"Murder on the Train" by Faith Martin

DI Hillary Greene, now a civilian consultant to the Thames Valley police, is taking some vacation (she would call it a holiday), heading to Hay-on-Rye in Wales, the town famous for its bookstores. It’s something of a working vacation – she’s published a crime novel, and she’s planning to visit the bookstores to promote the book.  

Staying a small inn, she’s charmed by both the inn and the other guests, a fairly broad array of people from England, Ireland, Scotland, and the Unted States. When it’s proposed that they all take the steam railway up a nearby mountain, Hillary goes along, although the small rail cars mean she must ride in another car. Which turns out to be a good thing, because one of the guests is murdered, and no one saw it happen.

 

If anyone knows the drill, it’s Hillary. She tells the others what to do, arranges for the police to come, convinces the constable to call in homicide detectives – and she inevitably finds herself co-opted into the investigation (“seconded” is the official term). To complicate matters even further, a local hoodlum decides to target Hillary and find a convenient way to kill her. 

 

Faith Martin

Murder on the Train is the 21^st and so far final novel in the DI Hillary Greene series by British author Faith Martin. Published in 2024, it’s as good as any of its predecessors; Martin has maintained a high level of quality throughout the series. There’s no word as yet when or if there will be a 22^nd story; Martin has been developing another series, and the Hillary Greene series has been considerably deemphasized on her web site. 

 

In addition to the DI Hillary Greene novels, Martin (a pen name for Jacquie Walton) has also published the Ryder and Loveday novels as well as the Jenny Sterling mysteries. Under the name Joyce Cato, she has published several non-series detective stories. Both Cato and Martin are also pen names for Walton. (Walton has another pen name as well – Maxine Barry, under which she wrote 14 romance novels.) A native of Oxford, she lives in a village in Oxfordshire.

 

I’ve read all 21 books in the DI Hillary Greene series and enjoyed every one of them. Here’s hoping that she’ll make another appearance.

 

Related:

Murder on the Oxford Canal by Faith Martin.

Murder at the University by Faith Martin. 

 Murder of the Bride by Faith Martin.

 Murder in the Village by Faith Martin.

 Murder in the Family by Faith Martin.

 Murder at Home by Faith Martin.

 Murder in the Meadow by Faith Martin.

 Murder in the Mansion by Faith Martin.

 Murder by Fire by Faith Martin.

 Murder at Work by Faith Martin.

 Murder Never Retires by Faith Martin.

 Murder of a Lover by Faith Martin.

 Murder Never Misses by Faith Martin.

 Murder by Candlelight by Faith Martin.

 Murder in Mind by Faith Martin.

 Hillary’s Final Case by Faith Martin. 

 Hillary’s Back! by Faith Martin.

 Murder Now and Then by Faith Martin.

Murder in the Parish by Faith Martin.

 

Some Monday Readings

 

Haunted by the Ghost of Evangeline – Joseph Pearce at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

Anatomy of a British screen classic – Jeffrey Meyers at The Critic Magazine.

 

Places That Remember Themselves: The Erosion of Memory in an Unmoored World – Holly Stockley at Front Porch Republic.

 

Splendor of Fire, Speed of Light: A Meander around St. Patrick – Paul Kingsnorth at The Abbey of Misrule.

 

Patrick: self-consciousness and sainthood – Padraig O Tuama at Poetry Unbound.

"Salt in the Wounds" by Mark Richards

Michael Brady and his daughter Ashley are moving for a year from Manchester to Whitby in northeastern England. Michael has been a detective chief inspector in Manchester, but he’s taking a year sabbatical to write and get away. What he’s getting away from is the death of his wife, inured in a hit-and-run incident that was no accident, except the driver had been aiming for Michael. His wife was in a coma for six months until he agreed with the doctors to remove her from life support. 

Whitby is his hometown; his sister Kate still lives married, married to a policeman herself and with two daughters. His best friend Patrick still lives there, too, married to his second wife and doing quite well financially. The town looks the same, but much has changed. 

 

During the annual Goth festival, Patrick is stabbed by an unknown assailant and later dies from the attack. The police, led by Michael’s brother-in-law, believe the wife is the culprit. Michael isn’t so sure, but he has to sit by while the police make the arrest. He undertakes his own investigation, and soon it’s clear that this is a murder tied into drugs, organized crime, and some very nasty thugs.

 

Mark Richards

Salt in the Wounds is the first novel in the Michael Brady crime thriller series by Mark Richards. It’s a great read of a story, building to a climax that will keep you closing the book and walking around, until you can’t stand it and have to find out what happened.

