A review by tombomp
Blood on the Tracks: Railway Mysteries by Martin Edwards

2.0

I found this quite disappointing - I'm not sure if maybe I've gone off mysteries a bit (it's a while since I've read them regularly) but I didn't find anything stand out and many of the mysteries were just not very interesting, combined with most having worse than pedestrian writing. And I love trains enough they'd usually elevate the mundane for me.

Mild detail spoilers outside spoiler tags below but I've spoiled the big stuff.

There were a few stories that managed to be both implausible AND uninteresting to me eg

Spoiler

The one where a guy just happened to see the guy he's indebted to in a train running alongside his at exactly the same speed, so he throws an egg through the window at him then when he comes to the window manages to shoot him with the revolver perfectly so as to kill him AND make the window shut AND so that somehow nobody notices the deceased fell back from the window when if he was killed by someone on his own train he'd most likely have been facing the other way etc

. Others are totally prosaic - the longest starts by showing you the murder happening then the detective solving it, but although there's a little flair put to the investigation of crushed glass it's really unnecessary as the

Spoiler

murderer is found in the only house within like a mile of the place where the death happened, and it's clear from the off even to the police who are presented as pretty stupid that the death wasn't caused by the train crushing the man as the murderer wanted them to think because there wasn't enough blood at the scene

. One mystery is so obviously an issue of public health I can only assume there was a lack of understanding of the effects of gas at the time to make it even vaguely suspenseful. The Arthur Conan Doyle story that opens the collection has nothing to do with detection because it's written in the form of a confession from someone involved and again the mystery is of only mild interest. One story revolves around the unbelievable claim that someone can escape from a train travelling at a reasonable clip safely by hooking a walking stick on to telegraph poles (??? this one is as baffling to you as me, I genuinely might have misunderstood). One story doesn't really have a mystery and instead revolves around a ghost.

I think probably the most interesting *mystery* in this is "The Mysterious Death On The Underground Railway" which at least has an interesting murder method and is written to keep the suspense up, although it's still not particularly striking. I was though quite struck by "The Knight's Cross Signal Problem" - the mystery itself is quite bad mostly because even by the end I had no idea how the method was supposed to have actually worked, but the detective is blind AND it has an Indian character in it who gives an impassioned attack on British colonialism which is in no way rebutted by any other characters. Unfortunately he's given a racist characterisation even in the small space given to him -

Spoiler

he's the murderer and confesses on the basis of a fortune teller's comment while having an unhealthy obsession with white women

so certainly not a basis to recommend it on, but an interesting curiosity.