Trains of thought

This is the third iteration of this column that has appeared since the pandemic hit, and it must reflect our changed circumstances. In March (Time to read ), we sought to understand plagues through literature; in April (Read at home), we ran out of stuff on our shelves and recognised the immensity of the resources available to readers online. But, now, as summer bakes this country’s vast plains, it is possible that we need to feel that we are elsewhere. Few of us will vacation this year; even the hills may be out of the question. Can books help?

Oddly, part of what I myself have been missing is the actual mechanics of travelling — getting into an aeroplane or a train or a ferry. Perhaps the news about how difficult it will be to ensure safety and social distancing on travellers at this time has made me nostalgic for the vanished world of, well, a couple of months ago. Yet travel books do not help here. They are misnamed. They are books about being in other places, not about the process of travelling. 

But one genre excels at planes, trains and automobiles: Crime fiction. Trains in particular — for many detective novels, they are not just a backdrop, but a player and a plot point. Some of the greatest British crime novels ever written have been set in or around trains, and every aspect of the experience has been explored — and mined for suspense and mystery. In some cases they turn on the anonymity and enforced closeness of fellow-travellers: Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train, is the classic example of this genre. Of course, perhaps you don’t talk to other people on trains (which, once you read Strangers, might be a good rule). But even just looking idly out the window might be dangerous. As the landscape flashes past you, who knows what you might see? And what could you do about it, even if you saw something? Here too there is a classic of the genre: Agatha Christie’s 4:50 from Paddington, in which a passenger on a commuter train out of London seems more than she bargained for. And if you want a more recent — and disturbing — take on What the Commuter Saw, there’s Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train, in which the titular girl spies on her old neighbourhood from a commuter train leaving an imaginary London suburb. 

Commuter and city trains, winding their way through crowded neighbourhoods or underground tunnels, have their particular charm in crime fiction, and always have had. The last appearance of Sherlock Holmes’ brother Mycroft was in The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans, which begins with a body near the Aldgate stop of the London Underground network. Now that long-distance train journeys have largely been displaced by air travel, metros and commuter rail have become the primary location for modern train thrillers — and here the classic surely is The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, about a hijacking in the New York City subway. 

Yet I am partial to train stories that are set in the wild countryside, where they are frequently the only sign of civilisation. Two of the greatest such stories were set in the wild and under-populated south-west of Scotland: John Buchan’s First World War thriller The Thirty-Nine Steps, and Dorothy L Sayers’ enormously complex and rewarding Five Red Herrings. The latter, if anything, underlines how things have changed for train travel: Several of the railway stations that play a crucial role in the story were shut in the 1960s. Without a car, getting to some of the little Scottish villages she describes is now almost impossible. (Buchan’s book was made into a movie by Alfred Hitchcock, who also did Strangers on a Train, and The Lady Vanishes, based on the book The Wheel Spins. He clearly saw the possibilities.)

Those times were far more dependent upon public transport than ours, and it comes through in the plots. Reconstructing crimes when you knew to the minute exactly when and where people could get anywhere was far more entertaining than the equivalent in modern novels, when the poor sleuths have to estimate driving times. Golden Age murder mystery authors like Sayers thought nothing of using incredibly complicated train timetables to construct or knock down alibis, confident that readers accustomed to dealing with such complex schedules would follow along. Britain’s ABC Railway Guide even lent its name to one of Hercule Poirot’s greatest cases, The ABC Murders. 

In the end, train mysteries do nostalgia better than anything. They do not just remind us of a time when train travel was central to civilisation, but also when it was itself more luxurious. The most memorable mystery novel set on a train is a candidate for greatest mystery novel ever: Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, in which an American with shady antecedents is killed in a coach of the magnificent pre-War train from Istanbul to Paris. No mystery can match that book and its resolution, just as nothing today could ever match the Orient Express. If you are going to dream about travelling, dream big.