Blood on the Tracks: A History of Railway Crime in Britain (30 page)

Although these and many other films are set in Europe, the latter part of this chapter will focus on a selection of films set in Britain. We begin with what can only be a selective survey of literature dealing with railway crime.
Industrial change, the growth of towns and a rapid increase in population brought a new kind of anxiety about crime during the nineteenth century. Widening opportunities for theft opened up with rich and poor living in very close proximity and with the greater quantity and visibility of goods and materials that were available for the criminal to steal. The railways themselves offered all kinds of new possibilities for criminal activity and this was quickly reflected in fictional literature. Only a small amount of Victorian crime fiction is still read but the Sherlock Holmes stories, mainly set in the late nineteenth century (although most were written in the twentieth century), have retained their popularity and are probably the most widely known.

Crime fiction dates back before 1800 but in the nineteenth century crime writing began to aim at a mass market. The
Newgate Calendar
of the eighteenth century gave accounts of the lives and crimes of those felons condemned and executed at Newgate. It was prefaced with a moral warning about the consequence of committing the deeds that brought the wretches to such a pretty pass. However, these accounts gave way to fictional crime stories which began to give less attention to the criminal and more to those who caught them.

The earliest recognised detective story is Edgar Allen Poe’s
Murders on
the Rue Morgue
(1841) first published in
Graham’s Magazine
. The title of the pioneering British literary detective novel (some might suggest William Godwin’s
Caleb Williams
of 1794 although its plot bears little resemblance to detective fiction as we understand it) is credited to Charles Dickens’
Bleak
House
(1852). Although the detective, Inspector Bucket, solves a murder, it is only a small part of a much bigger story. Crime was given a prominent role in Dickens’ earlier novel,
Oliver Twist
(1837-39).

It was in the 1860s that the ‘sensational novel’ came to prominence in the works of writers such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Wilkie Collins. By the later years of the nineteenth century, crime and detective fiction as a genre had become established and was very popular, notably in the form of the short story. Dick Donovan, ‘the Glasgow Detective’, was a pseudonym used by Joyce Emmerson Preston Muddock (1842-1934) who wrote nearly three hundred detective and mystery stories between 1889 and 1922. Although like Sherlock Holmes, Donovan appeared in the
Strand
in 1892, he was already a well-established popular detective. His exploits featured a number of encounters with trains while engaged in chasing murderers or mail-train robbers. Following in the Victorians’ footsteps were other writers like G.K. Chesterton, Arthur Morrison, R. Austin Freeman, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Margery Allingham.

Despite, or even perhaps because of, a certain literary snobbishness towards the genre, the popularity of crime fiction has long been reflected in the sales of such books on railway station bookstalls and newsagents. Victorian writers soon began to utilise the railway as a setting or backdrop to a story. Charles
Dickens was one of the earliest and he included trains in his writings from the 1840s. In his book
Railways and Culture in Britain
(2001), Ian Carter posed the question of why detective fiction and Britain’s railways went together like bacon and eggs, and suggested that with ‘railways enjoying a monopoly in passenger land transport beyond the strictly local, any British writer setting a crime story among travellers between 1830 and 1914 had little option but to describe railway travel’.

Agatha Christie, the doyen of the British murder and detection story. Railways feature in several of her stories. She was born at Torquay in 1870 and is commemorated by this plaque at nearby Torre Abbey.

Even if a crime did not always take place on a train, railways often entered the story as a means of conveying the sleuth to the scene of the offence or as a possible escape route for the perpetrator of the crime. The confines of the old-fashioned compartment; the later possibilities afforded by corridors and connections between carriages; the environs of stations and the minatory gloom of railway tunnels provided a galaxy of scenarios around which to weave a good tale.

Despite his stories containing a number of mistakes about the operations of the railways, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) featured trains in several of his immortal Sherlock Holmes adventures. In
Silver Blaze
Holmes and Dr Watson are on a journey to King’s Pyland in Dartmoor to investigate a murder and the disappearance of the racehorse ‘Silver Blaze’. Whilst on the
train Holmes, who is looking out the window and glancing at his watch, comments casually to the faithful Watson ‘We are going well… our rate at present is fifty-three and a half miles an hour… the telegraph posts upon this line are sixty yards apart, and the calculation is a simple one.’

