue set on board a fast-moving train.
For more than a century, authors from Poe to Christie to Warren Adler have perpetrated all sorts of mayhem on the world’s railways — highballing freights and crack passenger specials in this country, the fabled Orient Express, and now the Trans-Siberian Express that spans two continents on its 6000-mile route across Russia to the Sea of Japan.
Dr. Alex Cousins, a Russian-speaking American cancer specialist, has been sent to Moscow on a secret mission by the president of the United States. The mission: to prolong for seven weeks (for unspecified reasons) the life of Viktor Dimitrov, secretary-general of the politburo, who is dying of leukemia.
Cousins has done his duty, and now that he is ready to leave Russia, Dimitrov urges him to take the Trans-Siberian Express instead of flying — a “gift,” Dimitrov says, the train being one of legendary Victorian grandeur and the scenery being magnificent.
Cousins agrees, but with reservations that turn out to be more than warranted. First he meets and becomes romantically involved with Russian beauty Anna Petrovna; then he finds himself enmeshed in a politically motivated conspiracy, trapped on board the train with KGB agents watching his every move.
His only chance for escape is to seek help from his fellow passengers, but at least some of them are not who they seem to be….
This is a rousing novel of international intrigue and adventure, populated by sharply drawn characters; the Trans-Siberian Express, in fact, is so realistically depicted that it becomes a character in its own right. Adler’s prose tends toward the undistinguished, but his evocation of the Russian scene and the scope and drama of his story more than make up for any deficiencies.
Warren Adler is the author of a number of other contemporary thrillers, among them The Casanova Embrace (1978) and Natural Enemies (1979).
———
Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007. Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.
March 25th, 2010 at 7:47 pm
I read the paperback when it came out and got a big kick out of it.
March 25th, 2010 at 7:58 pm
I liked this one enough I hunted down a hardback copy after reading it. Bill sums up it’s pleasures and flaws well (as usual). And Adler also wrote THE WAR OF THE ROSES — which ends up a crime novel — more or less.
Bill also edited an anthology of mystery stories written with a railroad background — well worth looking up.
I’ve long been hooked on mysteries set on trains which have been around at least since Arthur Griffith’s ROME EXPRESS, Eden Phillipott’s MY ADVENTURE WITH THE FLYING SCOTSMAN, Victor L. Whitechurch’s MYSTERIES OF THE RAILROAD, and H. F. Wood’s PASSENGER FROM SCOTLAND YARD.
A few other good ones from the same era as the Adler are Colin Forbes AVALANCHE EXPRESS (skip the movie though), Derek Lambert’s YERMAKOV TRANSFER, and Christopher Hyde’s MAXWELL’S EXPRESS.
The romance of trains even inspired one of the racy bestsellers of the twenties and thirties — Maurice Dekobra’s MADONNA OF THE SLEEPING CARS.
Whatever the reason there’s something about a train whether it’s Holmes and Watson escaping Moriarity or Poirot with a dining car full of suspects or James Bond romancing a Russian spy on the Orient Express. When I was small I traveled quite a bit on trains and it was always an adventure, maybe the last time travel for the average person was a romance and not a hassle.
March 26th, 2010 at 8:10 am
I remember well running out to get THE WAR OF THE ROSES after seeing the film. Really loved it.
March 26th, 2010 at 8:37 am
This is a good one, I liked it when I read it in paperback about a year after it came out. I did a review of the anthology of train stories on my blog. It’s Midnight Specials by Bill Pronzini, Editor, Avon Books, 1977, mass market paperback short story collection
Search for Midnight Specials or go here: http://brokenbullhorn.wordpress.com/2009/11/26/midnight-specials/
March 26th, 2010 at 9:10 am
Bill P., Bill C. and David
Don’t know how I missed seeing or knowing about this book until now, or even realizing that Warren Adler wrote crime fiction. I probably passed on any number of his books over the years, thinking that all he wrote was popular fiction, a la Harold Robbins, for example.
But Adler has 13 books in CRIME FICTION IV, and Harold Robbins seven, so I guess I’ve been wrong about him all these years as well.