 

The two additional books in the series are The River Runs Deep and The Echo of Bones. Richards has also published Father, Son and the Pennine Way, Father, Son and Return to the Pennine Way, and Father, Son and the Kerry Way – all three being accounts of long walks with his son. Richards is also a ghostwriter and copywriter, and he lives with his family in England.

 

If the rest of the books in the series are anything like Salt in the Wounds, some great crime novel reading lies ahead.

"The Lost Manuscript" by Rubem Fonseca

A crime novel with literary elements, or a literary novel involving crime? That’s the question posed by a reading of The Lost Manuscript by Rubem Fonseca. First published in 1988, the novel was a bestseller in Fonseca’s home country of Brazil, as well as in Italy and Mexico. The English edition I read was published in 1997 in Britain, translated by Clifford Sanders.

The hero of the story is unnamed. He is a film producer based in Rio de Janeiro who’s been producing commercials for two years and is suddenly presented with the opportunity to film and direct a documentary in Germany about the early Soviet writer Isaac Babel. He’s becoming obsessed with all things Babel, reading her story, every scrap of information about the writer who served in the Red Cavalry (a Cossack unit. Even though Babel was Jewish), was a celebrated writer in the early Soviet period, and then was arrested in 1939 and executed in 1940, one more victim of Stalin’s purges.

Very early in the novel, the hero is approached by a woman who works in Rio’s carnival. She thrusts a small package into his hands and asks him to keep it safe. He’s never seen her before and isn’t quite sure how she selected him. Inside the package is some 30 stones, which appear to be costume-jewelry quality but turn out to be something far more valuable. 

Ruben Fonseca

He holds on to the package, and then learns the woman has been murdered. Then the doorman of his apartment building is murdered right in front of the hero’s door and the apartment ransacked. Someone knows or suspects he has the stones. Gradually he discovers that the stones are part of a major smuggling operation.

He flies to West Berlin, as much to flee the smugglers as the meet his producer. But the producer has something else in mind – to send the hero into East Berlin to obtain a lost manuscript of what is said to be the only novel by Babel. Someone has it and wants to sell it for American dollars. The hero makes the transaction, barely escaping the East German secret police. But instead of turning it over to the producer, he flees with it back to Rio.

The story is one of lost and smuggled things, the lengths to which people will go to satisfy their obsessions, and the violence lurking just below the veneer of society and culture. It includes a few graphically sexual scenes, but fewer than what’s contained in Fonseca’s collection of short fiction, The Taker and Other Stories.

Fonseca began writing later and he specialized in crime writing. He lived most of life in Rio de Janeiro. He became a police officer in suburban Rio in 1952, writing the crime reports that would later become the basis for his stories. He studied business administration at New York University from 1953 to 1954, returning to the police force in Rio until 1958. He began writing stories in the early 1960s, and published his first collection, “The Prisoners,” in 1963. His works were often censored by the Brazilian military government for their violent and sexually graphic content. Fonsecae received numerous prizes for his writing, including the Luís de Camões Prize for Literature and the Juan Rulfo Literature Prize for Latin American and Caribbean Literature. He died in April of 2020.

The Lost Manuscript works as a crime novel, and its works as a literary novel. It bears the influence of the high tide of magic realism in Latin America, as it was published shortly after the tide had crested. But it is still a thrilling story, full of literary discussions, criminal twists and turns, and a narrative that succeeds.

Related:

The Taker & Other Stories by Ruben Fonseca.

The Mystery Story That Ripped Me Off

Each Thursday, I usually have a review of a mystery or crime novel. I’ve read mysteries since I was six years old, stating with Trixie Belden, graduating to the Hardy Boys, then Agatha Christie, and on from there. Today, some of the best writers our there can be found penning mystery novels – Anne Perry, Ian Rankin, Louise Penny, William Brodrick, and more.

It was with some eagerness that I started reading the book I planned to review this week. It was set in the town where I grew up, it was in a series of which I’d read the first (a big award winner) many years ago, and it had an interesting premise.

I do not have a review of this book, this week or any week. I will not mention the title or the author, to protect the guilty. But what a profound disappointment.

When I buy a mystery novel, I want to read a mystery novel. I don’t want to read what begins as a good story and then is marred by the author’s political prejudices. I’m not interested in the author virtue signaling as to how “woke” she or he is. I don’t want characters stereotyped into cardboard cartoons, and whole classes of people dismissed as ignorant, so the author can let his or her friends know how cool they are. 

And it didn’t have to be this way. The novel has an interesting premise, several original supporting characters, and a knowledge of the geography and how people talk. But where it went awry was with the main character, the investigating police detective, who comes from a wealthy family but is hip, woke, aware, perceptive about privilege, and lives with a lover in the politically cool part of town. All of the politics flowed through this character, and it became tiresome.

