A review by weaselweader
The Railway Detective by Edward Marston
3.0
A cozy police procedural series!
Victorian England in the 1850s is the dawn of the locomotive age. Trains are supplanting the use of horses, carriages and canals as the method of choice for economic movement of goods and personal travel. But there are those who think of the trains as an industrial abomination, a blight on the pastoral beauty of England's countryside and unthinking "progress" that should be fought and halted on every possible front.
The Railway Detective is a very clever and entirely enjoyable introduction to Inspector Robert Colbeck, an intelligent, innovative and imaginative up-and-coming detective in the relatively new Scotland Yard of 1851. He has been assigned by his hidebound, equally unimaginative and outrageously old-fashioned Superintendent to the case of a train robbery. The brilliantly orchestrated theft of an enormous amount of bank gold and a number of bags of en-route mail together with the brutal pistol whipping of the engineer who dared to confront the robbers all pointed in the direction of a heist carefully planned with almost military precision. The use of inside information from the train company, the bank and the post office also seemed to be a foregone conclusion. The questions were why and how??
Marston makes excellent use of all aspects of his Victorian England setting to produce an effective historical novel. Class distinctions are convincingly maintained by the conduct and the dialogue of his cast of characters. But Marston's decision to reveal the culprit of the piece far too early in the novel, reduces what would have been a clever mystery to little more than a cozy and somewhat predictable police procedural that relies for its quality on dialogue and characterization.
Despite this decision that, were I Marston's editor, I might have suggested be done differently, The Railway Detective is an enjoyable start to a new series. The love interest in the story was both charming and heartwarming. I'm sure it will form a part of the upcoming novels in a new series that I'm looking forward to. I'll look forward to reading the next novel in the series and seeing if Marston has chosen to make his mystery just a little more challenging.
Recommended.
Paul Weiss
Victorian England in the 1850s is the dawn of the locomotive age. Trains are supplanting the use of horses, carriages and canals as the method of choice for economic movement of goods and personal travel. But there are those who think of the trains as an industrial abomination, a blight on the pastoral beauty of England's countryside and unthinking "progress" that should be fought and halted on every possible front.
The Railway Detective is a very clever and entirely enjoyable introduction to Inspector Robert Colbeck, an intelligent, innovative and imaginative up-and-coming detective in the relatively new Scotland Yard of 1851. He has been assigned by his hidebound, equally unimaginative and outrageously old-fashioned Superintendent to the case of a train robbery. The brilliantly orchestrated theft of an enormous amount of bank gold and a number of bags of en-route mail together with the brutal pistol whipping of the engineer who dared to confront the robbers all pointed in the direction of a heist carefully planned with almost military precision. The use of inside information from the train company, the bank and the post office also seemed to be a foregone conclusion. The questions were why and how??
Marston makes excellent use of all aspects of his Victorian England setting to produce an effective historical novel. Class distinctions are convincingly maintained by the conduct and the dialogue of his cast of characters. But Marston's decision to reveal the culprit of the piece far too early in the novel, reduces what would have been a clever mystery to little more than a cozy and somewhat predictable police procedural that relies for its quality on dialogue and characterization.
Despite this decision that, were I Marston's editor, I might have suggested be done differently, The Railway Detective is an enjoyable start to a new series. The love interest in the story was both charming and heartwarming. I'm sure it will form a part of the upcoming novels in a new series that I'm looking forward to. I'll look forward to reading the next novel in the series and seeing if Marston has chosen to make his mystery just a little more challenging.
Recommended.
Paul Weiss