In any case, I’ll make sure I obtain a copy of TRANS-SIBERIAN EXPRESS as soon as I can. (It won’t take long.)
On my To Be Watched list of DVDs is the movie TRANSSIBERIAN (2008). I think I like train movies even more than I like books that take place on trains.
March 26th, 2010 at 9:13 am
Patti
I never saw THE WAR OF THE ROSES the movie, nor read Adler’s book. It’s not really crime fiction, from all I know about it, only a story about a divorce that spirals out of control. It might be his best known book. Are the movie and the book pretty much the same?
— Steve
March 26th, 2010 at 9:22 am
Richard
You and David are right about Bill Pronzini’s MIDNIGHT SPECIALS being a classic, even if the stories aren’t all crime fiction.
The cover of the paperback is a beauty as well. Everyone should hustle over to your blog to take a look. As an added bonus, I see in the comments that someone has listed all the authors and stories that are in it, plus where they were reprinted from.
— Steve
March 26th, 2010 at 11:09 am
My father took a ride on this train once. He thought it was pretty cool, even though there were no spies (that he knew of) on board.
March 26th, 2010 at 2:02 pm
I don’t suppose the spies all stood around in trenchcoats with the collars turned up in back, did they? Probably not, but that would be the tipoff for me.
I do envy him the ride, though!
— Steve
March 26th, 2010 at 5:42 pm
The spies on the old Orient Express were sometimes pretty obvious like Sidney Reilly traveling with Sir Basil Zalesoff or the British agent who killed two Gestapo agents on the train and threw them out of the windows somewhere in Bulgaria (no easy trick as the widows on the Orient Express only opened eighteen inches).
I’m pretty sure there were no spies on the trains I rode as a child, but there was a romance about the thing that I felt even then.
Steve
I agree about the films. I’m even a bigger sucker for films set on a train.
There are a handful of crime films and books set on airplanes, but only the ones set on the old clipper ships really seem to work. Still, Ken Follett’s NIGHT OVER WATER is great fun and Richard Doyle’s IMPERIAL 109 too (the latter is by the grandson of Conan Doyle and very loosely based on the infamous plane that crashed into the Empire State Building). But its just not the same as the romance of a train.
March 26th, 2010 at 9:05 pm
Spies on trains: Don’t forget James Bond in FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE (1963) and LIVE AND LET DIE (1973).
March 26th, 2010 at 11:16 pm
Mike
Don’t worry, I would never leave out Bond. Still I’m not sure what the first book or story to deal with spies on a train is. Likely it was something by William LeQueux. Ironically the last novel of spy novelist E. Philips Oppenheim was THE LAST TRAIN OUT.
Richard Hannay managed to get on a train in both THE 39 STEPS and GREENMANTLE.
Other than the ones already mentioned my favorite mysteries on a train include
MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS — Agatha Christie
DREAD JOURNEY — Dorothy B. Hughes
MURDER ON THE CAMPAIGN TRAIN — the Gordons
STAMBOUL EXPRESS — Graham Greene
COMPARTMENT EAST — Pierre Jean Remy
THE EDGE — Dick Francis
LADY ON A TRAIN — Leslie Charteris
THE WHEEL SPINS — Ethel Lina White (THE LADY VANISHES)
MURDER ON THE LINE — John Creasey
RUNNING SPECIAL — Frank L. Packard
THE MAN IN LOWER 10 — Mary Rinehart
THE ST. PETERSBURG-CANNES EXPRESS — Hans Koning
GHOST TRAIN and the THE WRECKERS both by Arthur Ripley based on his plays
BOMBAY MAIL — Lawrence G. Blochman
And this doesn’t even count the classic tec tales in which train schedules feature prominently.
And while trains don’t figure much in the novel they are important in Raymond Chandler’s screenplay PLAYBACK.
April 9th, 2010 at 6:08 pm
[…] In the comments that followed Bill Pronzini’s review of Warren Adler’s Trans-Siberian Express (1977), the discussion in the comments turned first […]
April 22nd, 2010 at 9:15 pm
Bill,
Just came across this post. Thanks very much!
Yours,
Warren