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

3.0

I don't think a short story format necessarily worked for these mysteries because I think page count helps to build up the mystery in order to have a satisfying resolution. That being said, these stories were fairly entertaining. My favorite was definitely the nearly 50 page one called "The Case of Oscar Brodski" by R. Austin Freeman, the first example of the "inverted" detective story. My least favorite was definitely "The Knight's Cross Signal Problem" by Ernest Bramah. It had an interesting conceit in that our detective was blind, but the rest of the tale of so problematic, involving an Indian man plotting acts of violence (in this story causing a train crash with casualties) in England as justification for his country being colonized. Like why this story? And why have it be part of this collection from 2018? Fortunately, though many of these short stories are over 100 years old, they don't all have really dated and problematic things in them.