ANDREW Martin makes no apologies for his love of trains. His father John spent 40 years working on the railways, beginning as a ticket collector and ending up in the York offices of British Rail's northern HQ.
The young Andrew consequently got a free rail travel pass - First Class, no less - and put it to full use. "I would get on a train any time I was bored, or even just to read a book," the York-born author, who now lives in London, says. "I love trains. I like the dreaminess of them. If you're on a train you don't have to have an excuse for looking out of the window and doing nothing. If you're sitting at home with your feet up, you feel guilty. On a train, you don't."
There's something else he treasures about trains - that slightly melancholy sense of displacement, of in-betweenness you get on a rail journey.
"Proust said getting on a train is a tragic event, because you don't know what's coming next," he says. "There's an anonymity about a railway station, a sense of flux, of transience."
All of which makes the railways a great setting for brooding crime novels: as Andrew himself discovered with his last book, The Necropolis Railway.
It was set in the Edwardian period - the very high-water-mark of train travel, Andrew says, when virtually every village had its own station and magnificent engines clanked and steamed from one end of the country to the other.
It featured a wide-eyed Yorkshire hero, Jim Stringer, who headed south to London from Robin Hood's Bay and got a job on - surprise, surprise - the Necropolis Railway.
This was the train that ran funeral services from Waterloo to the sprawling suburban cemetery of Brockwood in Surrey.
It soon transpires that dirty deeds are afoot - and some of Brockwood's customers are arriving at the cemetery far sooner than they should have.
Jim sets out to find the truth behind the grisly deaths - hopefully before he collects his own one-way ticket to Brockwood.
The book bowled over Evening Press reviewer Chris Titley. Andrew's "brilliant eye for the humdrum detail, the sounds and smells, the advertising posters for Duke of Wellington Cigars and Stowers Lime Juice, make his London of 1903 one we walk right into," he wrote. "The reader is with Jim at every turn. We huddle against the dim damp of his room; we feel the heat of the engine's firebox; we are deafened by the rowdy release of the local inn."
Fans of The Necropolis Railway will, like Chris, no doubt be delighted that Andrew has returned to Edwardian England and to Jim Stringer for his new book, The Blackpool Highflyer.
This time it is the year 1905. Jim is married and happily settled in Halifax, working as driver's mate on the famous Blackpool Highflyer, running holidaymakers to the resorts of Blackpool and Scarborough.
He is convinced he has got just about the best job in the world - until one day his high-speed train encounters a huge millstone on the line.
Jim sets out to investigate. Who wanted to derail the packed train? And did they want to kill everyone on board, or just one passenger? As he gets closer to the answers, Jim is drawn deeper into the shady society that hangs around the fringes of Blackpool Central, Europe's busiest station. He discovers a murky world of dandies, fraudsters and ventriloquists, revolutionaries and textile magnates - and the deeper he digs, the longer his list of suspects becomes...
There is, Andrew says, a particular joy in writing about the Edwardian period.
Partly it is the vividness of it - the great, gleaming engines with their clanking levers and hissing gouts of steam, and the almost vaudevillian cast of characters. Partly it is the language people used, half-way between the stilted formality of the Victorians and the casual, obscenity-littered English of our own era. But above all, it is the unique moment in history that the uncomprehending Edwardians inhabited, living out their lives in blissful ignorance of the horrors of the First World War that were so soon to descend on them.
"There is a summery mood to Edwardian England," Andrew says. "And there is such a poignant feeling about the period, because of the awful events that were to come so soon afterwards."
Events that Jim, in his darkest imaginings, couldn't even have dreamed of.
Updated: 09:03 Wednesday, September 01, 2004
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