I read the story to the end, even as the narrative started to collapse in on itself. The ending was contrived; the killer turned out to be a minor character who has a brief mention in the story. I think what happened is that the author got so caught up in politics that he (or she) lost control of the story and had to figure out a way to end it. 

The reader, or at least this reader, got shortchanged. Which is a nice way to say I was ripped off.

This past weekend, in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, I read a review of a local production of A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams in which the reviewer made the claim that all men in the 1950s wanted to be Stanley Kowalski, the sexy and abusive character played by Marlon Brando in the movie. On the same page, in a story about the new Gauguin exhibition opening at the St. Louis Art Museum. the writer included a sentence about how the legal age for women to marry at the time of Gauguin was 13, “a law written by men, likely, to benefit themselves.” No source was cited for either statement; they were included as bald statements of fact when they were nothing more than political statements castigating a particular group of people, in both cases, white males.

Our culture has allowed politics to saturate everything. Everything we do has become a political act fraught with implications. Everything we say is judged through a political prism. And everything I read in the newspaper has to be deconstructed to understand the writer’s (and the editor’s) political bias.

It doesn’t have to be this way. 

My worry is that this is just beginning.

Photograph by Brian Wertheim via Unsplash. Used with permission.

“The Smiler with the Knife” by Nicholas Blake

Cecil Day-Lewis (1904-1972) was poet laureate of the United Kingdom from 1968 to his death in 1972. He published some 10 collections of poetry, four translations of poetry, three collections of essays, three novels for adults and two for children, a collection of short stories, and an autobiography. (He was also the father of Oscar-winning actor Daniel Day-Lewis.)

During World War II, he worked in Britain’s Ministry of Information as a publications editor. His career also included a five-year teaching stint at Oxford and serving as an editor for a leading publishing house. Under the pseudonym of Nicholas Blake, he wrote 20 crimes novels, 16 of which featured private detective Nigel Strangeways. 

The Smiler with the Knife, published in 1939, is one of the Nigel Strangeways crime novels, except that the hero isn’t Strangeways but his wife Georgia. In fact, Georgia Strangeways anticipates a whole array of resourceful, smart, and tough female detectives we’re far more familiar with today. Nigel’s the detective in the family; Georgia has established a reputation as an explorer and adventurer, a reputation that will serve her well.

Cecil Day-Lewis, aka Nicholas Blake

The Strangeways have bought a house in the country, not terribly far from London. They receive a notice that their hedge needs to be pruned; the local authorities have deemed it to pose a hazard to motorists. Georgia grabs the shears and starts chopping away. And then she and Nigel spit a locket in the grass. That locket will lead Georgia into a conspiracy by English Nazi sympathizers to create unrest and havoc, with the aim of taking over before that Churchill crowd gets too powerful.

Georgia and Nigel have to fake a separation. She returns to London, while he heads to Oxford. Gradually she comes to enter the orbit of the Nazi sympathizers, discovering an obvious layer and a more hidden layer. She takes risks; she adroitly maneuvers through close calls. And when she’s inevitably discovered, she will prove herself a formidable rival.

The Smiler with the Knife is a Nigel Strangeways crime novel, but it’s his wife who’s the star. And she well deserves the credit.  

Photograph: A road in Norfolk, where the Strangeways have their cottage.

“The Lake” by Sheena Lambert

Detective Frank Ryan is awakened early one Friday morning in September 1975 by a phone call. His boss in the National Garda (police force) is sending him, a young officer and something of the low man on the detective totem pole, to the small town of Crumm, three hours from Dublin.

Crumm is best known for the lake that was created with a dam project in the early 1950s. A town and surrounding farms were flooded for an electrical power project. Now it’s also going to become known for a body that was discovered when extended warm temperatures and drought shrunk the lake.

The body in question turns out to be a young woman. She’s been placed in a burlap bag. This is not an accident or a dislocated coffin from the flooded town cemetery. She’s been murdered.

Sheena Lambert

That’s the heart of the story in The Lake: An Irish Murder Mystery by Sheena Lambert. Detective Ryan arrives in town, establishes himself with the local Garda, and begins his investigation. Not surprisingly, much of the investigation happens in the vicinity of the pub run by the Casey family, specifically 23-year-old Peggy Casey. She and her sister and brothers own the pub, inherited form their parents, but it’s Peggy who runs it. She finds herself attracted to the police detective. And Ryan finds himself attracted to this young woman tending the bar.

