Deeply embedded in my mind are two images that represent mightiness. One is that of a colossal hawser securing the S. S. America alongside a New York pier. The other is of the engine of the Great Northern Railroad's Empire Builder. Ferocious orange with a warrior's dark stripe, it was a massive, diesel-powered, brake-hissing streamliner and the most terrifying thing I had ever witnessed as a young person, and also the best. It could be that these potent images, which make jet planes seem sissy, explain my appetite for books about ships and trains.
Or it could be that this taste is natural to most reading human beings. If that is the case, I come bearing good news. I have stumbled upon a novelist who has done for the early-20th-century English railway what Patrick O'Brian did for the early-19th-century Royal Navy. What separated O'Brian from the countless other novelists who set tales at sea during the Napoleonic Wars was that he managed to convey the sensibility of another time in a writing style that preserved certain vanished ways of speech and thought but had nothing of the costume drama or pastiche about it. He produced a vision that owed its lighting to both past and present, and that was enlivened by a sly trans-century humor. This is exactly what Andrew Martin has done - though quite differently - in his three mysteries starring Yorkshire railman Jim Stringer. I read the most recent, "The Lost Luggage Porter," when it came unbidden into the house and immediately ran out to buy (reviewers shrink from this practice) the other two: "The Necropolis Railway" and "The Blackpool Highflyer" (all, Harvest Original, paperback, $14).
Yes, these are mystery novels, but don't start looking down your nose in that unattractive manner. Bodies do pile up, certainly, and red herrings do litter the track in a fashion that harks back to the grand, thoroughly English tradition of Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, and, indeed, of Ronald Knox, fussing about with his own railway timetables. But, while the mystery element has its role, that is not what we're here for. We are here to enter the skilled working-class world of London and Yorkshire from 1903 to 1906. We are also here for an idiosyncratic wit, a humane temper, and beautifully spare, period-inflected language.
Jim Stringer is the son of a Yorkshire butcher. Trains are his passion, and his dream is to become an engine driver ("an Adonis in every way: a first-class man in mind and body"). He sets foot on that path when he makes an impression on a chance rail passenger with influence in "the Lanky" - as the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway is familiarly known. Jim arrives at London's Nine Elms locomotive works off Waterloo Station to take up a job as engine cleaner, and we enter the world of coal, soot, and cinders, footplates, fireboxes, boilers, and pressure gauges. Stringer narrates all three novels, displaying a soul that is imbued with the romance of facts and efficiency, the soul, in sum, of the compleat railman: "I sat back on my chair, pictured myself on the high footplate of one of the Lanky's Atlantic engines, the Highflyers, and how, up there, you just soared, receiving the most wonderful return for expenditure of coal that I could think of." It is no wonder that London's pandemonium distresses him: "There were just too many people . . . and that was all about it. Sooner or later, I thought as we rolled away from King's Cross, they will have to bring this madness to a halt and get everything put straight." That impatient, naïve practicality is of Jim's essence.
Soon enough, in every volume, a death or two kick off the plot, and things begin to make no sense at all. Jim, he of the orderly nature, promptly makes a nuisance of himself, asking endless impolitic questions trying to straighten things out. In the course of his investigations and intricate hypotheses - which I shall leave you to discover - we are introduced to a fine array of scams and dodgy customers, all set against historically resonant street and railway scenes and in adeptly conjured interiors of offices, pubs, factories, stations, and houses.
It would seem that Martin has spent a great deal of time peering closely at old photographs. Certainly he brings material circumstances to life in their peculiar detail and ambience, and then draws us further in through lines of sight. From high ground, Jim looks down at York Station, "at the miles of railway lines coming out of the station to north and south, spreading octopus-like. For a moment in the rain blur, the scene looked just like a photograph, but then one goods engine out of dozens began crawling through the yard to the south, proving it was not."
From these perspectives people's effects are often the only evidence of their existence: "From my lodge I saw washing flying on the line in the yard. There were three pairs of my landlady's knickers and three of her blouses, and they were all lit up by the light of the soap works wall. But there was no sign of the lady herself." Increasingly, these angles suggest the distance we ourselves stand from the era. Scenes are refracted through goneness, and there is a trace of melancholy throughout. This is true of Jim, whose mother died at his birth and who is emotionally austere - or at least tidy - and true in the subtly present fact of the coming extinction of his era and its way of life. At one juncture Jim, forced to accompany some villains to Paris, pictures "the wife," as he always refers to his wry, progress-loving, feminist helpmeet, "in her best white dress, fading into the distance and into the past, becoming no larger or more significant than a portrait of a lady that might be found inside a locket."
Martin could be compared, in a way, to W. G. Sebald, though he is not such a sad sack - in fact, not a sad sack at all. He is possessed of a sense of humor quite missing in Sebald. But he does share that writer's mood of alienated possession of the past. His is an original voice, and these historical novels are the best I have read this century.
Katherine A. Powers lives in Cambridge. Her column appears on alternate Sundays. She can be reached by e-mail at pow3@verizon.net.