Crime-writers and film-makers have not been slow to exploit the opportunities to set scenes of skulduggery in railway tunnels. This is Clay Cross tunnel in Derbyshire, opened in 1840 on the then North Midland Railway. It is over a mile long. Note the castellated entrance. Early railway travellers were often nervous about tunnels and so engineers sometimes provided castle-like features to give a sense of solidity and permanence.

Railway carriages provide a means whereby the mercurial Holmes can analyse and make his preparations for the case ahead as he travels on his way to solve it. In
The Boscombe Valley Mystery
, Holmes and Watson ‘leave Paddington by the 11.15’ to travel to rural Herefordshire. As they boarded they had the compartment to themselves where Holmes could peruse the ‘immense litter of papers [he] had brought with him. Among these he rummaged and read, with intervals of note-taking and of meditation, until we were past Reading’.

Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson sally forth by train to solve the mystery of ‘Silver Blaze’. The artist, Sidney Pagett, did much to create the popular image of Sherlock Holmes.

In
The Bruce Partington Plans
, the Metropolitan Railway is the setting for the murder of a man whose body was found along the underground tracks near Aldgate station. In his pocket were the top-secret plans for the Bruce-Partington Submarine. Holmes visits the scene of the crime to uncover clues. ‘Is it a coincidence that it [the body] is found at the very point where the train pitches and sways as it comes round on the points?… Either the body fell from the roof, or a very curious coincidence has occurred. Now, suppose that a train halted under such a window, would there be any difficulty in laying a body upon the roof?… Owing to the intersection of one of the larger railways, the underground trains are frequently held motionless for some minutes at that very spot.’ ‘Splendid, Holmes! You have got it!’ crooned the doggedly supportive Dr Watson, surely the greatest Sherlock Holmes fan ever.

In
The Final Problem
, Conan Doyle attempts to kill Holmes off with a spectacular plummet into the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland, still grappling with his arch-enemy, the egregious Professor Moriarty. Before this piece of melodrama, he and Watson had caught a train from Victoria only to spot Moriarty on the platform vainly trying to get someone to stop the train. Moriarty had obviously tracked them down and this then caused Holmes and Watson to change their route plan.

They alighted at Canterbury and as they waited for another train, a special one-coach train roars past. It had, of course, been hired by Moriarty in an effort to overtake Holmes. The inseparable duo also travels from King’s Cross station in
The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter
where Holmes suddenly exclaims that he has identified a starting point for their investigation. With that the engine whistles and the train plunges into the tunnel on the first part of its journey to Cambridge.

The proliferation of magazines and ‘penny dreadfuls’ (much criticised in the 1870s for being a bad influence on young working-class boys) with their lurid serialisations provided a plentiful supply of stories set around trains, stations and tunnels. Short stories about crime on the railway were abundant. Plots, rarely subtle, included bodies thrown from trains, innocent damsels (or sometimes dynamite) tied to the tracks, foreign spies and even double agents, cads who travel first class on third-class tickets, smugglers, saboteurs, and dead bodies (sometimes dismembered), turning up in trunks on stations or trains. On a number of occasions discussed elsewhere, this proved to be a case of life imitating art. Examples of the ‘body-in-the-trunk’ genre can be found in Henry Holt’s
Murder on the Bookstall
(1934) which concerns the discovery of a woman’s body at the bookstall on Charing Cross station and Agatha Christie’s short story
The Plymouth Express
(1923), where a young naval officer on a train journey to Plymouth finds the dead body of a woman underneath one of the seats in his carriage.

Although most actual recorded crimes relating to the railways involved theft – either on a passenger train or by an employee stealing from the company – fictional narratives tended to look to more exciting and gruesome action. Night train stories feature especially in European journeys. Agatha Christie’s
Murder on
the Orient Express
(1934) typifies the glamour of such continental travel with its elaborate meals, rich and exotic passengers and romantic places. Sherlock Holmes, always ready to announce that ‘the game is afoot’, kept a copy of
Bradshaw’s
European Railway Timetable
on his mantelpiece. Nonetheless, Britain provided the setting for many of these overnight sleeper railway murders. In
The
Mystery of the Sleeping Car Express
by Freeman Wills Crofts a murderer escapes from a moving train on the Euston to north Scotland line, while his victims and an innocent bystander are locked in their compartment.