In the short novel that is The Lake, Lambert has written both a murder mystery and a love story (her first novel, A Gathering Storm, published in 2011, is a contemporary romance.) A waste management engineer who changed careers to become a writer, Lambert has also written plays, stories, and newspaper articles. She blogs at Hey, Author.

We’ll have to wait to see if The Lake becomes the first in a Detective Frank Ryan series. It should.

Photograph by Larisa Koshkina via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

“The Z Murders” by J. Jefferson Farjeon

A familiar, common train journey, arriving at London’s Euston Station. Richard Temperley is returning home, temporarily to stay with his sister until his flat becomes available. The discomforts of travel are mitigated by an upgrade to a first-class car, except for the elderly man snoring all the way to the end.

It’s still early, so Temperley is advised by a porter to visit a nearby hotel, which casts a friendly eye on people sleeping for a few hours in the lounge by the fire. As he arrives, he notices a beautiful young woman rushing from the lounge. In the lounge he finds his snoring train companion, ostensibly sleeping near a window. Except he isn’t snoring. He’s dead.

Thus begins The Z Murders by J. Jefferson Farjeon, first published in 1932 and republished last fall by the British Library as part of its Crime Classics series. Farjeon (1883-1955) was a prolific writer during the Golden Age of the mystery and detective novel, from the 1920s through the 1940s. He wrote some 63 crime novels during his career, not to mention plays and short stories and three novels in the 1940s under the pseudonym of Anthony Swift. He’s not well known today, but he was quite popular in his lifetime, as was admired by such writers as Dorothy Sayers.

The Z Murders is about a serial killer, surprising to those of us contemporary readers and television viewers who think serial killers are a 20^th century (and later) phenomenon. As mystery writer Martin Edwards notes in the introduction, serial killers actually first appeared in crime and detective fiction in the 19^th century. But in The Z Murders, what appears to be random killings turns out to be a rather diabolical plan.

J. Jefferson Farjeon

And the beautiful young woman, Sylvia Wynne, that Temperley sees rushing from the hotel lounge is at the center of the murders. She knows far more about what’s happening that she wants to tell, but Temperley can’t believe she’s the killer. In fact, he’s rather smitten with Miss Wynne, and throws caution and good sense to the wind as he follows and joins her in uncovering what’s happening, simultaneously trying to keep Scotland Yard at bay.

Edwards points out that two features of The Z Murders – a hint (or more than a hint) of romance and occasional humor are Farjeon trademarks, helping to lighten what can be some fairly intense writing. Several of the scenes, involving the villain, are still intense when read more than 80 years after they were written.

It’s another good mystery, and there are still several in the Crime Classics series I haven’t read. I hope the British Library keeps adding new titles.

Related:

My review of Mystery in White: A Christmas Crime Story.

Top photograph: The original 1932 book cover for The Z Murders, published by the Crime Club.

‘Harry Lane is Innocent’ by J. Scaddon

London, 1948: Harry Lane is a 23-year-old child in a man’s body. He’s a simple sort, not good with complicated tasks (like making eggs; he mixes the shells with the eggs) but he can carry large sides of meat at the butcher’s shop, where he works with his dad.

One night, his father asks him to run an errand to his aunt’s, a walk he’s made many times. But a new street sign confuses him, and it’s taking him a bit longer, when he reaches Hunter’s Park. And what he walks into is a man brutally murdering a young woman. The man walks off, and he rushes to help, only to have her die in his arms. Just as a policeman comes up.

Harry Lane is Innocent is a new novella from J. Scaddon, a writer based in Wales and the author of several crime stories and children’s works. His writing focuses on novellas and short stories. And he has a background in forensic science that serves him well in this new story, and it is largely because forensic evidence is ignored.

In the short form of the novella, Scaddon explores a legal profession whose members seem more interested in a golf game or a step up the career ladder than in serving their clients, a judiciary that doesn’t want to be bothered with details, a police force thrilled at how quickly it can make an arrest and extract a confession, and a prison system that turns on strict order. The suspense and the tension build as a young attorney races to have the Home Office issue a stay in Harry’s execution. The ground Scaddon covers in what is a long short story is amazing, as is gow he gets inside the mind of Harry Lane.

The story is also educational. This is Britain in 1948, and capital punishment still exists. The conversations between the two executioners assigned to hang Harry are both instructive in the ways of state-approved death and chilling in their details.

Scaddon’s novellas include The Vagrant, Dr. Demontig – Serial Killer, and The Life of Abe. He’s also written three children’s stories.

Harry Lane is Innocent in an engrossing story, one that keeps the reader wanting to shake somebody.

Photograph by Marina Shemesh via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.